The Concepts & Terminology Working Group (CTWG) helps ToIP members and communities to express themselves in ways that enable others to understand what that communication intends to convey to whatever level of precision is needed.
This is important, because contributors/users in ToIP come from various backgrounds. Their culture may not be Western. English may not be their native tongue. They may be experts in non-technological topics that are relevant for ToIP. Working with one another presumes a setting where participants have some level of shared understanding. Often, sharing one's understanding at a superficial level suffices. Other situations require that underlying concepts are shared in a more in-depth fashion. It's like cars: people buying, selling, or driving cars do not need in-depth shared knowledge about cars, whereas (maintenance or construction) engineers or liability lawyers need to share a deeper knowledge of how cars do (or do not) work.
We expect to see situations of "language confusion", i.e. in which people use words or phrases, the intension (not: intention) of which differs from the interpretation of some listeners/readers. CTWG aims to provide means to resolve that. Sometimes a casual glance at a dictionary or glossary is the solution. In other cases, deeper understanding matters, e.g. in when drafting specifications or contracts. Then we need more than a set of definitions.
The scope of CTWG is to assist ToIP working groups (WGs), task forces (TFs), and other communities of interest or communities of practice that exist both within and outside of the ToIP Foundation to develop the concepts and terms they need for themselves or for particular projects, and make them available to the public. This includes developing artifacts and tools for discovering, documenting, defining, and (deeply) understanding the concepts and terms used within ToIP. Key deliverables include ways to define terms (e.g. terms wikis), maintain a corpus of data underlying these terms, and provide ways to query the corpus to obtain terms e.g. for the creation of glossaries and other artifacts. The data that underlies the terms typically consists of (formally modeled) concepts, plus their relations and constraints, and will encompass perspectives from technical, governance, business, legal and other realms. Although CTWG will maintain this corpus of data via repositories that all ToIP WGs and TFs can contribute to and inherit from, this does not preclude WGs or TFs from maintaining their own specialized glossaries if they require. Such specialized glossaries, together with other generators of concepts and terminology elsewhere in the industry, are expected to feed back into the glossaries and corpus of data maintained by CTWG in a cycle of continuous improvement.
Schedule:
Meetings are bi-weekly, every second Monday from 10:00-11:00 PT / 17:00-18:00 UTC. See the ToIP Calendar for full meeting details including Zoom links.
See our Meeting Pages for agendas, notes, and links to recordings of all meetings.
The table below lists all CTWG deliverables that have been approved to move beyond Pre-Draft status.
Name of Deliverable | Deliverable Type | Link to Draft Deliverable | Task Force | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|
Main ToIP Glossary | Glossary | CTWG | Generated document: https://trustoverip.github.io/ctwg-main-glossary/ | |
ToIP Concepts and Terminology Guide | Guide | Repo: https://github.com/trustoverip/ctwg-terminology-governance-guide | CTWG | Generated document: https://trustoverip.github.io/ctwg-terminology-governance-guide/ |
Specification Template | Template | Repo: https://github.com/trustoverip/specification-template | TSWG | Generated document: https://trustoverip.github.io/specification-template/ |
The overall scope of the CTWG includes the following activities:
You can join this WG by signing up for the Foundation mailing list at lists.trustoverip.org. Our mailing list is concepts-terminology-wg@lists.trustoverip.org.
Members as well as observers are welcome (see the caveat below).
For the protection of all Members, participation in working groups, meetings and events is limited to members of the Trust over IP Foundation (including their employees) who have signed the membership documents and thus agreed to the intellectual property rules governing participation. If you or your employer are not a member, we ask that you not participate in meetings by verbal contribution or otherwise take any action beyond observing.
The WG inherits the IPR terms from the JDF Charter. These include:
The primary focus of the ToIP Foundation is not just on technology (e.g. cryptography, DIDs, protocols, VCs, etc.), but also on governance and on business, legal and social aspects. Its mission to construct, maintain and improve a global, pervasive, scalable and interoperable infrastructure for the (international) exchange of verified and certified data is quite complex, and daunting". This not only requires technology to be provided (which is, or should be the same for everyone, i.e. an infrastructure). It also requires that different businesses with their different business models can use it for their specific, subjective purposes. And that each individual business and user is provided with capabilities that facilitate its compliance with the rules, regulations and (internal and external) policies that apply to that entity - the set of such rules, regulations and policies being different for every such entity, and dependent on the society, the legal jurisdictions and individual preferences. All this is to be realized by people and organizations from different backgrounds - different cultures, languages, expertise, jurisdictions etc., all of whom have their own mindset, objectives and interests that they would like to see served.
The aim of this WG is to enable people in the ToIP community to actually understand what someone else means, to the extent and (in-depth) precision that they need, and facilitating this by producing deliverables/results/products that are fit for the purposes that they pursue. Initially, we expected to see the development of a common glossary, that lists (and summarizes) the basic words we use in the ToIP community. It would include terms defined within as well as outside of ToIP (e.g. by NIST, Sovrin, W3C's VC, DID standards, and others).
However, the minutes on a IIW meeting topic 'glossary effort' showed that developing a common glossary is quite difficult. This is underlined by a post of Eugene Kim (2006). But even when an effort to establish a 'common glossary' were to be successful, that doesn't imply that the 'commonality' extends beyond the set of its creators. The idea itself of establishing a terminology and subsequently (cautiously, but nevertheless forcefully) imposing it on others, is a highly centralistic way of doing things. And it doesn't work (it never has).
The WG recognizes that different groups use (slightly or quite) different terminologies, and acknowledges their 'sovereignty' in doing this. Thus, such groups will be enabled to define their own terms, yet at the same time facilitated to use terms defined elsewhere. As each group curates its own terminology, they each have the ability to decide to what extent they will adopt the terms of other groups into their own terminology. We trust that the various ToIP WGs and TFs will work together and the need to harmonize terminology will arise as their cooperation takes on more solid forms.
We expect subgroups of the ToIP community (e.g. WGs, TFs, TIPs) to create their own specific terminologies that help them serve their needs as they focus on specific objectives (thus facilitating domain/objective-specific jargon). The CTWG will assist them where appropriate, and ensure that (in the midterm|) glossaries can be generated from each such terminology.
Also, we expect to include more precise (theoretical?) specifications of underlying concepts, e.g. in terms of conceptual/mental models. Such models help to obtain a more in-depth understanding of ideas that are worth and necessary to be shared within one or more community sub-groups. They may also facilitate the learning process that (new) community members go through as they try to understand what it is we're actually doing. And they may help to 'spread the word' in specifically targeted (e.g. business and legal) audiences. A specific focus of this WG is to establish relations between the concepts of the mental models and the terms defined in the various glossaries.
Finally, we expect to see results that we haven't thought of yet, the construction of which will be initiated as the need arises, by (representatives of) those that need such results for a specific purpose. Perhaps we might produce a method for resolving terminological discussions that can be lengthy and do not always get properly resolved (e.g. as in id-core issues #4, #122). Here,
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