[MINUTES] VCWG Entity Recognition 2026-04-07

This VCWG Entity Recognition call focused on establishing the foundation
for the group's work, including an overview of W3C processes and the
standardization stages. A significant portion of the meeting was dedicated
to discussing and brainstorming potential names for the specification, with
the ultimate goal of publishing a First Public Working Draft. Key use
cases, particularly around linked credentials in trade, were highlighted as
crucial for the specification's development.

   - *W3C Process Overview:* The meeting began with an explanation of the
   W3C's operational processes, the requirements for participation, and the
   importance of adhering to the W3C Code of Conduct to foster a positive work
   environment.
   - *Standardization Process Stages:* Attendees were briefed on the stages
   of the W3C standardization process, emphasizing the critical first step of
   publishing a First Public Working Draft (FPWD) to officially place the
   specification on the standards track and initiate IPR commitments. The
   group discussed the timeline for progressing through the Working Draft,
   Candidate Recommendation, and Recommendation phases, with a target of
   achieving an official global standard within approximately a year.
   - *Naming the Specification:* A substantial amount of time was spent
   deliberating on a suitable name and short name for the specification, as
   this was a prerequisite for publishing the FPWD. Several proposals were
   discussed, with "entity recognition" receiving objections due to its
   overlap with existing terminology in natural language processing. The
   discussion revolved around finding a name that accurately reflects the
   spec's purpose while avoiding ambiguity and potential confusion.
   - *Use Case: Linked Credentials:* Steve Capell presented a detailed use
   case involving trade transactions, highlighting the necessity of linking
   verifiable credentials for invoices to entity recognition credentials
   issued by authoritative business registers and subsequently by the UN. This
   illustrated the complex chain of trust required and the importance of the
   specification supporting such linked credential patterns.

*Action Items:*

   - Manu Sporny will create a rank-choice poll with the brainstormed
   naming options and send it out to the working group for selection by Friday.
   - The working group will reconvene to review the poll results and aim to
   finalize the specification's title and short name to enable the publication
   of the First Public Working Draft.
   - Participants are encouraged to add any further naming ideas to Issue
   #30 on GitHub before Friday.

HTML:
https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-vcwg-entity-recognition-2026-04-07.html

Video:
https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-vcwg-entity-recognition-2026-04-07.mp4

[image: W3C] <https://www.w3.org/>
VCWG Entity Recognition 7 April 2026 Attendees

Present

Benjamin Young, Dave Longley, Dmitri Zagidulin, Elaine Wooton, Kayode
Ezike, Kevin Dean, Manu Sporny, Parth Bhatt, Phil Archer, Shigeya S, steve
capell, Ted Thibodeau Jr

Regrets

-

Chair

-

Scribe

transcriber
Contents

   1. VCWG Entity Recognition Call <#bfa2>
   2. W3C Process Overview <#0767>
   3. Naming the Specification <#24fd>
   4. W3C Process and IPR <#6ddc>
   5. Standardization Process Stages <#7f7a>
   6. Use Case: Linked Credentials <#8976>

Meeting minutes VCWG Entity Recognition Call

Manu Sporny: Okay, We'll get started in a few minutes. We're going to wait
for a couple more folks to trickle in.
W3C Process Overview

Manu Sporny: All right, I think we've got a pretty good group of people
that have joined. so let's go ahead and get started. welcome everyone. this
is the first official VCs for entity recognition call. this is as I
mentioned an official W3C verifiable credential working group task force
call. everyone here needs to be either a W3C member or an invited expert. I
believe all of you are so that's good.

Manu Sporny: The facilitators for this call are going to be myself and
Benjamin Young. and our staff contact is Avon Herman and we have one of our
illustrious chairs here, Phil Archer, who is the chair of the verifiable
credential working group. the call today is going to largely be kind of a
background on how we operate what we need to do useful links for people
that sort of thing. So we'll be covering a decent bit of W3C process and
things like that. Apologies to those of you that have now this is going to
be the third time you're hearing this today. We fired up a whole bunch of
task forces today.

Manu Sporny: So we're just doing a lot of ground work on W3C process. so I
think this is largely going to be for you Steve you already know a lot of
this stuff. and then of course a reminder to everyone and questions the
ability to ask questions on things that we might not have covered in other
calls. so we'll do a bit of just background on W3C process and how we are
planning to operate here.
Naming the Specification

Manu Sporny: And then we will probably spend a little bit of time talking
about a first public working draft for the specification. and what we need
to kind of do before we do that. unfortunately naming something is standing
in the way of that. We need to pick a short name and we haven't quite
settled on our final name for the spec maybe. So we might end up spending a
decent bit of time talking about that today. and then there may be some
other u poll requests and issues we want to talk about. okay so let me stop
there. That's kind of where we are and what we're doing today. we'll do
some introductions if folks want to introduce themselves. Are there any
other updates or changes to the agenda or anything else folks would like to
cover today?

