[SCITT] Endor: A SCITT PoC for W3C Verifiable Credentials

[Orie Steele <[e-mail]>]

I made this today:

https://github.com/OR13/endor

As it says in the readme, this is just a toy example I made up to
experiment with.

The nice thing about endorsing W3C Verifiable Credentials is that they are
already an abstraction that applies to "non software supply chain" use
cases...

For example, we model cyber physical supply chain flows using them:

https://w3id.org/traceability

There are a number of organizations looking at oil and gas, steel,
ecommerce, and agriculture supply chains.

Often they will share some common trade documents such as Bills of Lading
or Commercial Invoices.

These are examples of "SCITT Artifact Types" which you might expect to see
across various distinct supply chain use cases.

However, as is the case with Oil and Gas needing to account for fluid
dynamics, and software needing to account for compilers, build servers and
various source files, there are cases where you may need to model
components of a supply chain with Verifiable Credentials that are highly
specific to the use case.

If you can tolerate modeling in RDF, W3C Verifiable Credentials come with a
built in abstract data model that integrates well with existing industry
ontologies such as:

- https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/
- https://qudt.org/

My main complaint against W3C Verifiable Credentials is the limitation to
JSON representations, if we could represent RDF in CBOR, we would have the
best of both worlds with the main remaining disadvantage being the
namespace overhead inherent in RDF.

If you drop that, you will likely need some registry or algorithm process
for handling collisions and interoperability, but there are various
solutions to those problems.

If you feel I butchered any of the concepts or terminology, feel free to
yell at me here or on github issues, as I said, I made this today, it's not
reflective of actual SCITT architecture, it was just to explore the space.

Regards,

OS


-- 
*ORIE STEELE*
Chief Technical Officer
www.transmute.industries

<https://www.transmute.industries>