WebID is a standard being developped at the W3C, which could be used in relation to some Debian Web services.
Potential uses
- Identification of Debian contributors
- Interlinking contributor profiles with other meta-data of Debian artifacts
- Using WebID+TLS for authentication on Web services (SSO, etc.)
Identification of Debian contributors
Each Debian contributor may have a WebID compatible profile published by some Debian service.
For instance, Debian project members are listed by http://db.debian.org/, so the same information could be provided in a standard way on such a service.
Some experiment are being conducted in this area :
WebIDDebianNet for an early experiment
See this blog entry for a more recent experiment.
See also the contributors.debian.org project, which intends to provide a profile for Debian contributors.
Interlinking contributor profiles with other meta-data
WebIDs profiles being Linked Data, they can be integrated with other meta-data in RDF, like the PTS'.
See blog entry about linked data descriptions of debian source packages
Using WebID+TLS for authentication on Web services
Combining WebID with client TLS certs, could be a mean for allowing authentication to Debian Web services.
The WebID+TLS specs are being worked on at the W3C.
It could be an alternative to other means being used : DebianSingleSignOn
Discussion
Interested by the use of WebID for the Debian project ? Contact us on : debwebid-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org (archives : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debwebid-discuss/).
See also recordings of the WebID BoF at Debconf 13
Security
See also : ContributorsInformationSources