Rights Layer Specification

Terminology

Status: Draft v0.1.0 — This section is normative.

This document defines the terms used throughout the Rights Layer Specification. The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this specification are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 and RFC 8174.

Rights Layer is a conceptual layer. All terms below are defined independently of any vendor, product, implementation, or technology.

A standard layer SHALL preserve extensibility while eliminating interpretive ambiguity in its core concepts. Accordingly, every term below has a single, unambiguous responsibility. Extension is possible through profiles and the extensions mechanism; reinterpretation of core terms is not.

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Core Terms

Subject

An identifiable entity that relates to a Right or to an Action. A Subject MAY be a natural person, a legal person, an organization, a public body, a system, a software agent, an AI, a robot, or any other identifiable entity that a legal or institutional system recognizes as capable of holding or exercising rights.

• Japanese: 主体
• The core specification MUST NOT assume human-specific attributes of a Subject. A Subject is identified by an identifier (see Data Model); Rights Layer does not prescribe any identifier scheme.

Object

The entity that a Right relates to. An Object MAY be tangible (land, a building, a vehicle) or intangible (a work, a claim, a share, a service, a category of activity).

• Japanese: 客体
• An Object is optional: some Rights (e.g., a qualification to practice medicine) relate to a category of activity rather than a specific object. In such cases the Object describes that category.

Right

The existence of a legally or institutionally recognized entitlement held by a Subject, optionally in relation to an Object, grounded in one or more Sources.

• Japanese: 権利
• A Right is ultimately treated as existing or not existing. Rights Layer deliberately does not classify Rights into industry-specific taxonomies; variety is expressed through Actions, not through subtypes of Right.

Source

The basis on which a Right exists. Examples: statute, contract, registration, court judgment, administrative act, inheritance, grant of qualification, ordinance.

• Japanese: 根拠
• Rights Layer does not model the content of a Source. It defines a structure for referencing a Source so that any party can locate and verify the basis of a Right in the system of record that governs it.

Action

An act performed on the basis of a Right. A Right has one or more Actions.

• Japanese: 行使事項
• Examples: use, sell, lease, build (land); drive (driving licence); examine, operate (medical practice); claim-benefit (insurance); vote (share).
• Variety across domains lives here: kinds exist at the level of Actions, not at the level of Rights.
• The core specification fixes only this meaning. It does not fix Action vocabularies or granularity: a profile MAY define operate, operateVehicle, operateHeavyVehicle, or providePassengerTransport as it sees fit. Choosing granularity is the responsibility of each institution or profile.

Eligibility

Exactly one requirement that must be satisfied for a specific Action to be exercised. An Action has zero or more Eligibilities (0..n); when an Action requires several requirements, each is expressed as its own independent Eligibility.

• Japanese: 適格要件
• An Eligibility MUST represent a single requirement. It is not: a set of conditions, a condition group, an evaluation result, a state, an evaluation process, evaluation logic, a rule engine, a workflow, or an institutional legal effect.
• Eligibility belongs to an Action, not to the Right as a whole, and not to the Subject as a permanent status.
• How a requirement is evaluated — by whom, with what data, by what method — is outside Rights Layer (see Eligibility Response).

Eligibility Response

A single Boolean answer, presented from outside Rights Layer, stating whether one specific Eligibility is satisfied.

• Japanese: 適格要件応答
• The relationship is strictly one-to-one: one Eligibility has at most one valid Eligibility Response, and one Eligibility Response corresponds to exactly one Eligibility. A Response MUST NOT be shared across Eligibilities.
• The value is Boolean:
  • true — the corresponding Eligibility is satisfied.
  • false — the corresponding Eligibility is not satisfied.
• There is no third value. unknown, pending, indeterminate, notEvaluated, and similar intermediate values MUST NOT be introduced into the core. If no Response has been presented, the Eligibility is simply unanswered: the Response does not exist. Communication failures, pending review, timeouts, and evaluation errors are states of the institution or implementation, never values of a Response.
• Authenticity and integrity: an Eligibility Response SHALL be verifiably attributable to its legitimate issuer (authenticity) and SHALL provide a means to establish that it has not been altered after issuance (integrity). The mechanism (digital signature, PKI, verifiable credential, authenticated channel, institutional attestation, or any other verifiable method) is outside the scope of this specification.
• The issuer of a Response MUST be identifiable or referenceable. The core specification does not restrict what kind of entity an issuer is (a person, a legal person, a public body, an industry body, a system, an AI, a certification service, or any other identifiable entity).
• How the issuer evaluated the requirement (human review, institutional examination, database lookup, external query, certificate checking, signature verification, AI evaluation, legal analysis, or anything else) is outside Rights Layer. Rights Layer standardizes only the meaning of the Boolean value and its one-to-one binding to an Eligibility.

