VCWG Entity Recognition

VCWG Entity Recognition Call

Manu_Sporny: Okay, We'll get started in a few minutes. We're going to wait for a couple more folks to trickle in.

W3C Process Overview

Manu_Sporny: All right, I think we've got a pretty good group of people that have joined. so let's go ahead and get started. welcome everyone. this is the first official VCs for entity recognition call. this is as I mentioned an official W3C verifiable credential working group task force call. everyone here needs to be either a W3C member or an invited expert. I believe all of you are so that's good.

Manu_Sporny: The facilitators for this call are going to be myself and Benjamin Young. and our staff contact is Avon Herman and we have one of our illustrious chairs here, Phil Archer, who is the chair of the verifiable credential working group. the call today is going to largely be kind of a background on how we operate what we need to do useful links for people that sort of thing. So we'll be covering a decent bit of W3C process and things like that. Apologies to those of you that have now this is going to be the third time you're hearing this today. We fired up a whole bunch of task forces today.

Manu_Sporny: So we're just doing a lot of ground work on W3C process. so I think this is largely going to be for you Steve you already know a lot of this stuff. and then of course a reminder to everyone and questions the ability to ask questions on things that we might not have covered in other calls. so we'll do a bit of just background on W3C process and how we are planning to operate here.

Naming the Specification

Manu_Sporny: And then we will probably spend a little bit of time talking about a first public working draft for the specification. and what we need to kind of do before we do that. unfortunately naming something is standing in the way of that. We need to pick a short name and we haven't quite settled on our final name for the spec maybe. So we might end up spending a decent bit of time talking about that today. and then there may be some other u poll requests and issues we want to talk about. okay so let me stop there. That's kind of where we are and what we're doing today. we'll do some introductions if folks want to introduce themselves. Are there any other updates or changes to the agenda or anything else folks would like to cover today?

Manu_Sporny: All with that, let's get into the first agenda item, which is just reintroductions, background. if you recognize someone new on the call or you're new to the call and would like to give an introduction to yourself, that would be awesome. I would specifically like kind of intros from you, Phil. I know it's late where you are, but, if you're able to, Steve, and then anyone else that wants to, like the rest of us know each other fairly well, and I think know know those folks fairly well, but, please feel free to introduce yourself if you see someone else on the call that might not know who you are.

Manu_Sporny: Phil, do you want to kick us off?

Phil_Archer: I can do that.

Phil_Archer: So I wear two hats in this group. the main hat I wear in a call like this is as chair of the group. I'm honored to do that alongside Brent Sundell. and if I'm wearing my co-chair hat, then I will do my very best to be neutral. and not put forward any particular view, including that of my employer. if I do want to talk on behalf of my employer, I will say something like, I'm taking my coach off. I'm now talking on behalf of GS1. so you know what a co-chair does. So GS1, we're the barcode people. that's what we're best known for, although in fact we do quite a lot more than that.

Phil_Archer: We're essentially a standards body for the supply chain industry. yes, we're best known for the things that go beep at checkout. but we have a whole load of standards around supply chains, ordering, invoicing, shipments and so on. And so that is where it is because of that that GS1 is happy to fund my time as co-chair here. and in that context, this particular work that this task force is looking at is very important. for two things. I'm delighted that this call is being held at an APAC friendly time because so many calls It's a pain for me. It's 9:00 at night. It's 10:00 for Ivan. but it also means that we can get Steve Capel on the call. Steve will introduce himself.

Phil_Archer: I'm not going to speak for him, but I had a call with him 13 hours ago at the beginning of my day and my day still hasn't ended and I'm still on the damn phone with Steve Cabel. but he's really important in my world and so I'm delighted that he's here and thank you for the task force organizers for making it work at a time that's good for him.

Phil_Archer: Steve

Steve Capell: All right.

Steve Capell: I'm rather flattered by that description not being so important, but I do really do appreciate everyone's effort to host this call in a time zone that works for Asia and I'll try to be bringing a few more Asian economies into this call because the subject matter is quite important to us. so I have a voluntary role at the UN. I'm a vice chair of a standards body part of the UN that actually works quite closely with GS1 and supports the digitalization of crossber trade and that's the primary use case I bring to this.

Steve Capell: and I recognize however that this specification is intended to be more general than that. but I suppose I'll be bringing that high volume trade use case to this and making sure that we meet everyone's use cases but obviously with selfish interest ours particularly there are probably a few important projects that we're working on that do have some significant adoption from member states and

Steve Capell: other commercial organizations. One is about supply chain transparency. It's called United Nations Transparency Protocol and it's really about that the transactions are product passports, facility records, product conformity certificates and so on and so forth. Another one is called verifiable trade which is about commercial invoices, way bills and stuff like this also as verifiable credentials. And underpinning both of those and the reason for my interest in this group is a thing called the UN grid which is the global registar information directory. think of it like a trust list of trusted registers.

