Re: Web Payments Telecon Minutes for 2013-12-04

On 12/06/2013 09:58 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> Thanks for sharing some great minutes.  Regarding Identity.
> 
> From what I can see the main difference between WebID and the draft 
> Payments Identity spec is:
> 
> 1. WebID has mandatory serialization of Turtle, Payments Identity has
> mandatory serialization of JSON LD.
> 
> 2. The examples are slightly different, but this would seem not to
> be a deal breaker.

There are more (and I apologize because some of this content isn't in
the spec at all yet), specifically:

3. There will be a full section on how one can write data to the identity:

https://payswarm.com/specs/source/web-identity/#writing-data-to-the-identity

4. There will be a full section on how one can read specific data from
the identity:

https://payswarm.com/specs/source/web-identity/#reading-data-from-the-identity

5. There will be a section on how one can do this reading and writing
not only via a Web browser and POST/redirects, but in an automated way
via ACLs related to HTTP Signatures.

6. There will be a section on how one can submit digitally signed
endorsements (such as a government ID) to the URL for storage and retrieval.

> I wonder whether Payments Identity could simply add support for 
> Turtle, then have a note referring to the WebID spec, so that JSON
> LD is also supported and there are a bunch of examples?

Unfortunately, I don't think it will be as simple as that. However, I do
expect that the Web Payments Identity and WebID specification will be
compatible with one another at a basic level. You can always content
negotiate for Turtle if your application requires that and there are
implementations willing to publish in Turtle.

I've mentioned my hesitation to Turtle wrt. JSON previously. Here's a
breakdown based on Programmable Web's API database[1]:

Number of Web APIs tracked: 10,503
Number of JSON-based APIs :  4,918
Number of RDF-based APIs  :     74

I had to choose RDF-based APIs because Turtle doesn't show up in the
list of formats, so the most that Turtle could have is 74 out of 10,503
publicly tracked APIs.

> Note I think that neither spec goes into the details of verified 
> identity (authentication) as that can be left to other documents.

Yes, authentication is left to stacks like Persona.

-- manu

[1] http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Friday, 6 December 2013 17:23:47 UTC