Evidence

Information referenced in support of an Eligibility Response — auxiliary material behind the answer, or material supporting the existence of a Right or Source.

• Japanese: 証拠
• Evidence MAY be held directly or referenced as external information.
• Evidence is not the Response. An Eligibility Response is the Boolean answer; Evidence is optional supporting reference material.

Evidence Source

A system, registry, authority, or record from which Evidence is obtained. Examples: a land registry, a licensing register, a corporate shareholder register, an insurance policy administration system.

• Japanese: 証拠源
• Rights Layer references Evidence Sources; it never replaces them. Each Evidence Source remains the system of record for its own domain.

Authority

An entity empowered to grant, attest, suspend, or revoke Rights, or to participate in Sources, Eligibilities, Responses, Decisions, or Evidence. Examples: a legislature, a court, a government agency, a registrar, a contracting party with granting power.

• Japanese: 権限主体
• A right structure MAY involve any number of Authorities. The core specification does not fix how many Authorities an institution has or how they are organized.

Decision

The judgment that all Eligibilities associated with an Action are satisfied. A Decision for an Action SHALL be established only when every Eligibility associated with that Action has exactly one verifiable Eligibility Response and every such Response is true.

• Japanese: 判定
• A Decision is not: a response to an individual Eligibility (that is the Eligibility Response), an institutional legal effect, the performance of the Action, the Exercise itself, an administrative disposition, the formation of a contract, the completion of a workflow, an access-control grant in a system, or a final disposition in an external institution.
• If any Response is false, or any Eligibility is unanswered, the Decision is not established. The rule is conjunctive (AND) and only conjunctive: alternative conditions, partial satisfaction, weighting, exceptions, and priorities are expressed in how Eligibilities are defined or in the external institution — never inside the core model.
• How an institution or system uses an established Decision is outside Rights Layer.

Exercise

The fact that an Action was actually performed on the basis of a Right, after the Decision for that Action was established.

• Japanese: 行使
• Establishment of a Decision and actual performance are distinct facts: a Decision MAY be established without the Action ever being performed.
• An Exercise does not automatically carry any additional institutional effect. Institutional effect, start/end processing, suspension, cancellation, audit, billing, and performance of obligations are the responsibility of the external institution or implementation.

Exercise Event

An Event that records a fact about an Exercise: requested, started, ended.

• Japanese: 行使イベント

Event

A recorded fact relevant to a Right or its exercise. Events are append-only and explain the present as history.

• Japanese: イベント
• Core event types: right granted, right revoked, source changed, exercise requested, eligibility response issued, decision established, exercise started, exercise ended.
• An Event carries no institution-specific state-transition logic. How state is derived from Events, and which institutional effect attaches to which Event, is the responsibility of the institution or implementation.

Proof Reference

A reference to material that allows a party to verify a piece of Evidence, an Eligibility Response, or an Event, in whatever manner the governing system provides.

• Japanese: 証明参照
• Rights Layer is neutral as to the proof mechanism: a Proof Reference MAY point to a paper record locator, a signed document, a registry lookup, or any other mechanism. No specific cryptographic or ledger technology is assumed or required.

Agreement Reference

A reference to an agreement (contract, terms, treaty, policy) that functions as a Source or that constrains an Action.

• Japanese: 合意参照

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Terms Deliberately Absent from the Core

• Context is not a core concept. A catch-all container for time, place, organization, purpose, session, environment, target state, or other evaluation material would be interpreted differently by every implementer and would blur authenticity and safety boundaries. Gathering evaluation material, obtaining environmental information, evaluation logic, and integration with external systems are all responsibilities outside Rights Layer. Such information MAY appear in profiles via extensions, but the core model contains no Context entity.
• State (as a general-purpose intermediate concept), Eligibility State, Decision Input, and Evaluation Context are not used. The only externally presented value in the core model is the Boolean Eligibility Response.
• Trust is not used in core concepts or normative requirements, because it implies a subjective judgment of who trusts whom. The normative requirements use authenticity and integrity.

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Term Relationships (summary)

Term	Belongs to / relates to	Cardinality
Right	Subject (holder), Object (optional), Source (1..*)	—
Action	Right	1..* per Right
Eligibility	Action	0..* per Action; each is exactly one requirement
Eligibility Response	Eligibility	1:1 — at most one valid Response per Eligibility; each Response answers exactly one Eligibility
Evidence	referenced by a Response (optional), or supporting a Right/Source	0..*
Decision	one Action; established only when all its Eligibilities have a verifiable true Response	—
Exercise	Action performed after its Decision was established	—
Event	Right, Source, Response, Decision, or Exercise	append-only

See Conceptual Model for the full model and diagrams, and Data Model for the normative requirements NR-1 to NR-15.

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