Manu Sporny: All with that, let's get into the first agenda item, which is
just reintroductions, background. if you recognize someone new on the call
or you're new to the call and would like to give an introduction to
yourself, that would be awesome. I would specifically like kind of intros
from you, Phil. I know it's late where you are, but, if you're able to,
Steve, and then anyone else that wants to, like the rest of us know each
other fairly well, and I think know know those folks fairly well, but,
please feel free to introduce yourself if you see someone else on the call
that might not know who you are.

Manu Sporny: Phil, do you want to kick us off?

Phil Archer: I can do that.

Phil Archer: So I wear two hats in this group. the main hat I wear in a
call like this is as chair of the group. I'm honored to do that alongside
Brent Sundell. and if I'm wearing my co-chair hat, then I will do my very
best to be neutral. and not put forward any particular view, including that
of my employer. if I do want to talk on behalf of my employer, I will say
something like, I'm taking my coach off. I'm now talking on behalf of GS1.
so you know what a co-chair does. So GS1, we're the barcode people. that's
what we're best known for, although in fact we do quite a lot more than
that.

Phil Archer: We're essentially a standards body for the supply chain
industry. yes, we're best known for the things that go beep at checkout.
but we have a whole load of standards around supply chains, ordering,
invoicing, shipments and so on. And so that is where it is because of that
that GS1 is happy to fund my time as co-chair here. and in that context,
this particular work that this task force is looking at is very important.
for two things. I'm delighted that this call is being held at an APAC
friendly time because so many calls It's a pain for me. It's 9:00 at night.
It's 10:00 for Ivan. but it also means that we can get Steve Capel on the
call. Steve will introduce himself.

Phil Archer: I'm not going to speak for him, but I had a call with him 13
hours ago at the beginning of my day and my day still hasn't ended and I'm
still on the damn phone with Steve Cabel. but he's really important in my
world and so I'm delighted that he's here and thank you for the task force
organizers for making it work at a time that's good for him.

Phil Archer: Steve

steve capell: All right.

steve capell: I'm rather flattered by that description not being so
important, but I do really do appreciate everyone's effort to host this
call in a time zone that works for Asia and I'll try to be bringing a few
more Asian economies into this call because the subject matter is quite
important to us. so I have a voluntary role at the UN. I'm a vice chair of
a standards body part of the UN that actually works quite closely with GS1
and supports the digitalization of crossber trade and that's the primary
use case I bring to this.

steve capell: and I recognize however that this specification is intended
to be more general than that. but I suppose I'll be bringing that high
volume trade use case to this and making sure that we meet everyone's use
cases but obviously with selfish interest ours particularly there are
probably a few important projects that we're working on that do have some
significant adoption from member states and

steve capell: other commercial organizations. One is about supply chain
transparency. It's called United Nations Transparency Protocol and it's
really about that the transactions are product passports, facility records,
product conformity certificates and so on and so forth. Another one is
called verifiable trade which is about commercial invoices, way bills and
stuff like this also as verifiable credentials. And underpinning both of
those and the reason for my interest in this group is a thing called the UN
grid which is the global registar information directory. think of it like a
trust list of trusted registers.

steve capell: So every country's business registration function and
trademark function and land register function would eventually be listed as
a trusted register on the UN grid. So the UN grid is just a fairly short
list. What will work very very similar to how passports work today where
the UN already maintains a list of issuing country public keys which is
whether to open the gate for you when you arrive at them.

steve capell: And this idea of linking the core core thing for us is how
can I be sure that the issuer of this trade document whether it's an
invoice, passport, whatever it is is really who they say who is the legal
entity behind this? that's our primary use case. That's probably enough for
me for now.

Manu Sporny: Wonderful. Thank you, Steve. Dimmitri, you're next.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah,…

Manu Sporny: And you might be other.

Dmitri Zagidulin: so I figured I'd introduce myself as well. so I'm
Demetrius Ago software engineer in the decentralized identity credentials
and did standard space. wear a lot of hats. to do work on various
credential wallets, storage systems, various specifications. one of the
hats I'm a technical architect at MIT's digital credentials consortium and
where we have a bunch of open source software including an open source
credential wallet for students called learn a credential wallet and in
implementing this of course ran into the problem of we need issuer
registries and when we're building verifier software as

Dmitri Zagidulin: Long story short, we shipped a couple of early iteration
registries. Then we did a year-long project with credential engine where we
did a review of various issuer registry specifications including the CCG
one. we ended up going with the open federationbased registry for that
pilot but afterwards I've continued to work and keep an eye in this group
since it's very interesting. I think in general issue registries this spec
is dealing with is an incredibly important and not talked about enough
pillar of the credential ecosystem. So looking forward to working with you
all.

Manu Sporny: Wonderful. Thank you, shean, you're up

Shigeya S: Hi, I'm Shir from KO University and I have a two hat but one of
them is KO and the other is originator profile and I'm a tech lead of the
orig profile shap but I'm wearing kale's hat on for this working group and
my background is I'm a researcher and working on a various u technology
standards and in the past 25 years and part of them is working with the GS1
technology I was working for the traceability part of the kind of
technology and I'm a specialized in identifier like a DNS and RFID
technology and whatever.

