The issuing authority can, once again, be a person, business, institution, or any other kind of agent.
acrt
This document specifies a vocabulary for asserting the existence of official endorsements or certifications of <em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:acrt="http://privatealpha.com/ontology/certification/1#" xmlns:bibo="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#" xmlns:vann="http://purl.org/vocab/vann/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#">agents, such as people and organizations.
The purpose of this vocabulary is record-keeping and exchange, and likewise is its application context. The actual vetting mechanisms of the certifications in question are out of scope.
An Agent Certification Ontology
Note that this assertion says only in <em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:acrt="http://privatealpha.com/ontology/certification/1#" xmlns:bibo="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#" xmlns:vann="http://purl.org/vocab/vann/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#">informal terms what the certification is, and what it allows me to do. This vocabulary is intended neither to describe the privileges granted by the certification, nor to describe the artifact that embodies the certification. It simply connects the subject of the certification to the issuing authority and their official serial number of the account.
The issuance of a government-regulated privilege, e.g. driver's license
An officially-recognized trade qualification, e.g. a welding ticket
An errors and omissions insurance policy
The issuance of an academic degree to a particular person
A pet license, where the principal is an animal
The notarization of an affadavit
An award (e.g. 2014 Nobel Prize in physics)
A mandatory professional status, e.g. bar association membership
A private certification of achievement, e.g. CISSP
The range of this term is left open, but should probably reference something abstract like a skos:Concept, an org:Role (itself a subclass of skos:Concept), or a skill, such as modeled by the Cognitive Characteristics Ontology.
Dorian Taylor
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) RDF vocabulary, described using W3C RDF Schema and the Web Ontology Language.
The range of this term is left open, but should probably reference a document. It could even point to an actual cryptographic certificate.
The principal of the certification can be any agent, like a person, company, animal, AI, whatever.
A person known by this person (indicating some level of reciprocated interaction between the parties).
This property specifies who (or what) is doing the certifying.
authority
The birthday of this Agent, represented in mm-dd string form, eg. '12-31'.
This property asserts that its subject is somehow proof of a given certification.
proves
The underlying or 'focal' entity associated with some SKOS-described concept.
A phone, specified using fully qualified tel: URI scheme (refs: http://www.w3.org/Addressing/schemes.html#tel).
Indicates a homepage of the service provide for this online account.
A document that this thing is the primary topic of.
A thing depicted in this representation.
A project (a collective endeavour of some kind).
Indicates an account held by this agent.
Indicates the class of individuals that are a member of a Group
A checksum for the DNA of some thing. Joke.
The gender of this Agent (typically but not necessarily 'male' or 'female').
The sha1sum of the URI of an Internet mailbox associated with exactly one owner, the first owner of the mailbox.
An image that can be used to represent some thing (ie. those depictions which are particularly representative of something, eg. one's photo on a homepage).
An organization funding a project or person.
A page about a topic of interest to this person.
Certification
This class represents the abstract notion of certification, of an agent, by another agent, that the first agent possesses some property or set of properties implied by the certification, potentially within some spatiotemporal scope, and which may or may not be designated by some identifier.
A string expressing what the user is happy for the general public (normally) to know about their current activity.
A work info homepage of some person; a page about their work for some organization.
A personal mailbox, ie. an Internet mailbox associated with exactly one owner, the first owner of this mailbox. This is a 'static inverse functional property', in that there is (across time and change) at most one individual that ever has any particular value for foaf:mbox.
This property specifies what achievement, skill, or fact is being certified.
qualification
A homepage of a school attended by the person.
This property points to some proof of the certification, like a scan of an official document or a page on the issuing authority's website that corroborates the certification.
proof
This property specifies that its subject, an agent, has issued a certification.
certifies
A project this person has previously worked on.
Indicates the name (identifier) associated with this online account.
A tipjar document for this agent, describing means for payment and reward.
An agent (eg. person, group, software or physical artifact).
A Myers Briggs (MBTI) personality classification.
The primary topic of some page or document.
A workplace homepage of some person; the homepage of an organization they work for.
A weblog of some thing (whether person, group, company etc.).
This property specifies that an agent possesses a given certification.
has-certification
A short informal nickname characterising an agent (includes login identifiers, IRC and other chat nicknames).
A foaf:LabelProperty is any RDF property with texual values that serve as labels.
This property specifies who or what agent is being certified.
principal
A location that something is based near, for some broadly human notion of near.
Aplan comment, in the tradition of finger and '.plan' files.
A textual geekcode for this person, see http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html
A link to the publications of this person.