Re: decentralized use cases

Hi.

Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> writes:

> On 7/12/12 11:21 AM, Henry Story wrote:
>
> Little glossary of terms:
>
> 1. WebID -- a cryptographically verifiable agent (humans, organizations, 
> and machines) identifier in the form of a de-referencable URI
> 2. WebID Authentication Protocol -- a RESTful protocol for leverages 
> Linked Data for cryptographic verification of WebIDs .
>
>
> WebID is all about a RESTful read-write-web driven by Linked Data.

Uh... great to see so much enthusiasm for WebID (I share it too)... but
WebID is not the alpha and omega of Linked Data, IMHO.

>
> I (and I guess others) would like to know what you don't find RESTful 
> about the WebID protocol.
>

That is not the question, again. 

WebID allows nice identification, authentication, and maybe soon
authorization when/if we standardize ACLs and delegation of
authiorization around it (thanks for your progress on that front and
shaping the way).

So if instead of inventing in LDP some identification mechanism based on
whatever other standard, we agreee on reusing FOAF (thus WebID), we have
immediate benefits of all the goodness of WebID.

But, so far it remains to be evaluated how much of the other
un-standardized aspects of building Linked Data and RESTful applicatios
have to be agreed on, which don't find an answer precisely in WebID.

And even if some WebID profile managers / identity providers /
authentication system / delegated authorization systems use REST APIs,
does it make it more important to LDP's charter [0] ?


I don't mean to criticise too much the great enthusiasm you have for
WebID, but I think that's just one of the nice technologies, compatible
with the Linked Data approach, that can help for LDP, not maybe a
"central" one.


Maybe a way to move forward is to identify precisely in that charter or
in LDBP 1.0 [1] what exact points WebID helps addressing ?


For instance, I'm a bit surprised not to find any match for
"identification" in either [0] or [1] (like how to identify a client
connecting to a service ?). The use cases document [2] is missing that
too... on purpose ?

Shan't we need to identify (how) people or agents consuming Linked Data
to properly exercise access control (and eventually provide adapted
content depending on the requestor) ?


Hope this helps.


Best regards,

[0] http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/charter
[1] http://www.w3.org/Submission/2012/02/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/wiki/Use_Cases_And_Requirements
-- 
Olivier BERGER 
http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
Ingenieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut Mines-Telecom, Telecom SudParis, Evry (France)

Received on Friday, 13 July 2012 15:40:07 UTC