Extract SCID section to a standalone spec?

[dmitrizagidulin]

The SCID Generation and Validation section would make an excellent standalone mini-spec (which the did:tdw spec can just refer to).
The technique is general, and useful outside of the DID space. For example, I'd love to use it as a way to generate stable identifiers for ActivityPub / ActivityStreams2 objects.

Is that something this group would consider doing?

[swcurran]

Sure. Note that the inspiration for that method is from Sam Smith’s SAID (sself-addressable identifiers) approach, which is an expired Internet Draft at IETF. I think the approach documented in did:td is likely better because it is allows for multiple SCID references in the content, doesn’t rely on CESR, and does rely on JCS vs. just “removing whitespace” from JSON. That said, we’re open to feedback on it — e.g. the use of the placeholder {{SCID}} was pretty arbitrary :-).

[dmitrizagidulin]

@swcurran excellent, ok. Do you want to just create a new repo (scid-spec or something), and we can copy that section into it? I'd be happy to help edit / author.

[swcurran]

Hey @dmitrizagidulin -- I did a quick creation of this spec to be incubated at BC Gov -- https://bcgov.github.io/scid-spec/. The repo is here: https://github.com/bcgov/scid-spec

It was a very quick pass, and the terminology context, abstract, background definitely needs improvement.

Please submit a PR to clean it up. Hopefully you are well-versed in SpecUp, but if not the guidance for using it is in the readme. It's pretty easy.

We can decide shortly where to incubate this, but for now, we can collaborate in this BC Gov repo.

Let's see where this goes!

[talltree]

@swcurran I like the idea of breaking out your JSON-based SCID format into a spec that any other spec could incorporate. I'm a huge proponent of SCIDs — so much so that I've been thinking the ToIP Foundation should publish a spec just covering the abstract requirements for any identifier to qualify as "self-certifying". I'm still cooking on that idea. But if we did it, it would then point to both your spec and the KERI spec and any other concrete SCID specs as examples.