World Skills Protocol (WSP)

The World Skills Protocol defines how professional truth is produced and verified. Authorized Issuers produce Evidence — immutable, verifiable facts — while Opus X computes Trust from those facts and holds the professional's identity on their behalf. Two principles govern it: Evidence Is Produced. Trust Is Verified. and An Issuer owns the learning journey; Opus X owns the professional identity.

Canonical Definition

The World Skills Protocol is a protocol that defines how authorized Issuers produce immutable, independently verifiable professional facts (Evidence), how those facts are bound to a professional identity owned by the professional, and how trust is deterministically computed and verified from accumulated facts — under a strict separation between production of evidence and verification of trust.

Key Facts

  • —WSP is designed to make professional truth portable across a multi-Issuer ecosystem, to make verification reproducible by any third party without the Issuer, to make trust recomputable rather than frozen, and to keep identity under the professional's control.
  • —The central tension is between autonomy of Issuers and coherence of identity: many independent Issuers must be able to attest freely, yet a single coherent professional identity must emerge.
  • —WSP resolves this by letting Issuers own the learning journey (they attest whatever they legitimately observe) while Opus X owns the professional identity (it alone binds facts into one identity and computes trust).
  • —A second tension — richness versus verifiability — is resolved in favor of verifiability: the protocol standardizes only what is needed to reproduce a verification.

Why It Exists

Credentials today fail in three ways: they are custodial (a certificate is only as trustworthy as the reachable survival of its issuer), static (they cannot be recomputed when standards change), and conflated (they mix the observation of a skill with a judgment about it). WSP exists to resolve all three at the protocol level rather than per product. By making the fact (Evidence) immutable and issuer-independent, credentials survive their issuers. By making trust a computation over facts, meaning can be recomputed when a Framework is reinterpreted. By separating production from verification, observation is never entangled with judgment. Without a protocol enforcing these separations, every implementer would re-conflate them, and portability across issuers would be impossible.

How It Works

WSP is composed of a fact layer and a trust layer, connected through identity. In the fact layer, an Issuer produces Evidence referencing a Framework coordinate. In identity, Opus X binds accepted Evidence to a professional identity (Opus ID) surfaced as a Professional Passport. In the trust layer, Trust is computed deterministically from the bound Evidence and exposed as Trust Status and Verification Responses.

WSP is not composed of course content, presentation layers, scoring opinions, or issuer branding. Those live outside the protocol. The relations are directional and non-circular: Issuer → produces → Evidence → bound to → Identity → consumed by → Trust → exposed via → Verification. No relation permits an accepted fact to be mutated.

Actors

WSP contains and governs: Evidence (OCR-110), Immutable Fact (OCR-114), Framework (OCR-115) and Framework Registry (OCR-119), Trust (OCR-105) and Trust Status (OCR-106), Verification (OCR-107) with its Request/Response (OCR-108/109), Professional Passport (OCR-101), Professional Identity (OCR-102), Professional (OCR-103), Opus ID (OCR-104), Issuer (OCR-120) and Certified Issuer (OCR-121), Organization (OCR-122), Identity (OCR-125). Every concept OCR in the 100-series is part_of WSP.

Lifecycle

  1. 01An Issuer becomes a Certified Issuer under governance.
  2. 02Opus X publishes a Framework the Issuer references.
  3. 03The Issuer observes a demonstration and produces Evidence.
  4. 04Opus X verifies integrity and authorization and journals the fact.
  5. 05The fact is bound to the professional's identity (Passport update).
  6. 06Trust is computed from accumulated facts.
  7. 07Any third party verifies trust independently.
  8. 08Frameworks evolve; trust is recomputed; facts are preserved.

Examples

  • ·A trading academy certifies as an Issuer, references the wtr Framework, and emits Evidence; Opus X verifies and binds it; a prospective employer verifies the professional's trust independently, months later, without contacting the academy.
  • ·A university's Evidence remains verifiable after the university reorganizes, because the fact is issuer-independent.
  • ·A Framework revision changes how a competency is interpreted; every affected professional's trust is recomputed from unchanged Evidence.

Counter Examples

  • ×A platform that stores a "trust score" an issuer typed in — that asserts trust instead of computing it, violating WSP.
  • ×A credential that stops verifying when the issuer's servers go offline — that is custodial, the failure WSP eliminates.
  • ×An issuer editing a past attestation to "fix" it — WSP forbids mutation; corrections supersede.
  • ×Opus X authoring a fact — Opus X verifies and computes; it never produces Evidence.

Distinctions

WSP is often mistaken for a credential format; it is a protocol with a strict separation of powers, of which credentials are a downstream expression. It is mistaken for a scoring system; trust is computed from facts, never scored by an issuer. It is assumed Opus X issues credentials; Opus X verifies and computes — Issuers produce Evidence. It is assumed facts can be corrected in place; they are append-only.

FAQ

What is WSP?
A protocol for producing, preserving, and verifying professional truth.
What are the two founding principles?
Evidence Is Produced. Trust Is Verified. and An Issuer owns the learning journey; Opus X owns the professional identity.
Who produces facts?
Certified Issuers.
Who computes trust?
Opus X.
Who owns identity?
The professional.
Can Opus X issue Evidence?
No. Opus X verifies and computes.
Are credentials part of WSP?
They are downstream expressions of Evidence, not the protocol itself.
Does WSP rank people?
No.
What makes verification work without the issuer?
Integrity plus provenance make Evidence independently verifiable.
What happens when a Framework changes?
Trust is recomputed; facts are unchanged.
Is the fact store mutable?
No. It is append-only.
How are errors handled?
By supersession; the original is preserved.
How are withdrawals handled?
By revocation; the original is preserved.
What is Opus ID?
The identifier of the professional identity (OCR-104).
What is a Professional Passport?
The professional-facing surface of the identity (OCR-101).
How is trust different from Evidence?
Evidence is a produced fact; trust is a computed function of facts.
Can an AI participate?
It may read and reason, never fabricate facts.
Is WSP a company or a protocol?
A protocol; Opus X governs it.
What prior art does WSP relate to?
Verifiable Credentials, DID Core, Open Badges — related, not equivalent.
Where is the canonical definition of each concept?
In its OCR within this registry.
What layer does a Trust Status belong to?
The trust layer (OCR-106).
Can an Issuer be suspended?
Yes; suspended Issuers cannot emit accepted Evidence.

Related Entities

Normative Sources

OCR-101 Professional Passport · OCR-102 Professional Identity · OCR-103 Professional · OCR-104 Opus ID · OCR-105 Trust · OCR-106 Trust Status · OCR-107 Verification · OCR-110 Evidence · OCR-114 Immutable Fact · OCR-115 Framework · OCR-119 Framework Registry · OCR-120 Issuer · OCR-121 Certified Issuer · OCR-125 Identity.

View the World Skills Protocol Registry Entry