Re: EOCred: recognition of credential

Thanks Nate, that's interesting about 'endorsements' being claims that 
could be verified. I agree that in many use case it will important to 
provide evidence or proof of authority for statements like 'This 
EOCredential is recognised by X'. (By the way one potential point of 
confusion if a driving licence is a credential: in the UK an endorsement 
<https://www.gov.uk/penalty-points-endorsements> on a driving licence 
indicates the driver has been penalized for some infringement. Get 
enough endorsements and you'll be disqualified from driving.)

As a matter of fact I think this issue of verifiability is pertains to 
many schema.org statements. If I use schema.org to say that I work for 
PJJK Limited, would you believe me? Or that my name is Phil Barker? Or 
that I wrote a certain scientific paper, and that I hold the copyright 
for it? So I would say that schema.org properties like worksFor 
<http://schema.org/worksFor>, name <http://schema.org/name>, author 
<http://schema.org/author>, and in fact pretty much every schema.org 
property, could be treated as relating to a claim that requires 
verification for some use-cases. So I think that a mechanism for 
verifiable claims made as statements using schema.org should be a 
general one that works across all properties (have a look at how Role 
<http://schema.org/Role> provides more information about a relationship 
or property for one way of addressing a similar problem).

I agree that providing a mechanism for verifying claims made on the web 
is an important thing to do, and I agree that it would be useful to do 
this for claims encoded in schema.org, but (as you know) it is a general 
(and difficult) problem.

I don't think it is the problem we are trying to solve with schema.org 
/here/.

I would state our use case as this:

    A website / email / other text includes the [unverified] statement
    that an educational occupational credential is recognized by some
    relevant organization. We wish to make that statement more easily
    processed by computers through semantic markup.

Extension of use case:

    The same mark up may be used to provide similar information as
    structured data independently of text on a web page or other medium.

Does that seem like a reasonable use case to address? Is it useful to 
make unverified claims about recognition of credentials machine readable?

If so, is there any improvement to the definition of the recognizedBy 
property that would help clarify that the claim to recognition may 
require further verification?

Regards, Phil

On 02/05/18 21:14, Nate Otto wrote:
> For some extra context/flavor:
>
> In Open Badges, we use the W3C Verifiable Credentials 
> vocab/methodology to enable 3rd parties to create Endorsements that 
> describe their recognition of a particular defined Credential. This is 
> still early days, but in the current version of the OB vocabulary, 
> there is a property that allows publishers to identify the 
> "endorsements" that have been awarded to the Credential (or to the 
> Issuer, or to the awarded instance of the credential).
>
> Because each endorsement is separately verifiable, the publisher's 
> word doesn't need to be trusted when they describe 
> organizations/individuals who recognize the badge. This means that the 
> relationship is actually between the (Credential -> Endorsement -> 
> Issuer of the Endorsement), not directly (Credential -> Issuer of the 
> Endorsement)
>
> If we add in a recognizedBy feature in the vocabulary, it might be 
> useful to define use cases for how this data is published (who is 
> publishing it, where, and for what audience?) and when/why that 
> published data should be trusted by consumers. This might yield 
> additional properties we might need in order to support those use 
> cases, or we might want to go the Open Badges route of modeling the 
> Endorsement of the credential itself as an intermediate relationship.
>
> Nate
>
>

-- 

Phil Barker <http://people.pjjk.net/phil>. http://people.pjjk.net/phil
PJJK Limited <https://www.pjjk.co.uk>: technology to enhance learning; 
information systems for education.
CETIS LLP <https://www.cetis.org.uk>: a cooperative consultancy for 
innovation in education technology.

PJJK Limited is registered in Scotland as a private limited company, 
number SC569282.
CETIS is a co-operative limited liability partnership, registered in 
England number OC399090