Together, XRI and XDI solve the twin problems of persistent identity and trusted data sharing relationships by providing the technical foundation for linking people and organizations in a "Web of trust" just the way the Web lets us link pages in a "Web of text".

XRIs (Extensible Resource Identifiers) address a longstanding problem on the Internet: how to have a persistent, portable, privacy-protected identifier for any resource, from a person to a company to an application to a concept.

XDI (XRI Data Interchange) uses XRIs to securely and privately share, link, and synchronize data between any two devices, domains, or applications – and maintain this link for as long as the two parties want to keep a data sharing relationship.

Our XDI Engine and it's accompanying set of drivers and client libraries are largely analogous with the ODBC infrastructure of the early 90s. The XDI engine is like the ODBC manager; once you have the engine you can use it in conjunction with the appropriate drivers to provide a standard interface to any data source. The XDI drivers are like the ODBC drivers they provide the data source specific data access. The XDI client libraries wrap the basic XDI access protocols and object models into easy to use APIs for developers to use in their favorite language.

Click here to check out ooTao's XDI demo.