How does XDI relate to XNS?
You might say that XDI is “XNS v2”. Much of XDI architecture is based on concepts originally developed in XNS (Extensible Name Service) v1.0 and v1.1 from the XNS Public Trust Organization (XNSORG). XNSORG contributed the XNS v1.0 and v1.1 specifications to the OASIS XRI TC to help develop the XRI identifier scheme, and they will also be contributed to the XDI TC to help develop the XDI specifications. • How does XDI relate to RDF? This is a hard question to answer in a FAQ. A summary answer is that the proposed XDI meta-schema and RDF use slightly different models for graphing data relationships. This might be compared to the difference between Cartesian and radian coordinate systems. Either can identify any set of points in a plane, but each is optimized for certain kinds of geometric shapes (e.g., line figures vs. circles). Following this analogy, RDF is a very robust, application-independent solution for describing any property of any URI-addressable resource, while XDI is optimize