Steve Capell: So every country's business registration function and trademark function and land register function would eventually be listed as a trusted register on the UN grid. So the UN grid is just a fairly short list. What will work very very similar to how passports work today where the UN already maintains a list of issuing country public keys which is whether to open the gate for you when you arrive at them.

Steve Capell: And this idea of linking the core core thing for us is how can I be sure that the issuer of this trade document whether it's an invoice, passport, whatever it is is really who they say who is the legal entity behind this? that's our primary use case. That's probably enough for me for now.

Manu_Sporny: Wonderful. Thank you, Steve. Dimmitri, you're next.

Dmitri_Zagidulin: Yeah,…

Manu_Sporny: And you might be other.

Dmitri_Zagidulin: so I figured I'd introduce myself as well. so I'm Demetrius Ago software engineer in the decentralized identity credentials and did standard space. wear a lot of hats. to do work on various credential wallets, storage systems, various specifications. one of the hats I'm a technical architect at MIT's digital credentials consortium and where we have a bunch of open source software including an open source credential wallet for students called learn a credential wallet and in implementing this of course ran into the problem of we need issuer registries and when we're building verifier software as

Dmitri_Zagidulin: Long story short, we shipped a couple of early iteration registries. Then we did a year-long project with credential engine where we did a review of various issuer registry specifications including the CCG one. we ended up going with the open federationbased registry for that pilot but afterwards I've continued to work and keep an eye in this group since it's very interesting. I think in general issue registries this spec is dealing with is an incredibly important and not talked about enough pillar of the credential ecosystem. So looking forward to working with you all.

Manu_Sporny: Wonderful. Thank you, shean, you're up

Shigeya_S: Hi, I'm Shir from KO University and I have a two hat but one of them is KO and the other is originator profile and I'm a tech lead of the orig profile shap but I'm wearing kale's hat on for this working group and my background is I'm a researcher and working on a various u technology standards and in the past 25 years and part of them is working with the GS1 technology I was working for the traceability part of the kind of technology and I'm a specialized in identifier like a DNS and RFID technology and whatever.

Shigeya_S: So I'm familiar with that kind of area too so my current focus is I have a multiple project and one of them is related to the deto work and the other is original profile which is trying to provide the information about the origin of the information and that of course require kind of the technology which we are discussing here and one more thing I want to mention that is that I'm a initial author of this document and I was away from the discussion unfortunately but I really need this standards to be happen so I'm really want to part of this discussion it thank you very

Manu_Sporny: Wonderful, wonderful to have you back in the group Sheaya. And as Shaga mentioned, he was there in one of the very first rebooting web of trust events where we put together the use cases for this document. I think that was I don't know six years ago at this point.

Shigeya_S: Yeah.

Manu_Sporny: I think Dmitri, you were there as okay, but here we are. It's on the standards track now and our job here is to get it all the way out to a global standard. is there anyone else that would like to introduce themselves to the group? All right. I think most of the other folks know each other and know the newer folks. All right.

W3C Process and IPR

Manu_Sporny: So let's talk I guess a bit about W3C process. so we are an official working group task force and like I mentioned at the beginning of the call you have to be a W3C member or an invited expert to participate in these calls. there is an expectation of an R agreement and an IPR release that happens. you've already kind of signed up to that by being a W3C IE or a member in the working group. the purpose here of standardization is to create a technical specification that is available under a patent and royalty-free license. That means anybody in the world can read it.

<Phil_Archer> IIRC, Manu is meant to also remind this TF that the meeting is being recorded and trasscribed, unless anyone objects.

Manu_Sporny: they can implement it and they can deploy it without having to worry about having to pay anyone patent fees licensing fees and things of that nature. in order to do that we follow up let me go ahead and share the W3C process document that is this document here. So, if you ever have any questions about what we're doing, why we're doing it, what's going to happen next, this document is an excellent document. Definitely bookmark it can answer all of your questions when it comes almost every question you could come up with. it's been, revised for many years now. yes, thank you, Phil.

