This document serves as a repository for all known global parameters,
properties, and values used by the Decentralized Identifier ecosystem.
Status of This Document
This section describes the status of this
document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C
publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found
in the W3C technical reports index at
https://www.w3.org/TR/.
This repository is under active development and implementers are advised
against using the repository unless they are directly involved with the
W3C DID Working Group.
Portions of the work on this specification have been funded by the
United States Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology
Directorate under contracts HSHQDC-16-R00012-H-SB2016-1-002, 70RSAT20T00000010,
and HSHQDC-17-C-00019. The content of this specification does not
necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the U.S. Government
and no official endorsement should be inferred.
Work on this repository has also been supported by the Rebooting the
Web of Trust community facilitated by Christopher Allen, Shannon
Appelcline, Kiara Robles, Brian Weller, Betty Dhamers, Kaliya Young,
Kim Hamilton Duffy, Manu Sporny, Drummond Reed, Joe Andrieu, and
Heather Vescent, Dmitri Zagidulin, and Dan Burnett.
This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other
documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other
than work in progress.
The
W3C Patent
Policy
does not carry any licensing requirements or commitments on this
document.
This document serves as an official repository for all known global parameters,
properties, and values used by the Decentralized Identifier ecosystem.
1.1 Conformance
As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.
The key words MAY, MUST, MUST NOT, and SHOULD in this document
are to be interpreted as described in
BCP 14
[RFC2119] [RFC8174]
when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.
2. The Registration Process
Software implementers might find that the existing Decentralized Identifier Core
specification [DID-CORE] is not entirely capable of addressing their use case
and might need to add a new parameters, properties, or values to this repository
in order to achieve their use case in a globally interoperable fashion. In order
to add a new parameter, property, or value to this repository, an implementer MUST
submit a modification request for this repository, as a pull request on the
repository where this repository is hosted, where the modification request adheres
to the following policies:
Any addition to the DID Extensions MUST specify a human readable
description of the addition.
Any name or value of a property or parameter MUST be indicative of
its function. Avoid generic terms such as "myProperty" or "foo".
Any method name SHOULD avoid generic terms such as "mymethod" or "registry".
If there are copyright, trademark, or any intellectual property rights
concerns, the addition and use MUST be authorized in writing by the intellectual
property rights holder under a
F/RAND
license. Examples include DID Methods that use trademarked brand names,
property names that utilize the titles of copyrighted works, and patented
technology that would cause the use of the extension to require licensing a
patent.
Any addition MUST NOT create unreasonable legal, security, moral, or privacy
issues that will result in direct harm to others. Examples of unacceptable
additions include any containing racist language, technologies used to
persecute minority populations, and unconsented pervasive tracking.
Any addition to the DID Extensions MUST link, via at least a URL,
preferably a content-integrity protected one, to the defining specification so
that implementers can implement the property.
Any addition to the DID Extensions that is a property or value, MUST
specify a machine readable JSON-LD Context for the addition.
The JSON-LD Context MUST be included in full as part of the submission.
A namespace URI MUST be provided for the JSON-LD Context so that consumer
implementations can consistently map a URI to the full context.
The URI provided MUST be persistent, and link all terms to their associated
human readable descriptions.
The URI provided SHOULD resolve or link to the full context contents.
JSON-LD Contexts MUST be versioned and MUST NOT be date stamped.
JSON-LD Contexts SHOULD use scoped terms and MUST use the @protected
feature to eliminate the possibility of term conflicts.
Properties in the DID Extensions MUST NOT be removed, only deprecated.
The Editors of the DID Specification Registries MUST consider all of the
policies above when reviewing additions to the repository and MUST reject repository
entries if they violate any of the policies in this section. Entities
registering additions can challenge rejections first with the W3C DID Working
Group and then, if they are not satisfied with the outcome, with the W3C Staff.
W3C Staff need not be consulted on changes to the DID Specification Registries,
but do have the final authority on repository contents. This is to ensure that W3C
can adequately respond to time sensitive legal, privacy, security, moral, or
other pressing concerns without putting an undue operational burden on W3C
Staff.
Entries that are identified to cause interoperability problems MAY be marked as
such at the discretion of the maintainers of this repository, and if possible,
after consultation with the entry maintainer.
Any submission to the registries that meet all the criteria listed above will be
accepted for inclusion. These registries enumerate all known mechanisms that
meet a minimum bar, without choosing between them.
3. Extensions
The following documents list known extensions to the DID Ecosystem: