◆ Semantic Web Catalogue

Design issue

Trust

Who vouches for it?

tension
Who counts as an authority; verification against usability.
also
Provenance, Proof, Verification
scheme
design issues

Threads (3)

Long-running problems under this issue, told step by step. All threads.

  • Who vouches for it? 1991–2022 open 9 steps

    How can a reader tell whether a claim on the Web is true, and whose word to take for it?

  • Statements about statements 1999–2026 largely settled 7 steps

    How do you say who made a statement, when, and how sure they are, in a data model built from single statements?

  • Who controls data about me? 2002–2026 open 8 steps

    Can people decide what happens to data about them, and can machines read and respect those decisions?

Who answered it

This issue's row of the map: which traditions' works mainly answer it, and the earliest from each.

traditionworksearliest
Hypertext
Knowledge representation 1 Named Graphs, Provenance and Trust 2005
Databases
Machine learning
Web standards 8 PICS 1996
Search 1 The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine 1998
Social web
Open knowledge
Decentralized web 5 Pretty Good Privacy 1991
Libraries, archives and museums
Life sciences 2 Nanopublication 2010
Media 1 Content Credentials 2021
Geospatial 1 TraCSS 2024
Commerce and supply chain
Government and law
Finance
Industry and engineering

7 of 17 traditions have taken up this question as a work's main issue; a work in several traditions counts in each. Same counts as the full map.

Timeline

Works on this question, its main or a secondary one, each shown once in date order; filter by tradition to follow one community. Bars run from start to end where both are known; marks people, projects and organizations still active. 2 entries have no date and are not shown. Hover over or focus an entry to draw its links. Scroll sideways, or use the decades above.

Lineage (14)

Works whose main question this is, by type, oldest first.

Concepts 2

  • Web of trust 1992 concept principle

    Decentralised trust model in which people vouch for each other's keys instead of relying on a central authority; put forward by Phil Zimmermann for PGP in 1992.

  • Nanopublication 2010 concept technique

    Smallest unit of publishable scientific information: a single assertion written as RDF named graphs, bundled with its provenance and publication details so it can be cited and credited on its own.

Writings 3

Standards 6

  • PICS 1996 standard ★ seminal

    Platform for Internet Content Selection: W3C labels describing the content of web pages, made to let parents filter what children see; the label specification became a Recommendation on 31 October 1996. The RDF specification calls it a predecessor of RDF.

  • PROV 2013 standard ★ seminal

    W3C family of specifications for recording provenance: who made something, from what, and how. PROV-DM is the model, PROV-O its OWL ontology; both 2013.

  • Verifiable Credentials Data Model 2019 standard ★ seminal

    W3C data model for tamper-evident digital credentials, such as diplomas or licences, that can be checked cryptographically. Version 1.0 became a Recommendation in November 2019, and version 2.0, with its Data Integrity and cryptosuite specifications, in May 2025.

  • Content Credentials 2021 standard

    C2PA's format for cryptographically signed provenance records ('manifests') attached to images, video and other media, recording who made them and how they were edited; version 1.0 appeared in December 2021.

  • RDF Dataset Canonicalization 2024 standard

    W3C algorithm that gives any RDF dataset a single canonical form, so the same graph always hashes and signs the same way regardless of blank-node labels or order; a Recommendation since May 2024.

  • Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 2025 standard

    W3C specification for attaching cryptographic proofs to data such as verifiable credentials, using pluggable cryptosuites; a Recommendation since May 2025.

Projects 3

  • Pretty Good Privacy 1991 project ★ seminal

    Email and file encryption program released by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. Instead of a central certificate authority, users vouch for each other's keys, the model its 1992 manual named the web of trust.

  • Rebooting the Web of Trust 2015–2023 project

    Series of design workshops on decentralised identity and trust, started by Christopher Allen in 2015, whose collaboratively written papers fed into DIDs and Verifiable Credentials. The twelfth was held in Cologne in September 2023; the thirteenth, planned for October 2024, was cancelled for lack of support, and the papers now survive on GitHub.

  • TraCSS 2024 project

    The US Office of Space Commerce's civil service for space situational awareness, which began sending collision warnings to beta users through Space-Track in September 2024; it moves basic space-traffic data from the military to a civil agency.

Also bears on this (18)

Concepts 3

  • Named graph 2005 concept formalism

    Set of triples given its own URI, so that statements can be made about the set, which is how provenance and context are recorded; stored as quads.

  • Content addressing concept technique

    Naming data by a cryptographic hash of its content instead of by where it is stored. It is the main alternative to location-based URIs: the name says what a thing is, not where it lives.

  • Merkle DAG concept formalism

    Graph of data blocks in which each block links to others by their content hash, so any change produces new hashes all the way up; a generalisation of the Merkle tree.

Writings 6

Standards 5

  • Platform for Privacy Preferences 2002–2018 standard

    W3C Recommendation of 16 April 2002 for websites to state, in machine-readable form, what they do with visitors' data, so browsers could compare it with users' preferences. Few sites or browsers implemented it, and the W3C made it obsolete in 2018.

  • OpenID 2005 standard

    Protocol created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 2005 that lets people sign in to many sites with an identity they control, a URL rather than a site-specific account; later versions built on OAuth.

  • EPCIS 2007 standard

    GS1 standard, first ratified in April 2007, for sharing events in a product's journey through supply chains: what was seen, when, where and why. Version 2.0 (June 2022) added JSON-LD, a REST API and GS1 Digital Link URIs.

  • Legal Entity Identifier 2012 standard

    20-character identifier for every company, fund or government body that takes part in financial transactions, defined in ISO 17442. The G20 called for it in 2011 after the 2008 crisis showed that regulators could not tell who was exposed to whom; the first LEIs were issued in December 2012. Its records say who is who and who owns whom, and are published openly, including as RDF.

  • Data Privacy Vocabulary 2022 standard

    Vocabulary for describing how personal and other data is processed, why and on what legal basis, made by a W3C community group from 2018; version 1 was published in December 2022. It is designed to support legal requirements such as the GDPR.

Projects 4

  • UN Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space 1962 project

    The UN's register of space objects, kept since the early 1960s and, under the 1974 Registration Convention, filled by launching states with each object's designator, launch date and site, basic orbit and function. It depends on states reporting, so it lags and has gaps.

  • Space-Track 2004 project

    The US Space Force's website for orbital data on tracked objects, open to registered users since 2004; classified and military objects are withheld or obscured.

  • PRISM 2007 project

    US National Security Agency programme, begun in 2007, that collected internet communications from major US companies including Google, Facebook and Apple; disclosed in June 2013 from documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

  • General Data Protection Regulation 2016 project

    EU regulation on personal data, adopted on 14 April 2016 and applied from 25 May 2018, which gives people rights over data about them and binds anyone processing it; it set off machine-readable work on consent and data-processing records.

People and organizations (27)

Linked to works on this question; the number counts those works.

World Wide Web Consortium (5) · Jim Miller (2) · Paul Groth (2) · Phil Zimmermann (2) · Andrew Gibson · Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity · Christian Bizer · Christopher Allen · Dan Yamamoto · Dave Longley · Deborah McGuinness · Greg Bernstein · Jan Velterop · Jeremy J. Carroll · Larry Page · Luc Moreau · Manu Sporny · Paolo Missier · Pat Hayes · Patrick Stickler · Paul Resnick · Satya Sahoo · Sergey Brin · Ted Thibodeau Jr · Tim Krauskopf · Timothy Lebo · Win Treese