<Manu_Sporny> W3C Process Document

Manu_Sporny: This call is being recorded and transcribed. every single one of the meetings will start off in that fashion. It just starts automatically. You need to let us know if you are not okay with that and then we can deal with that at that point. there are ways of saying things off the record in the chat channel. You can type slashme and this thing I don't want recorded. So, slashme or you can do off, which is a new command. I don't want this recorded either. Of course, I'm saying it out loud and so the transcriber is going to pick up on the thing I said, but that text won't find its way into the minutes. Anything else that you type in that channel will show up in the minutes. So, just be careful about what you type in there.

Manu_Sporny: it'll automatically show up unless you preface it with OFF colon or slashme. okay, so that's the meeting recordings we operate under W3C process which also includes the code of conduct. and that is another excellent W3C document. It talks about creating a positive work environment. it talks about expected unacceptable behavior, how to deal with any kind of problems as they come up. This group has never had any serious issues. but there are ways to escalate things if we do meaning people are being mean to each other on the call, there's there two big documents there.

Standardization Process Stages

Manu_Sporny: If you want to understand how W3C operates its working groups those two documents are kind of core to it. okay where are we in the process right now? we are at the very beginning of the standardization process for entity recognition specification. what that means is that there are a number of gates that we're going to have to kind of go through. the very first of those gates is something called a first public working draft. It's where we take the document that we have right now and we say this thing that we have which we don't have to agree on all the content in there but we think it's good enough to just publish publicly and let the world know that we're officially working on this thing and it's officially on the standards track. so that process is called publishing a first public working draft.

<Manu_Sporny> Positive Work Environment at W3C: Code of Conduct

Manu_Sporny: it triggers a number of things to happen. the first one this specification will show up as an official specification under development at W3C that's on the standards track. So there's a web page you can go to see all of W3C's global standards. It'll show up there. The other thing that it does is it starts the clock on R intellectual property commitments. and so within a number of months, I think it's six months, there will be an announcement saying that hey, there's an intellectual property release that you need to make on this document. that is important to companies that have patents. if you don't have any patents or if you don't have any patents that cover this technology, you don't have to worry about it.

Manu_Sporny: But big companies often do and they have to pay attention to those IPR agreements because if they don't make the commitment in time then I believe it's automatically released as being a part of the group. There's some details there that I'm a bit fuzzy on, but if you're a big company, make sure you pay attention to those IPR announcements. First public working draft starts the clock on that. if I remember correctly. okay. So that's why you want to do an FPWD sooner than later. As I mentioned a first public working draft. we don't have to agree on the content, The good news here is that we've been working on this specification for number of months now years really.

Manu_Sporny: And it's much further along that than some specifications are. Meaning that it should be fine for us to publish as a first public working draft. Just because we publish a document as a first public working draft doesn't mean we might not change the entire document. You can wildly change the document after FPWD based on the discussions we have in this group. and so just because we're publishing an FBWD doesn't mean anything gets locked in stone other than we are working on the standards track. let me pause there.

Manu_Sporny: I know that was a lot of information. Are there any questions or concerns about the process or where we are in the process or what we need to do So, I'm hoping silence means it's fairly clear. we will talk about, next stages of the process. as we come up to them. but a light kind of a high level view of it is we have a document that is called an editor's draft right now. That's the VC's for entity recognition spec. So let me share my screen here. so there's this document that we have today. if you look at the top left it says W3C editor's draft.

Manu_Sporny: And if we look at, the latest public published version in TR space, it's going to be empty, blank, page not found because we haven't published a first public working draft yet. But once we publish it, this link will go live. and then we will be in kind of, the WC proc C process. after that, does anyone remember which section the process diagram is in? probably not going to be able to find it quickly, but there's a diagram in here on how you go through the process.

Manu_Sporny: At a high level, we're going to publish a first public working draft and then we're going to work on this document up until the point where we think it's feature freeze ready. we think we're done with the design. We're not going to add any more features. It's ready for people to implement. once we get to that part. Thank you, Dave. what is this? ck Here we go. All right. So, this is a graphic diagram of the process. So, here's the first public working draft, We're going to go into the working draft where we just continually crank these out. every time we, update the main branch, a new working draft will be pushed out there.

Manu_Sporny: when we get to feature freeze where it's pretty much done for version 10. We want people to implement it. We will make a decision here and then the larger working group will make a decision to go into the candidate recommendation phase which at that point you create things called candidate recommendation snapshots and then candidate recommendation drafts and you continue iterating. This is where you get implementation feedback. We have to get at least two independent interoperable implementations for every feature in the spec. We will talk about that much later. But once we get that at that point we can say okay we want this to go to an official W3C recommendation. This process in here can take anywhere from first public working draft will happen hopefully within weeks.

