Specification / Entity Kinds
Entity kinds describe identity documents, not automatic trust. The taxonomy below preserves the owned-document profile. Current agent verification also supports explicitly approved self roots and signed descendants, with no universal human-parent requirement.
A human-root keyholder in the owned-document profile. Current agent verification also accepts explicitly authorized self roots. A kind or signed ancestry alone proves neither personhood nor application permission.
did:oas:<ns>:hmr:<id>Root entity. Exempt from the lineage requirement.
A collective owned-root profile. Actual threshold control requires the configured key-share ceremony and custody; an MHR kind or local document does not establish a quorum.
did:oas:<ns>:mhr:<id>Root entity. Exempt from the lineage requirement.
A stable corporate identity governed by a rotating MHR, providing organizational continuity across governance transitions. Added as the twelfth kind in spec v1.1.0.
did:oas:<ns>:enr:<id>Root entity. Verifiers additionally check its governing MHR.
A group of agents, tools, and workflows operating as a coherent unit, with its own identity distinct from any single member.
did:oas:<ns>:ao:<id>Owned-document profile: signed lineage to the configured trusted root. The entity kind alone establishes no authority.
An autonomous software entity capable of independent decision-making and action. The primary operational kind: it performs tasks, invokes tools, and collaborates with other agents.
did:oas:<ns>:agent:<id>Owned profiles carry signed ancestry. The current verifier also accepts approved agent self roots with no parent chain.
An instance identity under the provider's exact binding policy. A registered DID and a native execution UUID are distinct; neither can be inferred from the other.
did:oas:<ns>:agent:instance:<id>A delegated identity carries each signed parent link. The provider determines its actual identity and current root policy.
A capability that agents invoke to interact with external systems or perform computations. Typed identity makes every invocation attributable.
did:oas:<ns>:tool:<id>Owned-document profile: signed lineage to the configured trusted root. The entity kind alone establishes no authority.
A composable unit of agent behavior — a reusable capability package that can be attached to agents and governed independently.
did:oas:<ns>:skill:<id>Owned-document profile: signed lineage to the configured trusted root. The entity kind alone establishes no authority.
A defined process involving one or more agents executing a sequence of steps. Gives multi-agent orchestration its own verifiable identity.
did:oas:<ns>:workflow:<id>Owned-document profile: signed lineage to the configured trusted root. The entity kind alone establishes no authority.
A machine learning model with verified provenance. Identity-bound models make it possible to prove which model acted and where it came from.
did:oas:<ns>:model:<id>Owned-document profile: signed lineage to the configured trusted root. The entity kind alone establishes no authority.
A data collection with verified provenance and lineage. Datasets carry the same accountability chain as the agents and models that consume them.
did:oas:<ns>:dataset:<id>Owned-document profile: signed lineage to the configured trusted root. The entity kind alone establishes no authority.
An infrastructure service — compute, storage, networking — with verified identity, so even the substrate agents run on is attributable.
did:oas:<ns>:service:<id>Owned-document profile: signed lineage to the configured trusted root. The entity kind alone establishes no authority.
Lineage in practice
The multi-generation example from the specification. Verifying the scraper at generation 3 means walking four lineage proofs back to Alice — from bundled evidence via typed authorizing verification.
In this owned-document profile, humanRootChain terminates at its configured owner root. Current approved agent self roots use a separate explicit policy; a loop never supplies valid ancestry.
In this humanRootChain profile, generation is the path length minus one. It describes ancestry distance, not an automatic permission or trust score.
The humanRootChain representation describes owned OAS lineage. Independent agent roots in the current SDK use explicit receiver trust; do not force them into this owner-chain representation.