Shigeya S: So I'm familiar with that kind of area too so my current focus
is I have a multiple project and one of them is related to the deto work
and the other is original profile which is trying to provide the
information about the origin of the information and that of course require
kind of the technology which we are discussing here and one more thing I
want to mention that is that I'm a initial author of this document and I
was away from the discussion unfortunately but I really need this standards
to be happen so I'm really want to part of this discussion it thank you very

Manu Sporny: Wonderful, wonderful to have you back in the group Sheaya. And
as Shaga mentioned, he was there in one of the very first rebooting web of
trust events where we put together the use cases for this document. I think
that was I don't know six years ago at this point.

Shigeya S: Yeah.

Manu Sporny: I think Dmitri, you were there as okay, but here we are. It's
on the standards track now and our job here is to get it all the way out to
a global standard. is there anyone else that would like to introduce
themselves to the group? All right. I think most of the other folks know
each other and know the newer folks. All right.
W3C Process and IPR

Manu Sporny: So let's talk I guess a bit about W3C process. so we are an
official working group task force and like I mentioned at the beginning of
the call you have to be a W3C member or an invited expert to participate in
these calls. there is an expectation of an R agreement and an IPR release
that happens. you've already kind of signed up to that by being a W3C IE or
a member in the working group. the purpose here of standardization is to
create a technical specification that is available under a patent and
royalty-free license. That means anybody in the world can read it.

Phil Archer> IIRC, Manu is meant to also remind this TF that the meeting is
being recorded and trasscribed, unless anyone objects.

Manu Sporny: they can implement it and they can deploy it without having to
worry about having to pay anyone patent fees licensing fees and things of
that nature. in order to do that we follow up let me go ahead and share the
W3C process document that is this document here. So, if you ever have any
questions about what we're doing, why we're doing it, what's going to
happen next, this document is an excellent document. Definitely bookmark it
can answer all of your questions when it comes almost every question you
could come up with. it's been, revised for many years now. yes, thank you,
Phil.

Manu Sporny> W3C Process Document <https://www.w3.org/policies/process/>

Manu Sporny: This call is being recorded and transcribed. every single one
of the meetings will start off in that fashion. It just starts
automatically. You need to let us know if you are not okay with that and
then we can deal with that at that point. there are ways of saying things
off the record in the chat channel. You can type slashme and this thing I
don't want recorded. So, slashme or you can do off, which is a new command.
I don't want this recorded either. Of course, I'm saying it out loud and so
the transcriber is going to pick up on the thing I said, but that text
won't find its way into the minutes. Anything else that you type in that
channel will show up in the minutes. So, just be careful about what you
type in there.

Manu Sporny: it'll automatically show up unless you preface it with OFF
colon or slashme. okay, so that's the meeting recordings we operate under
W3C process which also includes the code of conduct. and that is another
excellent W3C document. It talks about creating a positive work
environment. it talks about expected unacceptable behavior, how to deal
with any kind of problems as they come up. This group has never had any
serious issues. but there are ways to escalate things if we do meaning
people are being mean to each other on the call, there's there two big
documents there.
Standardization Process Stages

Manu Sporny: If you want to understand how W3C operates its working groups
those two documents are kind of core to it. okay where are we in the
process right now? we are at the very beginning of the standardization
process for entity recognition specification. what that means is that there
are a number of gates that we're going to have to kind of go through. the
very first of those gates is something called a first public working draft.
It's where we take the document that we have right now and we say this
thing that we have which we don't have to agree on all the content in there
but we think it's good enough to just publish publicly and let the world
know that we're officially working on this thing and it's officially on the
standards track. so that process is called publishing a first public
working draft.

Manu Sporny> Positive Work Environment at W3C: Code of Conduct
<https://www.w3.org/policies/code-of-conduct/>

Manu Sporny: it triggers a number of things to happen. the first one this
specification will show up as an official specification under development
at W3C that's on the standards track. So there's a web page you can go to
see all of W3C's global standards. It'll show up there. The other thing
that it does is it starts the clock on R intellectual property commitments.
and so within a number of months, I think it's six months, there will be an
announcement saying that hey, there's an intellectual property release that
you need to make on this document. that is important to companies that have
patents. if you don't have any patents or if you don't have any patents
that cover this technology, you don't have to worry about it.

Manu Sporny: But big companies often do and they have to pay attention to
those IPR agreements because if they don't make the commitment in time then
I believe it's automatically released as being a part of the group. There's
some details there that I'm a bit fuzzy on, but if you're a big company,
make sure you pay attention to those IPR announcements. First public
working draft starts the clock on that. if I remember correctly. okay. So
that's why you want to do an FPWD sooner than later. As I mentioned a first
public working draft. we don't have to agree on the content, The good news
here is that we've been working on this specification for number of months
now years really.

Manu Sporny: And it's much further along that than some specifications are.
Meaning that it should be fine for us to publish as a first public working
draft. Just because we publish a document as a first public working draft
doesn't mean we might not change the entire document. You can wildly change
the document after FPWD based on the discussions we have in this group. and
so just because we're publishing an FBWD doesn't mean anything gets locked
in stone other than we are working on the standards track. let me pause
there.