Manu_Sporny: The working draft stuff might take 3 months to 6 months for our spec, this current one. Sometimes it can take 18 months, sometimes it can take years. You really don't want that to happen. for our spec that we're working in this group, it should take probably about 3 to 6 months. And then we'll move to candidate wreck. Hopefully, we'll be able to turn it around pretty quickly in there. another 6 months and then out to a recommendation. So in theory, hopefully by this time next year, we will have an official global standard for the thing we're working on. as long as we don't have any big disagreements, I love how let me dream, Phil.

<Dave Longley> W3C Process Document

Manu_Sporny: We anyway,…

Phil_Archer: All right.

Manu_Sporny: I'm not going to say this should be easy, but we have a very limited scope and that usually helps and hopefully we won't try and open the scope up, that much in this group. but Phil is right to laugh. everyone starts the process, wideeyed and with great hope. So that's basically the process there. Let me pause there. Any questions for folks that might not have been through this process before?

Manu_Sporny: Please, Phil.

Phil_Archer: not the process particularly.

Use Case: Linked Credentials

Phil_Archer: But I think there is a slight broadening of scope and this is something that we talked about in coobe and this is why I'm so pleased that Steve is here.

Phil_Archer: I think Senong is going to be joining us soon as well because I think there are some use cases around the trade documentation which may call for some new features to this document that are not in that moment. Steve, do you want to talk about linking one VC to another please?

Steve Capell: Yeah,…

Steve Capell: in fact I'm just writing a ticket in answer to ticket 51 with a documented use case. So yeah, a scenario is a trade transaction like a commercial invoice is issued as a VC by an issuer who is the export party in an exporting country and it makes its way to the importing party obviously who's the buyer who then has to pass it on to let's say a bank for trade finance or to the importing customs authority for automated due diligence and tariff compliance and so on.

Steve Capell: So the verifier is actually a party unknown and with no direct relationship to the issuer because it's the importing customs authority and the issuer in the exporting country has relationship with them. and this importing customs authority needs to know not just is this invoice valid but who is the entity that issued it. The VC of course will claim an invoicing party but it's typically issued by DID that represents that exporter and with 20 million of such exporters around the world.

Steve Capell: nobody can really know that did really representative of the legal entity who's claimed to be issuing that ice. So we imagine another credential totally separate very similar to a business registration certificate. In fact probably issued about the same time as the business registration certificate by the authorative business register who is a government entity typically in the exporting country. This would be a entity recognition In our case in UNP we call it a digital identity anchor but it's a VC that basically says this party is known to us as let's say acme pty.

Steve Capell: So that's the challenge is to link the invoice issued 50 about 5 billion of them a year to the entity recognition credential issued by the authority in the exporting country. but on top of that there's another link in the chain right because there are about a thousand of these authoritative registers and I would be willing to bet that nobody in the room can tell me whether org or registradorg is the Spanish authoritative business register. The answer is it's registrador.org and if you go to register.org it looks like some sort of cryptocurrency trading site or something, right?

Steve Capell: So how does a verifier in another part of the world not only know that the invoice was issued by acme pty but that the register who claims this is acme pty really is the authoritative register of that country. So there's another entity recognition credential this time issued by the UN to the national legal register asserting that the national legal register. Like I said, is very similar to how passports work. So there's a linked chain of credentials here to verify. Yes, the invoice is valid. look, I found essentially a business registration certificate, which is an entity credential. and not only is it valid, but the subject of the business registration certificate is the issuer of the invoice. And I've had another link credential, which is the UN saying this is an authorative register. Right?

Steve Capell: So this pattern of linked credentials with cryptographic proofs between the links is very common. That's just one example, Another one is product conformity certificates saying for example this timber is EU deforestation compliant or something like that. Lots of them. This is a well-established framework 30 40 years old governed by ISO casco. and what you need to verify is not just that the product conformity certificate which is a VC again is valid but that it was issued by an accredited conformity assessment body or certifier as opposed to my brother.

Steve Capell: not only that again but there are thousands of accredited certifiers around the world and there is an international organization not the this time it's called IAC that is maintains a register of accreditation authorities so this same pattern of following a transaction to a legal register to a register of registers occurs again and again in trade and this is the pattern that I'm keen to see This spec support

Manu_Sporny: Wonderful. Thank you for that background into that very important use case. So yes, that is going to be part of the work that we do here to make sure that we cover that use case in a way that is technically correct and…

Phil_Archer: Okay, fair enough.

Manu_Sporny: easy to scale and all of those things. which is why it's so important that you're here So, maybe it takes us 13 months, Phil, instead of 12. So, those, things like that are absolutely go into our use cases. Steve, and, that's part of kind of our entrance criteria to candidate wreck.

