Exploring Agent Representation on ENS

[estmcmxci]

@Arnold

Having a schema gives a pretty strong indication on how the attributes should be processed. It’s the opposite of a guess.

Schemas are explicit about structure and silent on client behavior.

My point with separation of concerns is that there needs to be a baseline on distinguishing between behavioral contracts, in this case, ENSIPs, and how they are represented and validated at the data layer through schemas.

In other words: Schemas describe the shape of data and ENSIPs prescribe how clients must behave.

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@Arnold

A client can pluck the JSON schema and put into something like zod and actually validate the data.

We need more than data validation — we need security guarantees. Without prescriptive cryptographic verification (i.e. ENSIP-25), a zod-valid agent record can still be a spoofed manifest.

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@Arnold

JSON-LD requires @type before properties are interpretable.

@Arnold

RDF requires rdf:type (class membership) before predicates resolve

These are sufficient for classification and attribution, but not enforceability. Type is not a verification protocol. Take the following real-world example for instance: W3C Verifiable Credentials.

VC use JSON-LD’s @type and still required a separate normative specification for the behavioral layer (credential issuance, verification, revocation).

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@Arnold

In my view whether we need a classification layer before resolving attributes is not an open design question, and omitting the classification layer goes against conventional wisdom.

Indicating how attributes should be processed is orthogonal to whether or not they can be enforced. NMS works well for classification and structural validation — what a node is and what shape its data takes — but ENSIPs are still necessary to create a baseline for how clients must behave.