Shibboleth Developers

[Michael Schwartz <>]

The benefits are simple: XRI provides a registered namespace like DNS.

DNS is very limited. It works great for looking up IP addresses, but its 
not really good for much else.

Like DNS, with XRI, organizations control their own namespace. So when I 
registered
  @gluu, my organization's i-number is : @!DA85!5F98!95A1!CA3B

I can extend this namespace as I see fit, for example:
  @gluu*mike = @!DA85!5F98!95A1!CA3B!ABCD

A better naming system would have a myriad uses. How can two people 
exchange data? How can you lookup organizational data? How can you 
reference global groups? It would also provide an easy solution for 
SP-initiated authentication (right now you can't do a lookup on a person, 
so we are thinking of all the crazy work-arounds). Really, the benefits of 
being able to globally name things are too numerous to list.

The Internet architects created a Internet scale naming system to replace 
the hosts file, but they didn't see the name to create an Internet scale 
/etc/passwd file. XRI answers this finally.

- Mike



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Michael Schwartz
Gluu
Founder, CEO

https://www.gluu.org
+1 646-810-8761



On Wed, 2 Mar 2011, Chad La Joie wrote:

> Yes, you've brought up XRI numerous times.  To date I don't see any
> benefits and no one has ever provided a list.  In addition, the use of
> XRI's would require all existing persistent identifiers to be
> re-issued which is a pretty steep cost.
>
> That said, there is certainly nothing that would prevent some one from
> creating a plugin that used them,
>
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 15:34, Michael Schwartz 
> <>
>  wrote:
> > > Persistent ID Mapping
> > > This data maps a persistent ID to an internal user identifier (e.g.,
> > > an LDAP UID).  The way that this data is currently constructed
> > > requires it to be replicated.  Alternative means of generating this
> > > value (e.g., something akin to the old crypto handle) could remove
> > > this requirement and I think I'll investigate supporting such a
> > > mechanism for v3.  If this data is lost all user settings associated
> > > with those IDs are lost and that would be bad.
> >
> > I'd like to suggest XRI identifiers here. A consistent naming design across
> > institutions could greatly enhance the opportunties for federation.
> >
> >  http://www.xdi.org
> >
> >  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Resource_Identifier
> >
> >
> > - Mike
> >
> >
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Michael Schwartz
> > Gluu
> > Founder, CEO
> >
> > https://www.gluu.org
> > +1 646-810-8761
>
>
>
> --
> Chad La Joie
> www.itumi.biz
> trusted identities, delivered