After a discussion this afternoon in Second Life and Skype with the dataportability folks, I decided to register a domain name called xrdstype.net and set up a registry of service types used in XRDS documents.
The idea was to create a community-neutral URIspace (registry) for URIs used as XRDS Service Type values. Christian Scholz describes the motivation for this:
One question we in the DataPortability Project had was which service types are actually already defined and what the process is to define new ones, e.g. for defining that one endpoint is data marked up in hCard and another one in FOAF. We thought that it wouldn’t be a good idea to just define URIs which belong to namespaces we don’t control and we also didn’t want to use the dataportability.org namespace as this is not part of our mission. This is true even more as the goal should be to create a general directoy of service types also for services which are outside the scope of the DataPortability project.
Gabe then proposed to register a neutral domain for it which now became xrdstype.net.The goal is to put some sort of wiki or other structure there which describes these service types and links to their definitions. This is not supposed to be a list just for XRDS-Simple of course but for the “complete” XRDS standard as well.
A couple things I want to amplify:
- Where an existing namespace exists, and the community controlling that URI space is cooperating, please use that URI space for XRDS Service Types. Some communities are understandably hostile or suspicious of the XRDS discovery model, and aren't going to cooperate. Thats in part why xrdstype.net is being created
- http://xrdstype.net should be thought of neutral infrastructure. It was created simply to provide a community-neutral place where Service Type URIs could be derived from. By community-neutral, I mean that a service type that may be usable beyond a single organizations uses can have a URI home for its service type that doesn't tie it to that organization/community.
- I'm going to be a benevolent dictator for this URI space for now. I see running xrdstype.net as an extremely ministerial task. At some point, if there's enough life in this, some appropriate group or organzation or individual(s) can take over.
- The infrastructure behind xrdstype.net will probably be a wiki - the idea here is that Service Type URLs should be resolvable to something useful by humans. Eventually there will probably also be machine-readable metadata, etc.
I haven't set any infrastructure up, but in the short term, if you'd like to use a URL under the xrdstype.net namespace, please email me with the following, which will be published at that URL:
- What path you'd like under xrdstype.net (I reserve the right to push back on this)
- A brief sentence or two describing the service
- Your email address (this will be published publicly)
- A link to more information (e.g. specs, project home page)
Eventually this information will be put on a wiki or some other page - but for now I'll manage this stuff by hand. I may be asking for help if there's serious demand for namespaces, though.