Manu Sporny: I know that was a lot of information. Are there any questions
or concerns about the process or where we are in the process or what we
need to do So, I'm hoping silence means it's fairly clear. we will talk
about, next stages of the process. as we come up to them. but a light kind
of a high level view of it is we have a document that is called an editor's
draft right now. That's the VC's for entity recognition spec. So let me
share my screen here. so there's this document that we have today. if you
look at the top left it says W3C editor's draft.

Manu Sporny: And if we look at, the latest public published version in TR
space, it's going to be empty, blank, page not found because we haven't
published a first public working draft yet. But once we publish it, this
link will go live. and then we will be in kind of, the WC proc C process.
after that, does anyone remember which section the process diagram is in?
probably not going to be able to find it quickly, but there's a diagram in
here on how you go through the process.

Manu Sporny: At a high level, we're going to publish a first public working
draft and then we're going to work on this document up until the point
where we think it's feature freeze ready. we think we're done with the
design. We're not going to add any more features. It's ready for people to
implement. once we get to that part. Thank you, Dave. what is this? ck Here
we go. All right. So, this is a graphic diagram of the process. So, here's
the first public working draft, We're going to go into the working draft
where we just continually crank these out. every time we, update the main
branch, a new working draft will be pushed out there.

Manu Sporny: when we get to feature freeze where it's pretty much done for
version 10. We want people to implement it. We will make a decision here
and then the larger working group will make a decision to go into the
candidate recommendation phase which at that point you create things called
candidate recommendation snapshots and then candidate recommendation drafts
and you continue iterating. This is where you get implementation feedback.
We have to get at least two independent interoperable implementations for
every feature in the spec. We will talk about that much later. But once we
get that at that point we can say okay we want this to go to an official
W3C recommendation. This process in here can take anywhere from first
public working draft will happen hopefully within weeks.

Manu Sporny: The working draft stuff might take 3 months to 6 months for
our spec, this current one. Sometimes it can take 18 months, sometimes it
can take years. You really don't want that to happen. for our spec that
we're working in this group, it should take probably about 3 to 6 months.
And then we'll move to candidate wreck. Hopefully, we'll be able to turn it
around pretty quickly in there. another 6 months and then out to a
recommendation. So in theory, hopefully by this time next year, we will
have an official global standard for the thing we're working on. as long as
we don't have any big disagreements, I love how let me dream, Phil.

Dave Longley> W3C Process Document
<https://www.w3.org/policies/process/#rec-track>

Manu Sporny: We anyway,…

Phil Archer: All right.

Manu Sporny: I'm not going to say this should be easy, but we have a very
limited scope and that usually helps and hopefully we won't try and open
the scope up, that much in this group. but Phil is right to laugh. everyone
starts the process, wideeyed and with great hope. So that's basically the
process there. Let me pause there. Any questions for folks that might not
have been through this process before?

Manu Sporny: Please, Phil.

Phil Archer: not the process particularly.
Use Case: Linked Credentials

Phil Archer: But I think there is a slight broadening of scope and this is
something that we talked about in coobe and this is why I'm so pleased that
Steve is here.

Phil Archer: I think Senong is going to be joining us soon as well because
I think there are some use cases around the trade documentation which may
call for some new features to this document that are not in that moment.
Steve, do you want to talk about linking one VC to another please?

steve capell: Yeah,…

steve capell: in fact I'm just writing a ticket in answer to ticket 51 with
a documented use case. So yeah, a scenario is a trade transaction like a
commercial invoice is issued as a VC by an issuer who is the export party
in an exporting country and it makes its way to the importing party
obviously who's the buyer who then has to pass it on to let's say a bank
for trade finance or to the importing customs authority for automated due
diligence and tariff compliance and so on.

steve capell: So the verifier is actually a party unknown and with no
direct relationship to the issuer because it's the importing customs
authority and the issuer in the exporting country has relationship with
them. and this importing customs authority needs to know not just is this
invoice valid but who is the entity that issued it. The VC of course will
claim an invoicing party but it's typically issued by DID that represents
that exporter and with 20 million of such exporters around the world.

steve capell: nobody can really know that did really representative of the
legal entity who's claimed to be issuing that ice. So we imagine another
credential totally separate very similar to a business registration
certificate. In fact probably issued about the same time as the business
registration certificate by the authorative business register who is a
government entity typically in the exporting country. This would be a
entity recognition In our case in UNP we call it a digital identity anchor
but it's a VC that basically says this party is known to us as let's say
acme pty.

steve capell: So that's the challenge is to link the invoice issued 50
about 5 billion of them a year to the entity recognition credential issued
by the authority in the exporting country. but on top of that there's
another link in the chain right because there are about a thousand of these
authoritative registers and I would be willing to bet that nobody in the
room can tell me whether org or registradorg is the Spanish authoritative
business register. The answer is it's registrador.org and if you go to
register.org it looks like some sort of cryptocurrency trading site or
something, right?

