RE: GS1's work on identifiers, resolvers and resources

Phil, I like your examples.  We need more of them.



Although the results are formatted in HTML (to make them easier to read for a retail consumer), each linkType is actually the name of a Credential (Credential Type) associated with the Subject's (product's) Digital Identifier (e.g. gtin/09506000134352) that, in turn, serves as the underlying data for building the web page – that is, each linkType or Credential represents different (possibly overlapping) collections of Claims (name-value pairs) for the Subject product (and its web page).



We need more of these real-life non-fungble entities (NFE) examples.

Best regards,
Michael Herman
Self-Sovereign Blockchain Architect
Hyperonomy Digital Identity Lab
Parallelspace Corporation

[Trusted Digital Web Certificate 0.1]






-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Archer <phil.archer@gs1.org>
Sent: November 18, 2019 7:37 AM
To: Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: GS1's work on identifiers, resolvers and resources



TL;DR - concepts of resolving identifiers to multiple possible destinations is being actively discussed elsewhere as well as here and there *may* be room for some commonality of approach with DID resolution. There's likely to be some ISO work in this area soon.



Dear all,



I finally (finally!) got around to reading the resolution spec which is very interesting if difficult to read. As a suggestion, because you're writing something abstract that only becomes real for a given DID Method, it would be really to have a running example throughout - that would make the whole thing easier to understand I'd say.



Anyway...



GS1 has been issuing identifiers for 45 years, the best known of which is what we nowadays call the GTIN but you may know it as the EAN/UPC or simply 'barcode.' My work is primarily about making those identifiers resolvable on the Web so that things like this will work:



https://id.gs1.org/gtin/09506000134352




which is a concrete example of the more general



https://{resolver}/{idType}/{idValue}<https://%7bresolver%7d/%7bidType%7d/%7bidValue%7d>



We can add things like batch numbers, serial numbers, expiry dates and more but that'll do for now.



If you resolve a GTIN (product barcode) and you're a consumer, you're probably after something like a product information page - which is what you get if you click that first link. As that's a food item, you might want to find something like a recipe idea for that product



https://id.gs1.org/gtin/09506000134352?linkType=recipeInfo




or product sustainability information



https://id.gs1.org/gtin/09506000134352?linkType=productSustainabilityInfo



If you're a developer, you might want all the links available for a given item, which is what you get if you click



https://id.gs1.org/gtin/09506000134352?linkType=all




(conneg gives you that in HTML or JSON, with JSON-LD coming soon).



So there's a difference with DIDs: in the GS1 context, the default that makes sense is to pass you on to 'something directly useful' rather than a document that contains links to things that might be useful but you can get the machine readable list of stuff if you want. In contrast, DIDs give you the machine readable document by default and redirect you somewhere else if you really want it.



But there's a lot of common thinking there, no?



Btw, I'll make a comment in GH about the notion of a resolver description file - we have such a thing



https://id.gs1.org/.well-known/gs1resolver




and we have things like one resolver redirecting to another if it doesn't have info about the identified item, and we're thinking that, in future, we might define a format for a small data file that can help you find the right resolver for your identifier without going through multiple HTTP redirects.



GS1 is working with HTTP, so the thinking is all Webby and Link Data.

Try this, for example



curl -I https://id.gs1.org/gtin/09506000134352


HTTP/1.1 307 Temporary Redirect

Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2019 12:22:21 GMT

Server: Apache/2.4.38 (Debian)

X-Powered-By: PHP/7.3.11

Link: <https://dalgiardino.com/risotto-rice-with-mushrooms/>; rel="pip"; type="text/html"; hreflang="en"; title="Product information page", <https://dalgiardino.com/mushroom-squash-risotto/>; rel="recipeinfo"; type="text/html"; hreflang="en"; title="Recipe website", <https://dalgiardino.com/where-to-buy/>; rel="hasretailers"; type="text/html"; hreflang="en"; title="Retailers", <https://dalgiardino.com/about/>; rel="productsustainabilityinfo"; type="text/html"; hreflang="en"; title="sustainability and recycling"

Location: https://dalgiardino.com/risotto-rice-with-mushrooms/


Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Access-Control-Allow-Methods: HEAD, GET, OPTIONS

Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Link, Content-Length

Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8



Note the HTTP Link Header that has all the available links in it, including what we can linkTypes (@rel values), titles and hreflang attributes.



We can add more than just the linkType in the query params, we can also have a 'context' which can be anything, but location is a typical use case (tell me about this product in the UK cf. this product in France) and we support Accept and Accept-Language HTTP request headers. That's a bunch of parameters that form a matrix of possible redirections :-)



Related conversations are going on elsewhere that I think are likely to lead to some standardisation work at ISO before long. From GS1's POV, that will be important and I hope ideas around resolvers, defaults, redirections, link types etc. will be part of that discussion - but it's too early to offer any concrete info as yet.



Chapter and verse on what we call GS1 Digital Link is in a draft standard at https://www.gs1.org/sites/default/files/docs/gsmp/gs1_digital_link_1.1_comrev_version_786.pdf.


Chapter 8 is about resolvers.



Enough for one email.



I'm happy to talk more about any of this if people want, but equally happy to keep quiet.



Cheers



Phil



--

Phil Archer

Director, Web Solutions, GS1

https://www.gs1.org




https://philarcher.org


+44 (0)7887 767755

@philarcher1

Skype: philarcher

A word on abbreviations I sometimes use in email:

https://philarcher.org/diary/2019/emailabbreviations/




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