Re: Chartering work has started for a Linked Data Signature Working Group @W3C

Peter (and others who may have made the same mistake)

At the moment, the charter text says:

"Draft State to be adopted from: …"

the intention is not to take over the, say, Linked Data Proof document as is, just to start by some document that is already there. Ie, the charter does not say that, say, the FPWD of the respective deliverable will be that document. In this sense, the criticism on that document is not really relevant for the charter.

In an upcoming new version I may change that to something like "input document", or something similar.

(The problem with the current situation is that the charters at W3C follow a specific template which, in this case, may be misleading.)

Ivan


> On 12 May 2021, at 19:47, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I was looking through the draft charter.  Under the suggestion that RDF and Linked Data are synonyms we get the following deliverables.
> 
> RDF Dataset Canonicalization (RDC)
> RDF Dataset Hash (RDH)
> RDF Integrity (RI)
> RDF Security Vocabulary (RSV)
> 
> I understand RDC, which is existing work, and RDH, which is also very close to existing work. I think I understand RI, which appears to be nothing more than the writing down of the necessary information to be able to verify signatures and similar things. Then RSV is just a vocabulary for these things.
> 
> So far, so good.
> 
> But when I look at the examples in the proposed source of RI, I get confused.  I see there an example of adding a signature into what looks like a JSON-LD document.  As far as I can tell, this JSON-LD document, EXAMPLE 1, produces an empty graph but this depends on the contents of the context document at https://w3id.org/identity/v1. The signed document, EXAMPLE 2, also produces an empty graph but this depends on the contents of two documents, neither of which are the context document for the original document.  So I'm very puzzled as to just what is going on here.
> 
> OK, maybe all this is just about some aspect of JSON-LD, so I considered signing a Turtle document.  Here is a Turtle document:
> 
> @prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
> 
> <alice> foaf:name "Alice" .
> 
> 
> I quickly run into two problems.
> 
> First, where is the signature supposed to go to make a signed document?  I suppose that it can be just fit into comments.
> 
> Second, what is the RDF graph resulting from this document?  That depends on the base IRI, which can be influenced by the location of the document.  So will there have to be an extra location provided as input to RDC and associated with the signature?  This issue also appears in JSON-LD documents.
> 
> I couldn't find any discussion of these issues in the input documents for the proposed WG.  I expected to see something saying how to add signatures to RDF concrete syntaxes and something that excluded documents with relative IRIs or somehow handled relative IRIs.  I also expected to see something that worked for JSON-LD documents.
> 
> So I'm rather confused as to just how the WG is going to do what it needs to do.
> 
> 
> peter
> 
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C 
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