steve capell: So how does a verifier in another part of the world not only
know that the invoice was issued by acme pty but that the register who
claims this is acme pty really is the authoritative register of that
country. So there's another entity recognition credential this time issued
by the UN to the national legal register asserting that the national legal
register. Like I said, is very similar to how passports work. So there's a
linked chain of credentials here to verify. Yes, the invoice is valid.
look, I found essentially a business registration certificate, which is an
entity credential. and not only is it valid, but the subject of the
business registration certificate is the issuer of the invoice. And I've
had another link credential, which is the UN saying this is an authorative
register. Right?

steve capell: So this pattern of linked credentials with cryptographic
proofs between the links is very common. That's just one example, Another
one is product conformity certificates saying for example this timber is EU
deforestation compliant or something like that. Lots of them. This is a
well-established framework 30 40 years old governed by ISO casco. and what
you need to verify is not just that the product conformity certificate
which is a VC again is valid but that it was issued by an accredited
conformity assessment body or certifier as opposed to my brother.

steve capell: not only that again but there are thousands of accredited
certifiers around the world and there is an international organization not
the this time it's called IAC that is maintains a register of accreditation
authorities so this same pattern of following a transaction to a legal
register to a register of registers occurs again and again in trade and
this is the pattern that I'm keen to see This spec support

Manu Sporny: Wonderful. Thank you for that background into that very
important use case. So yes, that is going to be part of the work that we do
here to make sure that we cover that use case in a way that is technically
correct and…

Phil Archer: Okay, fair enough.

Manu Sporny: easy to scale and all of those things. which is why it's so
important that you're here So, maybe it takes us 13 months, Phil, instead
of 12. So, those, things like that are absolutely go into our use cases.
Steve, and, that's part of kind of our entrance criteria to candidate wreck.

Manu Sporny: we don't go into candidate wreck until we figure out a way to
address those use cases. and we have thought about variations of those and
we think we have a solution that'll work, but we have to make sure that it
does. okay, so that is a preview of some of the work in front of us. let me
shift re let me stop there. any other kind of questions on W3C process
anything related to first working draft candidate wreck that stuff. The
next thing I want to try to cover is we do need to make a first public
working draft and quite well let me just say we need to do a first public
working draft sooner than later.

Manu Sporny: Before we start talking about that, is there anything else
people want to cover about process? So, let's talk about as I mentioned
before, a first public working draft doesn't mean that we agree with the
specification or with each other. It just means that we think there's a
document here that hangs together well enough that we could publish it. to
let people know that we're working on this officially. once we publish it,
we can change it in a variety of different ways. and we will continue to
kind of build consensus around the entirety of the document. before we go
into candidate recommendation, we usually get to the point where all of us
agree that this ver version we're about to put in candidate recommendation
has broad consensus.

Manu Sporny: not just with each other in this group but we have to have
horizontal review from other groups like privacy and security and things
like that. So we're just going to build consensus up as we go along. the
very first publication is FPWD. We need to do that. I would suggest that
the document that we have right now is in good shape to do that. except for
one thing we need to pick a short name. Right now it's VC recognition. if
people feel like that is going to be it for the next 12 to 18 to 24 months
like that is the name we want to use then we can go forward with an FPWD
vote. If people think we're going to change the name of the specification
and it might change the short name then we may want to take a little more
time to pick the right thing before we move forward.

Manu Sporny: I will note that you can change the short name later. It just
Avon really does not like it and staff just really doesn't like it when you
change the short name. We're supposed to pick something that we feel is
fairly stable. So, let me stop there.

Phil Archer: I'm happy with the short name as VC recognition.

Phil Archer: The only word I'm not happy with in the title is ty. and that
comes from my absolutely zero knowledge, but I've heard of a thing called
entity recognition in natural language processing. And entity recognition
comes up as a term that has a meaning and it doesn't mean what we mean
here. And so I'm perfectly happy with VC recognition as a short name. but
I'm think I'm going through things in my head like status issuer authority
recognition, something. But the word entity is not sitting well with me.

Manu Sporny: Got it. Thank you, Phil. Kevin

Kevin Dean: Of course,…

Kevin Dean: of course, I'm going to go to the opposite t with Phil. I don't
like the idea of VC recognition as a short name because there are lots of
other things we could conceivably recognize with and I think recognition
itself is too generic. I do actually agree with Phil's statement that
entity is, probably not an appropriate term. since we are really making a
very strong assertion about the maybe subject recognition but I think that
needs a more detailed discussion if we're going to move away from the word
entity I just don't like VC recognition because there are other things we
could recognize in future specifications

Benjamin Young> good callout…sad we missed that.

Manu Sporny: Great. Thank you. Kevin, Dmitri, you're up

Dave Longley> if it becomes pluralized does it help? "Recognized Entities"

Dmitri Zagidulin: and yet another minus one for entity recognition. I do
however think that I would rather instead propose VCs for recognized
Entities here is specific. It's not just subjects because we also need to
recognize issuers and verifiers. So it's all three entities. I absolutely
agree with Phil that entity recognition, the string is overloaded in
linguistics, but recognized entities That's it.

Phil Archer> That's better but still a little itchy

Manu Sporny: All and as people can see, naming things is really hard. I'll
try to be clear. we can change over and over and over again. This one
doesn' This is the thing that sticks, right? So, we want to be very sure
about this thing and this thing we can change over and over again and it
probably doesn't make too much of a difference. we do want to get it right
and I'm hearing at least a number of minus ones for entity recognition. the
way that we sometimes deal with this is we put out a rank choice poll and
we put it out not just to us but for example the entire credentials
community group and ask people like which one of these would you rank?

Ted Thibodeau Jr> "VCs for Agent Recognition"?

Manu Sporny: And then we get a much better signal back because the danger
here is that there will, potentially always be someone that doesn't like
whatever we pick and we'll minus one it at which point we just drag this
all out for weeks. and then the other bad thing to do is pick the name on
this call and then go with it and then have buyer's remorse on the very
next call. It's already happened multiple times with the title of this spec
and the short name. Okay. So,…

steve capell: question.

Manu Sporny: do we think we will be able to pick something today as
dangerous as that is or do we want to go back and brainstorm a bit more? We
do have an issue where we are brainstorming like other variations of this.
this is holding us up from doing an FPWD. as silly as that is, that's just,
where we are. thoughts from anyone are there. So, we've had some
suggestions of recognized entities. I'm particularly kind of a minus one
for VCs 4.

Ted Thibodeau Jr> "vc-recog"? A little blurrier, but still on point

Manu Sporny: What do we think about recognized entities? Ted has suggested
agent recognition. I'm concerned about that because the AI agent stuff,
actor recognition because we said no to actors and yes to entities in the
verifiable claims we have discussed many times ago.

Manu Sporny: Go ahead, Phil.

Phil Archer> Verifiable Claims anyone?

Dmitri Zagidulin> lol

Phil Archer: I'm going to say plus one to Dimmitri's suggestion of VC Recog…

Phil Archer: because it's an abbreviation and we can decide later what it's
an abbreviation of. So, it could be recognized entities which seem to be
okay or it could be party recognition or something else. But VC Recog seems
as if it gives us enough wiggle room to find consensus.

Dmitri Zagidulin> vc-recog is not bad for a shortname!

Manu Sporny: All right, there's a good concrete proposal. what do folks
think about that? Kevin's minus oneing it. please elaborate, Kevin.

Ted Thibodeau Jr> "VCs for a Verifiable Ecosystem"? "vc-ecosystem"

Dmitri Zagidulin> +1 to Recognized Entities

Kevin Dean> Party recognition

Kevin Dean: It's just an abbreviation for recognition and I've got the same
objection to that as I did for the full word. I've proposed also maybe the
idea of party recognition as a more specific term than entity. And this
could be VC party, because we're looking to recognize parties to
transactions or to parties to an interaction of some kind.

Manu Sporny: So I'll remind we we had explored the word party and the VC
data model and in this specification as well and went away from it in both
cases. So if we have minus ones with the name, it's probably not a good
idea to go forward with it. what we'll need to do is come up with proposals
for what the short name is going to be. I do see a number of people plus
one recog.

Kevin Dean> -1 to vc-recog

Dmitri Zagidulin> +1 to vc-recog

Manu Sporny: But Kevin, if you feel strongly against it, then we'll just
have to hold off publishing until we get a better abbreviation. and that
will require us to actively brainstorm, get a list of things down there and
then do a rank choice poll on them. that can take a couple of weeks, which
is it's not a big deal if we can't publish an FPWD for a couple of weeks,
but that is kind of where we are with this spec. The pe they got their FPWD
resolutions passed today, so they'll go forward.

Manu Sporny: And it's totally fine for us to kind of take time to pick
something that's right for this before we put it out there. So what that
means I have asked folks to put forward ideas over the past couple of
weeks. I don't know if that really happened. because now we're blocked by
picking the short name, we are probably going to want to spend the rest of
the time brainstorming, alternate, names. I think it was this one. there we
go. Benjamin, I think you added things here. so let's start adding.

Manu Sporny: If folks can basically say out loud what we're missing. So
we've got verifiable participants

Dmitri Zagidulin: How about rolls?

Manu Sporny> -1 to party (because we decided to not do that several years
ago) :(

Manu Sporny: where verifiable roles anchors.

steve capell> vc-recog works for me.

Benjamin Young> Verifiable Participants

Dmitri Zagidulin: Fble and Steve mentions the UN name verifiable anchors
might not be a bad idea.

Phil Archer: It's actually digital identity anchor D I A

Shigeya S> -1 to party.

Dmitri Zagidulin: And anchors might not be a bad short name.

Manu Sporny: Say that again.

Manu Sporny: D. Yep. What else are we wanting we do want a full set because
once you put a rank choice poll out there, all of them kind of affect each
other. and this would become the name of the specification and then the
short name would be some kind of abbreviation of it or it might be the full
thing.

Dave Longley> vc-recognition seems to be the same to me as vc-recog for a
shortname, except the latter might be harder to find in a search.

