Announcing YADIS...again

[Carl Howells]

I've read through the documentation provided, and I'm a bit confused by 
all of this.  How does having this protocol make things easier?

I suppose that is a very general question, so perhaps some more concrete 
ones would be a better starting point.

Is supporting the profile exchange a requirement for all YADIS-compliant 
servers, or is it an optional feature?

What's your timeline on having a demo site supporting both LID and 
OpenID-style URLs?  What about a timeline for LiveJournal supporting YADIS?

How would you go about adding support for a non-url-based identity 
system, like sxip or i-names?

And back to some broader thoughts and questions...

 From my current understanding of YADIS, I'm really confused by its 
motivation.  At the moment, it seems to be LID, but allowing you to use 
the OpenID authentication mechanism in place of LID's authentication 
mechanism.  This seems like it would require little change to LID 
servers, but OpenID servers would require adding enough new 
functionality to essentially make them LID servers.

All this raises a question:  Why not just use LID?  What does YADIS 
actually add?

Anyway, thanks for your time.  Hopefully someone can help enlighten me.

Carl Howells


David Recordon wrote:
> Some months ago, Brad Fitzpatrick, Johannes Ernst (of NetMesh and LID),
> and myself got together to figure out how to make the OpenID and LID
> personal digital identity technologies interoperable as to leverage each
> protocol's most compelling features with each other .  We figured this
> be a good idea given that both are based on URLs as identifiers and  are
> bottom-up initiatives with fairly similar goals. Working on this
> problem, we realized quickly that what we were really building was a
> bottom-up, light-weight interoperability framework for personal digital
> identities since we addressed the problems in a quite general manner.
> 
> Working on this, it became clear very quickly that the resulting
> interoperability architecture was much more broadly applicable. In our
> view, it promises to be a good foundation for decentralized, bottom-up
> interoperability of a whole range of personal digital identity and
> related technologies, without requiring complex technology, such as SOAP
> or WS-*. Due to its simplicity and openness, we hope that it will be
> useful for many projects who need identification, authentication,
> authorization and related capabilities. 
> 
> We have written a document that describes the base YADIS protocol, and
> outlines how to use it together with LID and OpenID. This document is
> largely still a work in progress, proposing how different existing
> identity systems can work together; feedback is welcomed. The YADIS
> codename is also not designed to be user facing and is expected to be
> changed as this project further progresses.
> 
> YADIS' initial focus is to empower the individual user with user-centric
> personal digital identity, and not so much to serve the needs of
> enterprises for, say, enforcing compliance with government regulations.
> While there are successful uses of the described technologies in
> enterprises already, we realize that more work needs to be done to
> address additional enterprise requirements. If you have specific
> expertise in this area, we very much appreciate your input. We do
> however see the ability for corporations to integrate their existing
> authentication mechanisms with other YADIS enabled services providing
> their users with SSO abilities outside of their own architecture.
> 
> More information about YADIS and ways to get involved can be found at
> http://www.yadis.org where we also provide a full copy of document
> describing this proposal.  We look forward to further discussing it with
> all of you in a few days at the conference in Berkeley.  It is our
> current plan to use this mailing list for both OpenID and YADIS at this
> time.  While this may change in the future, we felt it be best as YADIS
> continues to evolve with a user facing name as we'd expect most of you
> to be interested in this as well.
> 
> --David
> 
>