Please note that this specification is suitable for pre-production pilot implementations.
How to Register a Community Activation Programme
The registered thing is the community. An extension, if the community builds one, sits beneath it. So this is a process for getting a community admitted, not for getting a schema listed.
Who should register
A Community Activation Programme is an organised community activating UNTP in a sector, a geography, or both. Eligible operators are member associations that represent many constituent organisations: industry associations, standards bodies, intergovernmental bodies, consortia, research centres and government agencies.
A single company is not an eligible operator. If your need is company-specific, add your properties under Product.characteristics, or in a namespace you publish yourself, as described in Extension Vocabularies — no registration required.
If you have built something substantive and are not a community, the route is to contribute it to one. Where no suitable community exists to receive it, it is a Secretariat judgement whether the UN should seek nominations to establish one. Good work is not turned away for want of a sponsor, but it does need an owner that will stand behind it.
Admission criteria
Checked once, at initial registration, against a declaration you publish. They are not re-checked on every update.
- Operated by a representative member association, not a single corporate. A CAP speaks for a sector.
- Evidence of an existing community — named members, a convening history, published governance.
- Open participation on non-discriminatory terms for relevant actors in your declared scope. Without this, incumbents can define a sector standard that excludes competitors, which damages UNTP more than having no extension in that sector.
- A commitment to implement, not only to specify.
- A commitment to the extensions methodology and to conformity testing, including that any extension stays additive and does not redefine core terms.
- Open licensing. Anything others are expected to implement is free to implement, under a licence appropriate to the artefact.
- A public specification with stable, resolvable URIs, if you build an extension.
- A named accountable contact and a durable contact point.
- A declared scope, sector and geography, with evidence that you have engaged with any existing CAP whose scope overlaps yours.
Commitments that continue after admission, and whose breach can lead to removal: version management, published and non-discriminatory fees where you charge for assessment or membership, participation in UNTP governance, and a wind-down commitment that your artefacts remain resolvable or are handed to UNECE if the community ceases.
What registration does and does not mean
Registration says your community met the criteria on the date it was admitted. It does not say your extension passed conformance testing, which is a separate verdict recorded against each extension version. A forum listing says less again: only that you convene there.
What you will get
- An entry at
https://registers.uncefact.org/untp/cap/{your-slug}, which does not change if you join or leave a forum. - A conformance verdict against each extension version you submit.
- Listing in the sector and regional forums you convene at, with the four technical tables on your CAP page generated from your register entry rather than maintained separately.
- Discoverability for software vendors, scheme owners and other communities deciding what to support.
Prerequisites
| Item | Notes |
|---|---|
| A web domain you control | For did:web and for hosting your profile and any artefacts. |
| A published declaration against the criteria above | A page on your own site. The URL is recorded against your entry. |
| A named representative who can liaise with UNECE | For onboarding and any future dispute. |
| A defined scope | Sector, geography, or both. |
You do not need an extension. A community may activate the core specification without building one. You also do not need a complete vocabulary on day one, or conformant software among your members.
Step by step
1 — Get in touch with UNECE
Tell us the community, the operating organisation, and the scope. The secretariat confirms eligibility before you invest in the rest.
2 — Publish your declaration
A page on your own site stating how you meet each criterion. This is what the secretariat decides on, and the URL is recorded in your entry so that what was claimed stays auditable.
3 — Publish your DID
A did:web at a domain you control. This is your acting identity, used to sign the conformance credentials you later issue about software. It is distinct from the register identifier, which UNECE mints and which survives you changing anything else.
4 — Publish your CAP profile
A machine-readable profile at a stable URL, which the registrar crawls after admission. It declares the identifier schemes, conformity schemes and software you build on. This is required at admission, because without it your entry is frozen at its registration date.
Registration pushes; maintenance pulls. You submit once, and after that the registrar comes to you. Nothing obliges you to maintain the UN-side copy of anything.
5 — Build your extension, if you need one
Follow Extension Vocabularies. An extension is additive: it may add properties in its own namespace, and may not change or remove core ones. Publish a schema and a JSON-LD context at stable URIs, and at least one sample credential per credential type.
6 — Submit the extension version for conformance testing
An extension releases, and is tested, as a whole. Submit a version and UNECE runs the suite described in the governance page: your samples validate against both your schema and the core schema, safe-mode expansion loses nothing, no protected term is redefined, and every IRI you mint resolves.
Most failures are one of two things. A property added to an open class without a namespace passes schema validation and then vanishes on expansion, which is why safe mode is in the suite. Or a context redefines a core term, which JSON-LD rejects outright.
7 — Assert conformance of software, as you adopt it
You test software against your extension, because you know its requirements and UNECE does not. You issue the conformance credential and host it; the register links to it. Cite the software's entry in the software implementers register, which is where core conformance is recorded, so the order is visible: core first, then yours.
How your CAP page and forum listings work
Your community's page on a forum site is part yours and part generated.
Yours, maintained in the forum repository: the narrative, images, your named contact, governance prose, pilot case studies and channel links. Nothing in this register overwrites that.
Generated from your register entry at each forum build: the credential extensions table, the identifier schemes table, the conformity schemes table and the software systems table. Change your entry and the change reaches every forum you appear on at its next deploy.
You may convene at several forums or none, and forum membership changes nothing else about your entry. Some communities organise entirely outside the forum process.
A thing you build on does not have to be registered to appear in those tables. Many are not: a national business register belongs on GRID rather than in a UNTP register, and plenty of schemes are simply named until somebody registers them. Each link carries both how far you have got with adopting it and where it stands in relation to a UNTP register, because those are different facts.
Maintaining your registration
A new extension version is submitted the same way as the first, and tested as a whole. The previous version's verdict stays on the record.
Changes to what you build on reach the register through your profile on the next crawl. You do not file anything.
Rotating keys is a change to your DID document. Conformance credentials you issued under the old key stay verifiable through your DID history.
Winding down moves your entry to dormant rather than deleting it, because credentials issued under your extension stay in circulation. Your wind-down commitment is what keeps the artefacts resolvable.
Disputes
If you disagree with a conformance observation, file a dispute with UNECE. Validation is re-run independently; if your dispute is upheld, the observation is amended, the original retained and marked retracted, and the new one linked back to it. Disputes about how a rule should be read, rather than about the data, go through change control.
Where to get help
File an issue on the UNTP specification repository, or contact UNECE through the usual channels. If your question is about whether your community is eligible, ask before writing the declaration.