Manu_Sporny: we don't go into candidate wreck until we figure out a way to address those use cases. and we have thought about variations of those and we think we have a solution that'll work, but we have to make sure that it does. okay, so that is a preview of some of the work in front of us. let me shift re let me stop there. any other kind of questions on W3C process anything related to first working draft candidate wreck that stuff. The next thing I want to try to cover is we do need to make a first public working draft and quite well let me just say we need to do a first public working draft sooner than later.

Manu_Sporny: Before we start talking about that, is there anything else people want to cover about process? So, let's talk about as I mentioned before, a first public working draft doesn't mean that we agree with the specification or with each other. It just means that we think there's a document here that hangs together well enough that we could publish it. to let people know that we're working on this officially. once we publish it, we can change it in a variety of different ways. and we will continue to kind of build consensus around the entirety of the document. before we go into candidate recommendation, we usually get to the point where all of us agree that this ver version we're about to put in candidate recommendation has broad consensus.

Manu_Sporny: not just with each other in this group but we have to have horizontal review from other groups like privacy and security and things like that. So we're just going to build consensus up as we go along. the very first publication is FPWD. We need to do that. I would suggest that the document that we have right now is in good shape to do that. except for one thing we need to pick a short name. Right now it's VC recognition. if people feel like that is going to be it for the next 12 to 18 to 24 months like that is the name we want to use then we can go forward with an FPWD vote. If people think we're going to change the name of the specification and it might change the short name then we may want to take a little more time to pick the right thing before we move forward.

Manu_Sporny: I will note that you can change the short name later. It just Avon really does not like it and staff just really doesn't like it when you change the short name. We're supposed to pick something that we feel is fairly stable. So, let me stop there.

Phil_Archer: I'm happy with the short name as VC recognition.

Phil_Archer: The only word I'm not happy with in the title is ty. and that comes from my absolutely zero knowledge, but I've heard of a thing called entity recognition in natural language processing. And entity recognition comes up as a term that has a meaning and it doesn't mean what we mean here. And so I'm perfectly happy with VC recognition as a short name. but I'm think I'm going through things in my head like status issuer authority recognition, something. But the word entity is not sitting well with me.

Manu_Sporny: Got it. Thank you, Phil. Kevin

Kevin_Dean: Of course,…

Kevin_Dean: of course, I'm going to go to the opposite t with Phil. I don't like the idea of VC recognition as a short name because there are lots of other things we could conceivably recognize with and I think recognition itself is too generic. I do actually agree with Phil's statement that entity is, probably not an appropriate term. since we are really making a very strong assertion about the maybe subject recognition but I think that needs a more detailed discussion if we're going to move away from the word entity I just don't like VC recognition because there are other things we could recognize in future specifications

<Benjamin_Young> good callout...sad we missed that.

Manu_Sporny: Great. Thank you. Kevin, Dmitri, you're up

<Dave Longley> if it becomes pluralized does it help? "Recognized Entities"

Dmitri_Zagidulin: and yet another minus one for entity recognition. I do however think that I would rather instead propose VCs for recognized Entities here is specific. It's not just subjects because we also need to recognize issuers and verifiers. So it's all three entities. I absolutely agree with Phil that entity recognition, the string is overloaded in linguistics, but recognized entities That's it.

<Phil_Archer> That's better but still a little itchy

Manu_Sporny: All and as people can see, naming things is really hard. I'll try to be clear. we can change over and over and over again. This one doesn' This is the thing that sticks, right? So, we want to be very sure about this thing and this thing we can change over and over again and it probably doesn't make too much of a difference. we do want to get it right and I'm hearing at least a number of minus ones for entity recognition. the way that we sometimes deal with this is we put out a rank choice poll and we put it out not just to us but for example the entire credentials community group and ask people like which one of these would you rank?

<Ted_Thibodeau_Jr> "VCs for Agent Recognition"?

Manu_Sporny: And then we get a much better signal back because the danger here is that there will, potentially always be someone that doesn't like whatever we pick and we'll minus one it at which point we just drag this all out for weeks. and then the other bad thing to do is pick the name on this call and then go with it and then have buyer's remorse on the very next call. It's already happened multiple times with the title of this spec and the short name. Okay. So,…

Steve Capell: question.

Manu_Sporny: do we think we will be able to pick something today as dangerous as that is or do we want to go back and brainstorm a bit more? We do have an issue where we are brainstorming like other variations of this. this is holding us up from doing an FPWD. as silly as that is, that's just, where we are. thoughts from anyone are there. So, we've had some suggestions of recognized entities. I'm particularly kind of a minus one for VCs 4.

