Responsibility Infrastructure
Responsibility Infrastructure
Standards for Provable Responsibility
Public interoperability layer · Proposed

Responsibility Interoperability Standard.

The proposed public standard for preserving common responsibility meaning across independent organisational and system boundaries.

Status
Proposed
Scope
Common responsibility semantics
Technology model
Implementation-neutral
Companion protocol
Responsibility Interoperability Protocol
§ Purpose

Standardise the meaning that must survive the boundary.

The Responsibility Interoperability Standard defines the minimum common semantics that independent parties need in order to exchange responsibility information without surrendering ownership of their internal systems or operating models.

It is concerned with externally relied-upon responsibility meaning, not with making every participating organisation operate the same internal process.

§ Semantic commitments

Keep the responsibility facts distinguishable.

Identity
The parties, organisations or systems participating in the responsibility exchange.
Responsibility
The specific responsibility being proposed, held, transferred or discharged.
Scope
The boundary, conditions and intended outcome to which the responsibility applies.
Authority
The source, holder, scope, limits and validity of the authority relied upon.
Evidence
Attributable proof supporting a responsibility event, claim or outcome.
Outcome
The result associated with the responsibility and the evidence supporting that result.
§ Boundary rules

Interoperability without internal standardisation.

  • Responsibility meaning must remain explicit when it crosses an organisational or system boundary.
  • Identity, authority, evidence and responsibility must remain distinguishable concepts.
  • Acceptance, rejection, transfer and other material responses must not be inferred where the applicable requirement calls for an explicit event.
  • Material event history and provenance must remain reconstructable across exchange and later reconciliation.
  • Interoperability conformance must identify the applicable publication, role, scope and version.
  • Independent implementation must not require adoption of a common internal product, workflow engine or runtime architecture.
§ Operating environments

The semantic boundary must survive different operating conditions.

The public interoperability layer is intended to support online, intermittently connected, offline and air-gapped operation with later reconciliation. The same core responsibility meaning must remain reconstructable regardless of the transport or connection model used.

It is intended to support human-to-human, human-to-machine, machine-to-human and machine-to-machine exchange.

§ Relationship to RI

A public interoperability standard within a wider architecture.

The Responsibility Interoperability Standard defines the common semantic boundary for independent exchange. The Responsibility Infrastructure Standard addresses the wider normative architecture in which responsibility may be represented, evidenced, verified, recognised, resolved and relied upon.