Re: Thoughts on the LDS WG chartering discussion

On Fri, 11 Jun 2021 at 17:13, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> Dan Brickley wrote:
> > <file:/dev/🦖/RGMv1> rdf:value “hex sequence here” ^wikidata:Q5153426 .
>
> You've just described what Hashlinks do:
>
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-sporny-hashlink-07
>
> Which we could use to generate triples of the form:
>
> <hl:zQmWvQxTqbG2Z9HPJgG57jjwR154cKhbtJenbyYTWkjgF3e>
>   schema:contentURL
>     <https://rgm.example/file.txt> .
>
> Or
>
> <https://rgm.example/file.txt>
>   sec:digest
>     "QmWvQxTqbG2Z9HP7...btJenbyYTWkjgF3e"^sec:multihash
>
> and then we could canonicalize those using RDH (there is a "simple
> canonicalization" path in the algorithm when you don't have blank nodes to
> contend with) and then express the signature using LDP and LDV.
>
> Doing so is fairly trivial, but doesn't address many of use cases listed in
> the LDS WG Charter.
>
> If we put that in scope, Dan, would you be in favour of the charter? If we
> do,
> we should do that without poking XML Digital Signatures in the eye and
> opening
> all of those old wounds.


Yeah, after sending it, I realized we also have data:URIs from 1996, which
do much of the work too.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc2397/

I appreciate your absolutely natural wariness of old wounds and the
daunting heritage of XML Signature. But we do all seem to agree that the
are a few options for trivial transformations that bring non-RDF content
into an RDF form suitable for Linked Data Signing.

I can believe that a new WG might not want to go anywhere near XML
Signature. I do believe W3C team, TAG and AC as a body and AC reps
individually have some responsibility to weigh these tradeoffs. W3C can’t
afford to make many new frameworks for signing web content, so if this one
is (like XML Signature) something that can sign any content but is named
after the format its workings are written in, we ought to make that clear
to AC in the charter.

There are two reasons this work has “Linked Data” in the name. One is the
special attention it gives to making RDF more usefully content hashable and
signable, and the other is that its own data is expressed in RDF.

Can we tease these two aspects apart a little? The former is just useful to
get done for RDF folks regardless of signature, … but the latter piece
(which is applicable, we agree, to all content) does seem to have the
ingredients for being a modern successor to some subset of the
sign-any-web-content goals of XML Signature, and perhaps browser / web
platform usecases too. That is territory where people may be alienated by
the commitment to RDF, of course. But it is also potentially a route to
much greater impact for this work.

Dan


>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> News: Digital Bazaar Announces New Case Studies (2021)
> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
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