[Opensim-dev] OpenID (was: Lively)

[Frisby, Adam]

“Huh?”

From: opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de [mailto:opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de] On Behalf Of Dzonatas
Sent: Monday, 21 July 2008 2:57 PM
To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] OpenID (was: Lively)

Melanie wrote:

Hi,



Mike Mazur wrote:



Perhaps a model along the lines of OpenID is the way to go, a highly

available third party speaking a standard protocol which can be queried

for a user's avatar data.





Yes. But it should speak to the client. Not to the grid. So the

client can fetch the data and then push it to the grid server.



Melanie


Perhaps, yet there is another perspective. What constitutes the grid? In most technologies that have included the now outdated semantic web and the more recent Web 2.0, the grid is more distinct from the client. Web 3.0 is much different from Web 2.0. To describe it in buzzwords, the semantic web has been ejected and the clouds have rolled in. The grid, in Web 3.0 terms, may include several web apps found on various websites, and the client may only be just the web browser (no special download like Lively does). In order for those web apps to talk to each other without one person logging in to all the websites, we can use OpenID. The web apps and opensim together are what used to be the grid.

Even if the sims aren't quite Web 3.0 at this time, there are standards being made for it.

More can be read here: http://blogs.gnome.org/jamesh/2007/10/23/openid-20/
And: http://www.axschema.org/

For example, RESTful calls from opensim can poll openid servers to initiate an attribute exchange of avatar information.  The user, also, can look and change the avatar being referenced at the OpenID server, like maybe with a URL: http://username.openid-example.com/avatar. The OpenID most likely would not hold the actual data, but another web app could provide the storage for the actual content. The reference of the avatar at the OpenID server is just meta data, unless one wants to propose a standard at http://www.axschema.org.

If OpenID was used in this way, then without even being in the 3D client, one could buy clothes from one web app and transfer them over to another web app that acts as the user's inventory. There is already development to allow such a transfer with the current grid, but it still is based on a login to the grid instead of OpenID.
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