<Ted_Thibodeau_Jr> "vc-recog"? A little blurrier, but still on point

Manu_Sporny: What do we think about recognized entities? Ted has suggested agent recognition. I'm concerned about that because the AI agent stuff, actor recognition because we said no to actors and yes to entities in the verifiable claims we have discussed many times ago.

Manu_Sporny: Go ahead, Phil.

<Phil_Archer> Verifiable Claims anyone?

<Dmitri_Zagidulin> lol

Phil_Archer: I'm going to say plus one to Dimmitri's suggestion of VC Recog…

Phil_Archer: because it's an abbreviation and we can decide later what it's an abbreviation of. So, it could be recognized entities which seem to be okay or it could be party recognition or something else. But VC Recog seems as if it gives us enough wiggle room to find consensus.

<Dmitri_Zagidulin> vc-recog is not bad for a shortname!

Manu_Sporny: All right, there's a good concrete proposal. what do folks think about that? Kevin's minus oneing it. please elaborate, Kevin.

<Ted_Thibodeau_Jr> "VCs for a Verifiable Ecosystem"? "vc-ecosystem"

<Dmitri_Zagidulin> +1 to Recognized Entities

<Kevin_Dean> Party recognition

Kevin_Dean: It's just an abbreviation for recognition and I've got the same objection to that as I did for the full word. I've proposed also maybe the idea of party recognition as a more specific term than entity. And this could be VC party, because we're looking to recognize parties to transactions or to parties to an interaction of some kind.

Manu_Sporny: So I'll remind we we had explored the word party and the VC data model and in this specification as well and went away from it in both cases. So if we have minus ones with the name, it's probably not a good idea to go forward with it. what we'll need to do is come up with proposals for what the short name is going to be. I do see a number of people plus one recog.

<Kevin_Dean> -1 to vc-recog

<Dmitri_Zagidulin> +1 to vc-recog

Manu_Sporny: But Kevin, if you feel strongly against it, then we'll just have to hold off publishing until we get a better abbreviation. and that will require us to actively brainstorm, get a list of things down there and then do a rank choice poll on them. that can take a couple of weeks, which is it's not a big deal if we can't publish an FPWD for a couple of weeks, but that is kind of where we are with this spec. The pe they got their FPWD resolutions passed today, so they'll go forward.

Manu_Sporny: And it's totally fine for us to kind of take time to pick something that's right for this before we put it out there. So what that means I have asked folks to put forward ideas over the past couple of weeks. I don't know if that really happened. because now we're blocked by picking the short name, we are probably going to want to spend the rest of the time brainstorming, alternate, names. I think it was this one. there we go. Benjamin, I think you added things here. so let's start adding.

Manu_Sporny: If folks can basically say out loud what we're missing. So we've got verifiable participants

Dmitri_Zagidulin: How about rolls?

<Manu_Sporny> -1 to party (because we decided to not do that several years ago) :(

Manu_Sporny: where verifiable roles anchors.

<Steve Capell> vc-recog works for me.

<Benjamin_Young> Verifiable Participants

Dmitri_Zagidulin: Fble and Steve mentions the UN name verifiable anchors might not be a bad idea.

Phil_Archer: It's actually digital identity anchor D I A

<Shigeya_S> -1 to party.

Dmitri_Zagidulin: And anchors might not be a bad short name.

Manu_Sporny: Say that again.

Manu_Sporny: D. Yep. What else are we wanting we do want a full set because once you put a rank choice poll out there, all of them kind of affect each other. and this would become the name of the specification and then the short name would be some kind of abbreviation of it or it might be the full thing.

<Dave Longley> vc-recognition seems to be the same to me as vc-recog for a shortname, except the latter might be harder to find in a search.

Dmitri_Zagidulin: VC Anchors might not be a bad short

Dmitri_Zagidulin: the other adjective. Go ahead, Dave. The

<Dmitri_Zagidulin> nobody is going to be searching for the shortname tho

Dave Longley: If we've got verifiable roles,…

<Dave Longley> me = somebody :(

<Ted_Thibodeau_Jr> "VCs for Participant Roleplayers" "vc-pr"

Dave Longley: we should probably put recognized roles as well.

<Dmitri_Zagidulin> plus, these days, search engine stemmers are pretty good.

Manu_Sporny: the other sorry real quick Dimmitri I want to also make sure that we spent quite a bit of time coming up with recognized entity and recognized action which is fine we can go away from it but this was after quite a while of discussion I'll just want to point that out so if you're suggesting things and I guess please make sure that you read the specification and exactly what it does, today with the things that we might add in the future. that's it. Go ahead, Demitri.

