New Work Item Proposal: Traceability Vocabulary

https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/156

As noted on the issue, this is continuing on work we (Transmute and
Mavennet) did in the vc-examples repo, as part of our Phase 1 work with DHS
SVIP:

https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2019/11/06/news-release-dhs-awards-182k-cross-border-oil-import-tracking
https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2019/11/08/news-release-dhs-awards-198k-raw-material-import-tracking

Crude Oil and Steel Certificates have a lot of complexity, such as chemical
composition (periodic table) and mechanical properties (thousands of
specifications and grades).

In Transmute's last version of the Steel Mill Certificate VC, we made use
of the `@json` type, to avoid getting whiplash as the data model changed,
but now we think we are ready to start formalizing it better

...and we're also jealous of how nice the citizenship vocabulary looks.

However, this vocabulary has some "special features", the citizenship vocab
does not have:

- Makes use of the GS1 extensions to Schema.org which focus on supply
chain, and which we hope have battle tested what should be simple things
like international postal addresses :)
- 100% of the vocabulary is generated from JSON Schema, including the
JSON-LD context file. This lets us control data shape, semantics and
documentation via edits to smaller JSON files.
- All examples are synthetic data generated deterministically, this means
we automatically generate good and bad examples to test the schema and
context files against.

I've added Mahmoud from Mavennet, and Mike from Mesur as owners based on
the feedback on my last email regarding vocabularies.

The hope is that if we are clever, we can keep this vocabulary general
enough such that it can be further extended to support specific supply
chain use cases, such as importing/exporting steel and oil, and any
subsequent supply chain use cases that may be relevant not just to the
United States, but international imports and exports generally.

If supply chain traceability and verifiable credentials are of interest to
you, we welcome additional contributors, this is going to be challenging
work.

Regards,

OS


-- 
*ORIE STEELE*
Chief Technical Officer
www.transmute.industries

<https://www.transmute.industries>