For organizations

Recognize the same objects. Keep your own authority.

Institutions that hold information about land, living systems, facilities, materials, and organizations can take part in one identity system without giving up custody of their records or their responsibility for them — and without adopting anyone else’s software.

Who benefits

What stays with you, and what shared identity adds

Government agencies and registries

Land records, business registers, environmental and food-safety regulators

What stays with you

Official records, legal definitions, and the authority to register and amend them.

What shared identity adds

Other systems can reference registered objects exactly, reducing re-keying and mismatched records — without the register being copied.

Research institutions and repositories

Universities, laboratories, field stations, data repositories

What stays with you

Observations, methods, datasets, and the scientific responsibility for them.

What shared identity adds

Findings attach to the specific parcels, organisms, facilities, and samples they describe, and remain connected as they are reused.

Industry and supply networks

Producers, processors, cooperatives, buyers, certifiers, logistics providers

What stays with you

Commercial records, contracts, and control over what is shared and with whom.

What shared identity adds

Partners refer to the same farms, facilities, lots, and shipments without merging databases or adopting each other’s codes.

Finance and insurance

Lenders, insurers, impact and transition finance

What stays with you

Underwriting, credit decisions, and the confidentiality of both.

What shared identity adds

Confidence that the parcel, facility, or organization being financed is the one that others observe and report on.

Software and AI providers

Farm and factory software, platforms, digital agents

What stays with you

Their products, data models, and customer relationships.

What shared identity adds

A neutral identity contract for interoperability, so integrations do not depend on fragile name and address matching.

How participation is designed

Participation without centralization

The RSM ID specification describes how independently governed organizations take part. In outline, an organization would participate in five ways. None of these processes is open yet.

  1. Register namespace authority

    Become, or be delegated by, a registered authority able to issue identities and names in a namespace. Delegation is auditable and revocable.
  2. Operate or join a Semantic Space

    Run a conforming space — on Locus or any compatible engine — or have one hosted. The space gets its own RID and RSN.
  3. Register your resources

    Issue an RID and an RRN for each resource you are responsible for. Keep its content in your own space, under your own policies.
  4. Relate existing identifiers

    Associate your local codes, and external identifiers such as DOIs, with RIDs — recording the evidence for each. Nothing is renamed.
  5. Reference others by RID

    Point to resources described by other institutions through their RIDs, so relationships survive their redesigns and yours.

Namespaces

Authority, namespaces, and Semantic Spaces

Every RID begins with a registered prefix, an issuance namespace that is globally unique and never reused. Within it, registered namespace authorities issue identities and names; the authority segment of an RRN records which one.

A person, cooperative, company, research institution, or community may administer one or more Semantic Spaces. Authority can be delegated without transferring ownership of the resources described — delegation and ownership are separate relationships. Participation does not require 451 applications or any single hosting provider.

Example

A regional cooperative could administer its own space, rrn:451:willowcreek:us-ca:willowcreek:space/root, and issue names in it — without owning the farms it describes. (Fictional.)

In the specification

Doc 08 §3.2 · Doc 08 §4.6 · Doc 08 §10.6

Participation status

  • RID, RRN, RSN, identity records, and the resolution protocolDefined by specification
  • Identity Registry and the 451 prefixProposed reference architecture
  • Public resolver at rmsid.orgProposed reference architecture
  • Resolver on this websiteDemonstrated on this site
  • Namespace and identity registration for organizationsNot available yet

The 451 prefix is proposed for the controlled 451 federation and must be registered before production use (Doc 08 §3.2).

What you can do today

Read the RSM ID specification against the resources your systems already manage, keep a field ready for a canonical RID beside your own identifiers, and see how resolution is presented using the demonstration resolver. When registration and participation processes exist, they will be described on this site.

No organization is listed as a participant on this site because no participation programme exists yet. The spaces named in the specification — RSM, Wellzai, and Musewoods — are proposed, not operating.