<Benjamin_Young> those were from the last call

Dmitri_Zagidulin: No, that's it, I

Manu_Sporny: Recognized actors.

<Steve Capell> the current UN name for this is "Digital Identity Anchor" for what it's worth

Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: And there's one above it.

Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: Yeah, I'm throwing things at the wall. So

<Steve Capell> Digital Identity Anchor | UN Transparency Protocol

Manu_Sporny: We're just brainstorming now, so it's fine. we're trying to get a list here. Any other options folks want to put down here?

Kevin_Dean: Recognize subjects. Yeah.

Dmitri_Zagidulin: That's not even off for that one cuz it's not just subjects, right? It's also issues and verifiers. …

Manu_Sporny: Who are subtypes subjects?

Manu_Sporny: I guess Kevin is your point. I don't know if the chat Dmitri Zagidulin:

<Ted_Thibodeau_Jr> "VCs for Ecosystem Partners"

Dmitri_Zagidulin: I see. subjects as in synonym for entities rather than our VC role. I got you.

Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: And this is not necessarily from some authority in the cloud. This might be Mano makes a list that I subscribe to and…

Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: Dave makes a similar list. That's the extent of the authority I care about.

Manu_Sporny: Any other options that folks want to put on here?

Manu_Sporny: And I apologize if I missed anything in the chat. There's a lot of stuff in there and…

Manu_Sporny: I don't know how strongly people feel about each one of those. So, just blurt it out if I missed something and you want it on the list. Go ahead, Coyote. Which one?

Kayode_Ezike: Yeah. So out there known and…

<Ted_Thibodeau_Jr> Recognized Actors?

Kayode_Ezike: he's known.

Manu_Sporny: You're a bit muffled, Coyote, for me. Known entities.

Kayode_Ezike: Yeah,…

Manu_Sporny: Do you want known actors?

<Steve Capell> we are talking about credentials issued by some authority that "recognises" it's registered member role. So it seems not unreasonable.

Kayode_Ezike: pretty much like all the variations. Sure.

Manu_Sporny: Do you want known known subjects?

Manu_Sporny: Go ahead, Dave. That's a good idea.

Dave Longley: To get around the short name,…

Dave Longley: we could go in a different direction and do something like VC who is. And then it doesn't really matter what the title is, but it's a short name.

Manu_Sporny: Who is thing I'm concerned about Stephen Curran's who is proposal which does give you back VCs.

Steve Capell: but Steven's proposal is more about discovery than the VC,…

Steve Capell: right? …

<Dave Longley> to go in another direction: "VC Who's Who" ... vc-who ... vc-who-is ... etc.

Manu_Sporny: You get VCs when you go to who is endpoint. I guess That's true.

Steve Capell: yeah, but he doesn't define the structure of the VC. So the VC you find who is endpoint could actually be an entity recognition VC. There's no incompatibility there.

Manu_Sporny: Yeah, that's true. Do we want how Yeah. H it is one approach. I mean we would want to check with Stephen Curran first. VC…

Dmitri_Zagidulin: Agreed.

Manu_Sporny: who is which one do we prefer?

Dave Longley: Yes, just they're both options.

Manu_Sporny: How do we feel about VC's 4 and removing that from the title?

Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: You could just make that one VC ecosystem partners.

Manu_Sporny: I'm very pro removing it from the title.

Manu_Sporny: But because it's only showing up here kind of once. So I don't know how other people feel about that one. Yep. I Sorry, can go up? I heard a bloop. Okay, Demetri is saying plus one. All right. Are there any on here…

Manu_Sporny: where people are like Okay.

Dave Longley: I threw in one more in chat.

Dave Longley: You could do recognized relationships just to bring in a different concept.

Manu_Sporny: Are there any on here where people are I cannot live with that. It would destroy the meaning of the spec or we don't even want to put this out as an option. are there any of these jump out as I don't think the group is thinking about it in this way. and this might be a bad association with the spec.

Dmitri_Zagidulin: I hate to say it, but I think relationship might because we're specifically dealing with entities, not relationships, we want to be able to reco identify entities without presuming any relationship whatsoever.

Manu_Sporny: Okay, Dave, any particular Okay,…

Dave Longley: I don't really care. we can strike it. I was thinking more like when you publish these credentials you're saying know about This is what I know about them. That's a relationship to some extent, but I'm happy to strike

Manu_Sporny: go ahead.

Manu_Sporny: and Phil.

