Metadata Distribution Subcommittee of TAC

[Tom Scavo <>]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 9:13 PM, Cantor, Scott 
<>
 wrote:
>>
>>OTOH, I'm completely in favor of standardizing MDX, but we need that
>>for addressing purposes, not as a query language.
>
> I don't understand what that means, unless what you're talking about as a
> "dynamic query" is the idea of querying on some arbitrary criteria.

Yes, precisely. I want to assume that everything of interest can be
known in advance and can therefore be pre-computed, so that all we
need to do is map the query to a file in the file system. This is what
we do now for JSON metadata, in fact. I'm not keen on building a high
availability, high latency system that supports the full range of MDX,
that is, queries for arbitrary subsets of metadata. (Related to this,
I suspect eduGAIN is a disaster waiting to happen.)

> I agree, that's not a major goal. The goal I had was to be able to query
> on entityID, which is the degenerate case. I don't know if that's what you
> mean here.

Yes, that *is* what I mean but I think we can do more. The MDX syntax
is easily extended to entity attributes, so it shouldn't be too hard
to let users create entity attributes and thereby pre-register their
queries (so that the target aggregate can be pre-computed).

Of course all of this depends on an online signing key (online in the
sense that these processes can be automated), which is why your notion
of a trusted HSM for the signing key is crucial.

Tom