Dmitri Zagidulin: VC Anchors might not be a bad short

Dmitri Zagidulin: the other adjective. Go ahead, Dave. The

Dmitri Zagidulin> nobody is going to be searching for the shortname tho

Dave Longley: If we've got verifiable roles,…

Dave Longley> me = somebody :(

Ted Thibodeau Jr> "VCs for Participant Roleplayers" "vc-pr"

Dave Longley: we should probably put recognized roles as well.

Dmitri Zagidulin> plus, these days, search engine stemmers are pretty good.

Manu Sporny: the other sorry real quick Dimmitri I want to also make sure
that we spent quite a bit of time coming up with recognized entity and
recognized action which is fine we can go away from it but this was after
quite a while of discussion I'll just want to point that out so if you're
suggesting things and I guess please make sure that you read the
specification and exactly what it does, today with the things that we might
add in the future. that's it. Go ahead, Demitri.

Benjamin Young> those were from the last call

Dmitri Zagidulin: No, that's it, I

Manu Sporny: Recognized actors.

steve capell> the current UN name for this is "Digital Identity Anchor" for
what it's worth

Ted Thibodeau Jr: And there's one above it.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Yeah, I'm throwing things at the wall. So

steve capell> Digital Identity Anchor | UN Transparency Protocol
<https://untp.unece.org/docs/specification/DigitalIdentityAnchor>

Manu Sporny: We're just brainstorming now, so it's fine. we're trying to
get a list here. Any other options folks want to put down here?

Kevin Dean: Recognize subjects. Yeah.

Dmitri Zagidulin: That's not even off for that one cuz it's not just
subjects, right? It's also issues and verifiers. …

Manu Sporny: Who are subtypes subjects?

Manu Sporny: I guess Kevin is your point. I don't know if the chat Dmitri
Zagidulin:

Ted Thibodeau Jr> "VCs for Ecosystem Partners"

Dmitri Zagidulin: I see. subjects as in synonym for entities rather than
our VC role. I got you.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: And this is not necessarily from some authority in the
cloud. This might be Mano makes a list that I subscribe to and…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Dave makes a similar list. That's the extent of the
authority I care about.

Manu Sporny: Any other options that folks want to put on here?

Manu Sporny: And I apologize if I missed anything in the chat. There's a
lot of stuff in there and…

Manu Sporny: I don't know how strongly people feel about each one of those.
So, just blurt it out if I missed something and you want it on the list. Go
ahead, Coyote. Which one?

Kayode Ezike: Yeah. So out there known and…

Ted Thibodeau Jr> Recognized Actors?

Kayode Ezike: he's known.

Manu Sporny: You're a bit muffled, Coyote, for me. Known entities.

Kayode Ezike: Yeah,…

Manu Sporny: Do you want known actors?

steve capell> we are talking about credentials issued by some authority
that "recognises" it's registered member role. So it seems not
unreasonable.

Kayode Ezike: pretty much like all the variations. Sure.

Manu Sporny: Do you want known known subjects?

Manu Sporny: Go ahead, Dave. That's a good idea.

Dave Longley: To get around the short name,…

Dave Longley: we could go in a different direction and do something like VC
who is. And then it doesn't really matter what the title is, but it's a
short name.

Manu Sporny: Who is thing I'm concerned about Stephen Curran's who is
proposal which does give you back VCs.

steve capell: but Steven's proposal is more about discovery than the VC,…

steve capell: right? …

Dave Longley> to go in another direction: "VC Who's Who" … vc-who …
vc-who-is … etc.

Manu Sporny: You get VCs when you go to who is endpoint. I guess That's
true.

steve capell: yeah, but he doesn't define the structure of the VC. So the
VC you find who is endpoint could actually be an entity recognition VC.
There's no incompatibility there.

Manu Sporny: Yeah, that's true. Do we want how Yeah. H it is one approach.
I mean we would want to check with Stephen Curran first. VC…

Dmitri Zagidulin: Agreed.

Manu Sporny: who is which one do we prefer?

Dave Longley: Yes, just they're both options.

Manu Sporny: How do we feel about VC's 4 and removing that from the title?

Ted Thibodeau Jr: You could just make that one VC ecosystem partners.

Manu Sporny: I'm very pro removing it from the title.

Manu Sporny: But because it's only showing up here kind of once. So I don't
know how other people feel about that one. Yep. I Sorry, can go up? I heard
a bloop. Okay, Demetri is saying plus one. All right. Are there any on here…

Manu Sporny: where people are like Okay.

Dave Longley: I threw in one more in chat.

Dave Longley: You could do recognized relationships just to bring in a
different concept.

Manu Sporny: Are there any on here where people are I cannot live with
that. It would destroy the meaning of the spec or we don't even want to put
this out as an option. are there any of these jump out as I don't think the
group is thinking about it in this way. and this might be a bad association
with the spec.

Dmitri Zagidulin: I hate to say it, but I think relationship might because
we're specifically dealing with entities, not relationships, we want to be
able to reco identify entities without presuming any relationship
whatsoever.

