Responsibility Infrastructure.
The architecture for responsibility that must remain intelligible, provable and usable across organisational and system boundaries.
Definition
Responsibility Infrastructure provides the architecture through which responsibility can be represented, evidenced, verified, recognised, resolved and relied upon across independent organisations and systems.
Its purpose is to preserve responsibility as it moves across boundaries, so that an independent party can determine what responsibility existed, who or what held it, under what authority, what occurred, what evidence supports the record and what standing applies at the point of reliance.
Responsibility Infrastructure Standard
The Responsibility Infrastructure Standard defines the broader normative requirements governing Responsibility Infrastructure. Each identified publication states its own status, scope, version and applicability.
Responsibility Infrastructure Standard overview →Responsibility Interoperability Standard and Protocol
The proposed public interoperability layer defines the minimum common semantics and exchange behaviour required for responsibility meaning to survive between independent parties and systems without requiring a common vendor stack.
Where expressly released, the public package may include schemas, reference code, validators, fixtures and conformance tests necessary for independent interoperability. Internal implementation details that are not part of the applicable public specification remain outside interoperability conformance.
Responsibility Interoperability Protocol →Normative scope
The Responsibility Infrastructure Standard and Responsibility Infrastructure Protocol remain distinct from the public interoperability layer. A conformance claim must identify the publication, version, role and scope to which the claim applies.
Functions
Responsibility records preserve what happened. Verification determines what the evidence supports. Recognition determines effect within the applicable recognition regime. Registry preserves and publishes standing. Resolution determines which standing applies to a particular request. Reliance occurs when an external party or system uses that standing within its own decision context.
Implementation neutrality
The public interoperability layer does not prescribe a vendor, universal software architecture, database, user interface or deployment model. Independent implementations may use different internal systems provided the applicable interoperability requirements are satisfied and responsibility meaning survives the boundary.
Application
Responsibility Infrastructure is domain-neutral. It can be applied wherever responsibility crosses organisational, institutional or system boundaries.