Responsibility information working proposal.
A working proposal for preserving the meaning of responsibility information across independent organisational and system boundaries.
- Status
- Founder-authored proposal; not consensus-approved
- Scope
- Common responsibility semantics
- Technology model
- Implementation-neutral
- Original working title
- Responsibility Interoperability Standard
Information distinctions proposed for review.
This proposal examines possible common semantics that could help independent parties exchange responsibility information without surrendering control of their internal systems or operating models. It does not establish mandatory requirements.
It is concerned with externally relied-upon responsibility meaning, not with making every participating organisation operate the same internal process.
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.
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.
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 the wider architecture.
Responsibility Infrastructure describes the wider architecture. This working proposal focuses on the information that independent systems need to share without adopting a particular implementation.