<Ted_Thibodeau_Jr> (might be worth knowing that the "Who's Who" publications are all driven and supported by paid listings, even if they include some unpaid)

Phil_Archer: So many of these words have other connotations in other contexts.

Phil_Archer: Recognized relationship sounds like a marriage certificate to me. and recognized entities and relationships you very quickly start talking about entity relationship diagrams. which brings me back to the original problem I had with entity recognition and the fact that we have such a long list of possible ones tells us quite a lot. I think it's such a nebulous thing we're trying to get to here.

<Steve Capell> "vc-whois" is also ok for me

Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: And now you've said It's

Phil_Archer: I will say one thing I'm delighted about and please may this continue. Nobody thankfully has included the word trust. Thank you for not including that word.

<Dmitri_Zagidulin> +1 to removing VCs For

<Steve Capell> and I believe stephen would have no problem

Manu_Sporny: Yeah, that was the first word on the chopping block in the group.

Phil_Archer: But in a thank god no one saying it anyway.

<Dave Longley> Recognized Relationships

Manu_Sporny: Yeah. Dimmitri, you're on the queue.

Dmitri_Zagidulin: Yeah, good point about not saying I want to point out that although the list long, it's just combinatorial of only very few handful of adjectives and nouns, right? It's a choice between, recognized, known, verifiable, and…

Dmitri_Zagidulin: entities, roles, actors, that kind of thing. So, it's actually very few options if you think of it from that point. And that's good. That's alignment.

Manu_Sporny: Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it.

Manu_Sporny: And it's okay to have this many choices in a rank choice poll. they get whittleled down very quickly. So, I'm hearing, is there anything else on here that people want to strike? I'm hearing you no recognized entities would big minus one to that. and then I'm hearing some work against recognized relationships and…

Manu_Sporny: Dave's like I don't really mind if we remove that.

Kayode_Ezike: I was just going to say we're not going to be putting out the short names for voting to VC…

Kayode_Ezike: who is VC who right or are

Manu_Sporny: We're not going to put these out? I will admit it's a bit weird to have a short name that has nothing to do with the title of the spec. that is usually a bad name smell. we would have to expand this into something that is the title of the spec. I'm suggesting it would be good to expand this into something we could live with that matches up with who is stuff. I may maybe…

Kayode_Ezike: only asking because I wasn't sure if that's something that the community would decide on or if it's something that the working group would

Manu_Sporny: what we want to do is just run a rank choice poll among ourselves to see…

<Shigeya_S> +1 phil

Steve Capell: Okay.

<Ted_Thibodeau_Jr> "Confirmed Actors in the VC Ecosystem"

Manu_Sporny: if we can get to some clear signal and if we don't then we open it up to the larger group right and not put all these options in front of everyone. And I think the first pass might need people that really do understand more or less what the spec is about and we don't want people that have no idea what the spec is about weighing in. I'm sorry Dmitri I think you were on the queue.

Dmitri_Zagidulin: Plus one about running the poll. I just wanted to say that in the one sort of plus to the word entities is that a lot of authentication specs use it as part of their terminology. have an entry for entity and it's usually defined as anything that has separate identity or… something like that. So there's precedent in specifically the word entity in credential and authentication like specs.

Manu_Sporny: Yep. Last one to that.

Manu_Sporny: Okay, next steps here are I will put these into a rank choice poll. I will send it out to us. we can hopefully turn that around quickly in a week or two and then we can come back to this and see if we can pick a name and a short name and title for the spec. all right. with that, thank you everyone very much for the call. Apologies that we're in a bike shedding phase.

Manu_Sporny: It's just because we need to get this spec out and we need the bike shed. finally, if there are other items you want added here, please go to issue 30. I will put it in the chat channel and add your items. I will wait a day or two before I raise the poll. I think I'll probably wait until the weekend to raise the poll. If you don't get your selections in here, no complaining that it wasn't on poll. get it in there by Friday and I'll open the poll on Friday. All right. thank you everyone.

Phil_Archer: everyone. Bye-bye.

Manu_Sporny: I really appreciate everyone's have a great rest of your day and we'll meet again next week. Take care. Bye. Meeting ended after 01:01:44 👋 This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors. People can also change the text after it was created.

<Shigeya_S> +1 dmitri

<Ted_Thibodeau_Jr> "Verifiable Conjuntions"?

<Dave Longley> entity is in the VCDM spec too.

<Steve Capell> UNTP / UNGRID / DIA Identity Anchor use case · Issue #66 · w3c/vc-recognition · GitHub

<Manu_Sporny> Change document title · Issue #30 · w3c/vc-recognition · GitHub