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The mission of the C&T WG is to address the needs of ToIP stakeholders for conceptual models and terminology that will , terminology and glossaries so as to maximize the understandability, interoperability, usability of the ToIP stack and digital trust infrastructure, applications, and ecosystems built on top of the ToIP stack.

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• Drummond Reed
• Daniel Hardman
• Scott Perry
• Shashishekhar S
• Philippe Page
• Paul Knowles
• Taylor Kendal
• Scott Whitmire
• Arjun Govind
• Vinod Panicker
• sankarshan
• Steven Milstein

Description

Context

Unlike most Linux Foundation projects, the The primary focus of the ToIP Foundation is not just on technology (e.g. cryptography, DIDs and other identifiers, communication protocols, verifiable credentialsVCs, etc.). Instead, our focus is just as much on governance, including the , but also on governance and on business, legal and social aspects. It is a complex and daunting mission to "construct, maintain and improve a global, pervasive, scalable and interoperable infrastructure for the (international) exchange of verified and certified data". This is an engineering task that must not only provide the requires technology to be provided, but also actual business value to be created, and capabilities for complying with different rules and requirements from different legal contexts and societies. The main difficulty ToIP seeks to overcome is the integration between all of these domains. 

C&T WG Mission

A well-known impediment for this integration major difficulty that ToIP seeks to overcome is "language confusion", which is perhaps the most pervasive impediment for working together across all of these domains. Many stories about this exist in various cultures. A more contemporary acknowledgement of this is the architecture of , and anyone that enters the EU parliament building in Strasbourg, which is reminded of this difficulty (because that building resembles the Tower of Babel (according to  as painted by Pieter Brueghel's famous painting).

The mission of the proposed C&T WG is to identify and address the issues that relate to ways of thinking (mental/conceptual models) and terminology that may be an impediment for the overall mission of the ToIP Foundation.

C&T WG Fit-for-Purpose

In a similar way that the ToIP stack must be fit for purpose, the deliverables of this WG must also be fit for purpose. This means the WG needs to understand what stakeholders need to do with the mental/conceptual models and terminology this WG will govern.

Specifically, the WG  shall create and maintain a list of stakeholders, their objectives, the issues they face regarding concepts/conceptual models and terminology, and the products or services they might use for resolving such issues. Understanding these end products or services will provide the requirements that the deliverables of this WG must satisfy. It will help us decide what tasks to undertake, guide us with tool selection, etc.

This is especially important because we envisage stakeholders will come from very different domains—technical, business, legal, policy, marketing—each of which has different needs. We will need to reconcile the needs of these different groups into a minimum number of artifacts to be produced and maintained.

Concepts, Terminology and Scopes

The most basic purpose for having conceptual models (i.e. sets of carefully defined concepts, relations between concepts and constraints that should be satisfied) and terminology (formal labels for such concepts) is to help someone that interprets a term (interpreter) that is uttered by someone else (speaker), to accurately apprehend its intended meaning. This is particularly important in settings where groups of such individuals work together for a specific set of purposes, or to realize common objectives (we will use the term 'scope' to refer to such groups). For these groups to work efficiently and effectively, the ideas they work on together with must be aligned. This is particularly valuable in (software) engineering, where 'interpretation errors' (mis-apprehensions) that go undetected may lead to buggy software and costly repairs.

It is common knowledge that every scope can have its own terminology (jargon). ToIP is about about interoperability between people from different domains (hence also different scopes) - e.g. legal, business, technical, social and other domains. Therefore, it is crucial to find a way each scope can use its own terminology, yet be able to determine whether or not a concept referred to by one term in one scope is the same as a a concept referred to by another term in another scope.

actually need in terms of concepts, terms and glossaries, and how such stakeholders will actually use it. Many such artifacts already exist, e.g. glossaries (of NIST, or Sovrin), terminology sections in standards (e.g. W3C VC, DID), yet this does not seem to be satisfactory: Aries RFCs can define their own terms, the CCG has recently initiated a new 'glossary effort'. 

While the currently existing artifacts are useful for people to learn about specific topics, they have no track record of resolving terminological discussions. We regularly see such discussions (e.g. in issues, e.g. did-core #4, #122) and they are lengthy, do not always get resolved, and arguments do often not refer to any glossary at all. If we want people from the different disciplines (tech, business, legal, ...) to work together, we may need a way to actually ascertain that such discussions can be resolved.

Pragmatically useful and Theoretically Sound

The fact that many glossaries exist, and initiatives keep popping up to create more, proves there is a need. At the same time, it shows that earlier efforts have not brought the benefits that people hoped for, or expected. The WG should support such initiatives in a pragmatic way, e.g. by supporting the creation of a Common Glossary that describes relevant words. Perhaps such an effort can be undertaken in concert with the aforementioned CCG effort. 

Theorists/philosophers have noted that "far too much stock has been placed in the supposed efficacy and utility of defining our terms", and provide a theory for dictionaries, definitions, and meaning. Applying such theories and adopting the results of that work has proven helpful where people, especially from different backgrounds, try to work efficiently and effectively together. The WG should therefore support the creation and maintenance of relevant, and theoretically sound conceptual models and associated terminologies.

At a later stage, when the pragmatic and theoretical work have started and progressed to some extent, the WG should propose ways in which to bring these two togetherFor example, this situation is quite common in court cases. Arguments are regularly made about whether or not someone or something qualifies as (an instance of) some concept. The outcome of this discussion is relevant, because laws assign consequences (duties, rights, ...) to those that do or do not qualify. In order to be able to refer to such concepts, the first section of many legal documents defines the mapping between terms and the criteria that are used to determine whether or not someone or something qualifies as an instance of a concept. This way, even if different laws have different terms for the same concept, it is not an issue if legal documents make these mappings explicit. The definitions are written in such a way that judges and other lawyers should all apply them in the same way (in case of disputes, judges settle the intended interpretation). The processes for defining and using such legal terms serve as an inspiration for our work.

Contributions and Example Outputs

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