What is the XDI Service Dictionary?
The XDI Service Dictionary, which is developed and maintained by the OASIS XDI TC, plays a special role because its purpose is to define the global set of XDI resources used to describe and control XDI data sharing using XDI forms and link contracts. In this respect it might be analogous to a specialized legal dictionary. • Will there be other XDI dictionaries? Yes. Like real-world dictionaries, XDI dictionaries can be published by any authority and can cover any fields of interest, from very general to very specialized. Generalized XDI dictionaries will focus on the shared concepts common to almost all vocabularies (in the English language this would be the equivalent of Merriam Webster’s or the Oxford English Dictionary). Such generalized dictionaries can address a longstanding problem in XML – how to establish XML elements that can be broadly shared across many XML schemas (the machine-language equivalent of generic nouns.) More specialized XDI dictionaries or “glossaries” can also