Manu Sporny: Okay, Dave, any particular Okay,…

Dave Longley: I don't really care. we can strike it. I was thinking more
like when you publish these credentials you're saying know about This is
what I know about them. That's a relationship to some extent, but I'm happy
to strike

Manu Sporny: go ahead.

Manu Sporny: and Phil.

Ted Thibodeau Jr> (might be worth knowing that the "Who's Who" publications
are all driven and supported by paid listings, even if they include some
unpaid)

Phil Archer: So many of these words have other connotations in other
contexts.

Phil Archer: Recognized relationship sounds like a marriage certificate to
me. and recognized entities and relationships you very quickly start
talking about entity relationship diagrams. which brings me back to the
original problem I had with entity recognition and the fact that we have
such a long list of possible ones tells us quite a lot. I think it's such a
nebulous thing we're trying to get to here.

steve capell> "vc-whois" is also ok for me

Ted Thibodeau Jr: And now you've said It's

Phil Archer: I will say one thing I'm delighted about and please may this
continue. Nobody thankfully has included the word trust. Thank you for not
including that word.

Dmitri Zagidulin> +1 to removing VCs For

steve capell> and I believe stephen would have no problem

Manu Sporny: Yeah, that was the first word on the chopping block in the
group.

Phil Archer: But in a thank god no one saying it anyway.

Dave Longley> Recognized Relationships

Manu Sporny: Yeah. Dimmitri, you're on the queue.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, good point about not saying I want to point out
that although the list long, it's just combinatorial of only very few
handful of adjectives and nouns, right? It's a choice between, recognized,
known, verifiable, and…

Dmitri Zagidulin: entities, roles, actors, that kind of thing. So, it's
actually very few options if you think of it from that point. And that's
good. That's alignment.

Manu Sporny: Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it.

Manu Sporny: And it's okay to have this many choices in a rank choice poll.
they get whittleled down very quickly. So, I'm hearing, is there anything
else on here that people want to strike? I'm hearing you no recognized
entities would big minus one to that. and then I'm hearing some work
against recognized relationships and…

Manu Sporny: Dave's like I don't really mind if we remove that.

Kayode Ezike: I was just going to say we're not going to be putting out the
short names for voting to VC…

Kayode Ezike: who is VC who right or are

Manu Sporny: We're not going to put these out? I will admit it's a bit
weird to have a short name that has nothing to do with the title of the
spec. that is usually a bad name smell. we would have to expand this into
something that is the title of the spec. I'm suggesting it would be good to
expand this into something we could live with that matches up with who is
stuff. I may maybe…

Kayode Ezike: only asking because I wasn't sure if that's something that
the community would decide on or if it's something that the working group
would

Manu Sporny: what we want to do is just run a rank choice poll among
ourselves to see…

Shigeya S> +1 phil

steve capell: Okay.

Ted Thibodeau Jr> "Confirmed Actors in the VC Ecosystem"

Manu Sporny: if we can get to some clear signal and if we don't then we
open it up to the larger group right and not put all these options in front
of everyone. And I think the first pass might need people that really do
understand more or less what the spec is about and we don't want people
that have no idea what the spec is about weighing in. I'm sorry Dmitri I
think you were on the queue.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Plus one about running the poll. I just wanted to say
that in the one sort of plus to the word entities is that a lot of
authentication specs use it as part of their terminology. have an entry for
entity and it's usually defined as anything that has separate identity or…
something like that. So there's precedent in specifically the word entity
in credential and authentication like specs.

Manu Sporny: Yep. Last one to that.

Manu Sporny: Okay, next steps here are I will put these into a rank choice
poll. I will send it out to us. we can hopefully turn that around quickly
in a week or two and then we can come back to this and see if we can pick a
name and a short name and title for the spec. all right. with that, thank
you everyone very much for the call. Apologies that we're in a bike
shedding phase.

Manu Sporny: It's just because we need to get this spec out and we need the
bike shed. finally, if there are other items you want added here, please go
to issue 30. I will put it in the chat channel and add your items. I will
wait a day or two before I raise the poll. I think I'll probably wait until
the weekend to raise the poll. If you don't get your selections in here, no
complaining that it wasn't on poll. get it in there by Friday and I'll open
the poll on Friday. All right. thank you everyone.

Phil Archer: everyone. Bye-bye.

Manu Sporny: I really appreciate everyone's have a great rest of your day
and we'll meet again next week. Take care. Bye. Meeting ended after
01:01:44 👋 This editable transcript was computer generated and might
contain errors. People can also change the text after it was created.

Shigeya S> +1 dmitri

Ted Thibodeau Jr> "Verifiable Conjuntions"?

Dave Longley> entity is in the VCDM spec too.

steve capell> UNTP / UNGRID / DIA Identity Anchor use case · Issue #66 ·
w3c/vc-recognition · GitHub
<https://github.com/w3c/vc-recognition/issues/66>

Manu Sporny> Change document title · Issue #30 · w3c/vc-recognition · GitHub
<https://github.com/w3c/vc-recognition/issues/30>

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