Re: Portable Trust Infrastructure (PTI) — Architectural Proposal for Community Discussion

Hi Manu,
Thank you for taking the time to review the PTI discussion paper and for pointing me toward the Recognized Entities work :-).
I took a decent glance through the specification that you shared and I agree there is meaningful overlap, particularly around expressing recognition relationships between entities and the actions they are trusted to perform. I think this work addresses an important foundational challenge in the broader trust ecosystem: enabling participants to understand and verify why a particular entity should be trusted within a given context.
My initial observation is that PTI and Recognized Entities appear to be addressing related but different layers of the trust problem.
The Recognized Entities model focuses on questions such as:
Who is recognized?
Who recognizes them?

What actions are they recognized to perform?

PTI has been exploring a broader architectural question:

Once trusted entities, credentials, and recognition relationships exist, how can trust signals, relationships, and attestations become portable, composable, and interpretable across different trust contexts?
For example, an SME may accumulate trust signals from multiple ecosystems:
A commerce platform validating business activity
A financial institution observing repayment behaviour

A government registry validating identity

An employer validating professional history

The challenge we are exploring is how these independent trust signals can remain interoperable and become reusable across domains while respecting privacy, governance, and user control.

I see strong alignment with the W3C ecosystem and do not view PTI as an alternative to Verifiable Credentials, DIDs, or recognition mechanisms. Rather, these standards appear to provide important foundational primitives upon which broader trust infrastructures can be built.
I would be very interested in contributing to the Recognized Entities discussion and learning where aspects of the PTI model may align with existing work, where similar ideas are already being explored, and where there may be opportunities to refine the concepts collaboratively.
Thank you again for the guidance and invitation to participate. I appreciate the opportunity to engage with the community.
Kind regards,
Alison Mukoma
Founder - TumiTrust

https://www.tumitrust.com (https://www.tumitrust.com/)
https://www.tumitrust.com/docs