Decentralized Identifier
A URI that resolves to a document containing public keys, authentication methods and service endpoints, controlled by its subject rather than issued by a central registry, and designed to be verifiable and persistent across the platforms the subject uses.
Why it matters
The most mature published answer to the narrow part of agent identity: giving a non-human actor a durable, cryptographically verifiable identifier that survives the platform it was created on. It answers who, and only who. An identifier that carries no authority is still the prerequisite for granting any — you cannot issue a permission to something you cannot name.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Decentralized Identifier. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
A DID is a technical identifier. Agent identity is the broader property that includes a recorded authority grant and an attributable action history. The DID is one component.
The DID says who. The grant says what they may commit. Conflating them is the same category error as reading a tool manifest as a permission.
A service account is issued by a platform and dies with it. A DID is controlled by its subject and is portable.
Relationships
Typed edges into the rest of the ontology. These are what make the canon traversable rather than merely readable.
| Verb | Target | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
requiredBy | Agent Identity | Inverse of requires. The subject imposes the object as a precondition. |
addresses | Identity | The subject speaks to the object as a question or concern. |
dependsOn | W3C DIDs | The subject cannot function correctly without the object. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00023 |
| Status | Canonical industry term |
| Adoption | Draft standard |
| Domain · Layer | Identity & discovery · Governance |
| Origin | W3C Recommendation (DID Core). Adopted by several proposed agent networking protocols as the identity primitive. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
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