BA and Credentials/Badging Vocabulary

There is an draft Agenda item for the Credentials CG at the upcoming W3C
TPAC meeting titled "Credentials Vocabulary (led by Badge Alliance?)".
There is also one for "Merge technical work - Open Badges and Identity
Credentials".

The general idea here is to try and work toward the Badge Alliance's
specs where it makes sense to do so. BA has been busy exploring if they
can move toward JSON-LD[1], and it became clear to the folks at Digital
Bazaar and Accreditrust that it wouldn't be productive to create yet
another vocabulary that does more-or-less what the BA specs do wrt. the
data that goes into a badge.

Namely, the Assertion specification lays out the vocabulary necessary to
do basic badging in the "Structures" section:

https://github.com/openbadges/openbadges-specification/blob/master/Assertion/latest.md#structures

We could convert the structures to a Linked Data vocabulary and a
JSON-LD Context. For example, the human-readable vocabulary could be
expressed like so (note the embedded RDFa in the page that is
machine-readable):

https://w3id.org/commerce

The document could also be content-negotiated to other formats by
machines to get something more machine-readable, like so:

https://web-payments.org/vocabs/commerce.ttl

The vocabulary could then be used in a JSON-LD context file, like so:

https://w3id.org/openbadges/v1

The general proposal is that the Credentials CG could create a first cut
of these documents and then hand them over to the BA for further
development, refinement, addition, etc. Or, the documents could be
placed into the Credentials CG and pushed toward "official standard"
status at W3C with BA being the primary maintainer/author of the documents.

Doing this would be a first solid step toward merging the work that the
BA is doing and the work that has been done in the Web Payments CG and
Credentials CG. Creating a shared vocabulary will enable both
communities to at least use a common language when describing
badges/credentials. Using JSON-LD would be a step toward using a common
syntax, and ensure that even if we just stop there, that the two
ecosystems would be largely interoperable (with the only big differences
being with how badges/credentials are digitally signed).

-- manu

[1]
http://prezi.com/i50_fyhtstrk/json-ld-prototype/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: High-Stakes Credentials and Web Login
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/identity-credentials/

Received on Monday, 20 October 2014 14:39:51 UTC