Advance Notice: Working in progress on a Linked Data Signatures Working Group Charter

Hello,

This is an advance notice that a draft charter [1] for a Linked Data 
Signatures Working Group is being prepared, with a mission to "define a 
standard for uniquely identifying and securing Linked Data for use cases 
such as Verifiable Credentials. The work will include defining RDF 
Dataset Canonicalization algorithms as well as algorithms and 
vocabularies for encoding digital proofs, such as digital signatures, 
that secure information expressed in serializations such as JSON-LD, 
TriG, and N-Quads."

While the need for Linked Data canonicalization, digest, or signature 
has been long-felt, recent work has developed mathematical algorithms 
and related implementations sufficiently mature to bring to the 
standards track.

The W3C Credentials Community Group (CCG)[2,3] has been instrumental in 
the work leading to this charter proposal, and the work envisaged in the 
Working Group plans to incorporate several of the documents that the CCG 
has incubated and published over the years. However, this work is not 
bound to a specific application area or serialization. This Working 
Group aims to cover numerous use cases in Linked Data that depend on the 
ability to verify the authenticity and integrity of the data being 
consumed. A separate explainer document:

    https://w3c.github.io/lds-wg-charter/explainer.html

provides some background, as well as a selected set of use cases.

The draft charter is at:
    https://w3c.github.io/lds-wg-charter/index.html

We welcome input and feedback on the draft charter in the GitHub 
repository, where feedback is public:
    https://github.com/w3c/lds-wg-charter/issues

W3C Members may also discuss on the member-confidential mailing list 
<w3c-ac-forum@w3.org>.

If you should have any questions or need further information, please 
feel free to contact Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>.

A formal Advisory Committee Review for this charter is expected in about 
six weeks.

This announcement follows section 5.2.2 of the Process Document
    https://www.w3.org/2020/Process-20200915/#WGCharterDevelopment

For Tim Berners-Lee, Director,
Wendy Seltzer, W3C Strategy Lead;
Xueyuan Jia, W3C Marketing & Communications

[1] https://w3c.github.io/lds-wg-charter/index.html
[2] https://www.w3.org/community/credentials/
[3] https://w3c-ccg.github.io/

Received on Tuesday, 6 April 2021 07:31:39 UTC