Hi all,
Since work is currently being done on IdAS(Registry) anyway due to the "Higgins Configuration Management", I think now may be a good time to implement UDIs.
A UDI is a string (URI, XRI, Cool URI or anything else) that somehow can be resolved to a Context, Entity or Attribute. See
http://www.parity.com/udi
The proposal is to create a new project idas.udi that provides this functionality. The goal is that no one will need to use this project if you just want to use the IdASRegistry as most people use it today. This means that if all you want is read/write the Context IDs in your configuration file, then with Greg&Co's latest improvements, idas.registry makes you totally happy and you don't need this "new, fancy UDI stuff". On the other hand, if you want the more powerful UDI concept and for example use Linked Data Cool URIs or XRIs to point to Entities or Attributes, then you use idas.udi in addition to idas.registry.
The UDI idea is extensible. There will be some UDI types supported "out of the box" (URI, XRI, Cool URI), but you can at any time invent new ones.
The implementation wouldn't have much effect on idas.registry itself, except that I would move some (e.g. XRI-related) functionality from there to the new project. This might even remove idas.registry's dependency on configuration.xrds and OpenXRI (weeeeeeee!).
Here's a first description of how all this could look like:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/IdAS_UDI_ResolutionMarkus
