PTI Glossary
Canonical definitions for terms used across the Portable Trust Infrastructure (PTI) documentation. Where a term appears in the normative specification, the definition here is informative unless explicitly incorporated by reference.
Core infrastructure
Portable Trust Infrastructure (PTI)
An open architecture for generating, exchanging, resolving, and consuming trust intelligence across institutional boundaries. PTI separates trust production from trust consumption and binds outcomes to explicit trust contexts.
Trust Infrastructure
The collective services, APIs, schemas, and governance frameworks that implement portable trust. Trust Infrastructure encompasses registries, exchanges, intelligence engines, and consumer integrations.
Trust Fabric
The operational layer connecting trust producers: the trust graph: and trust consumers. The fabric enforces policy, routes events, and derives context-scoped outcomes.
Identity and subjects
Trust Subject
An individual or organization whose trust signals, contexts, and lookups are governed under PTI. Identified by pti_id in the trust registry. Also referred to as subject in API and governance text.
Trust Identity
A registry-managed identity record for a subject, keyed by pti_id, with lifecycle state, verification level, and optional partner references.
Trust Credential
A cryptographically verifiable claim, signed assertion, or verifiable credential presented as trust evidence, distinct from a derived context score.
pti_id
The portable subject identifier allocated by the Trust Registry. Format: pti_ prefix plus opaque suffix. MUST NOT embed raw personally identifiable information.
Trust Profile
The aggregate view of a subject's signals, context scores, relationships, and assertions across enabled contexts. Distinct from a point-in-time trust report.
Portable Trust Profile (PTP)
Product name for the printable trust report (usually PDF) that shows PTS: trust band, context detail, and a checkable authenticity credential for a subject. Short form: PTP. Distinct from the ongoing Trust Profile aggregate and from a subject-controlled Trust Passport.
PTP
Short name for Portable Trust Profile.
Trust Passport
A subject-controlled bundle of portable proofs, typically signed trust assertions and recent context summaries, intended for sharing with institutions.
Context and scoring
Trust Context
A registered life-area or lens scope (e.g., lending, risk_compliance) that isolates signals, scores, and lookup entitlements.
Context Score
A derived 0–100 outcome for a single context_id, accompanied by band, confidence, drivers, and coverage gaps.
Trust Score
An informal umbrella term for credibility outcomes. PTI implementations SHOULD prefer context scores over a single cross-context number unless an explicit aggregation policy is published.
PTS (Portable Trust Score)
The member-facing overall trust number (typically 0–1000). Short form: PTS. Distinct from a single context score and from PTI / PTI-ID (the platform and the subject id). When a cross-context headline is shown, publish how it was combined.
Trust Confidence
A 0.0–1.0 measure of certainty in a score, match, or assertion, distinct from the score magnitude itself.
Graph and relationships
Trust Graph
The persistent graph of subjects, producers, contexts, signals, evidence, and relationships used for traversal, scoring, and provenance.
Trust Relationship
A durable edge between subjects or between a subject and an institution (employment, tenancy, partnership, endorsement) that may unlock relationship-scoped signals.
Affiliation Confidence
A bounded trust metric (typically 0.0–1.0) on a subject↔organisation relationship. Combines org confirmation, evidence quality, and platform chronology (whether the member existed on the network before the organisation onboarded, or the reverse). Chronology is a confidence modifier, not proof of employment. Feeds the PTP; it is not a social graph, career timeline, or endorsement marketplace.
Trust Chain
An ordered sequence of attestations or endorsements linking a subject to trusted anchors (verifiers, institutions, community nodes).
Portable Trust Bridge (PTB)
Also called Trust Bridge: the path of people connecting two members so one can get an introduction to the other (including other possible routes). Shown in the member app as a map and step-by-step journey. Distinct from a Trust Chain (formal attestations toward trusted organisations) and from portable trust (proof carried to institutions). See the plain-language entry in the TumiTrust glossary.
Signals and evidence
Trust Signal
A normalized, context-bound representation of verified activity derived from a trust event: with polarity, weight, and provenance.
Trust Event
The canonical ingest unit, an immutable record of activity submitted by a trust producer with event_type, context_id, and pti_id.
Trust Evidence
Supporting artifacts (documents, registry matches, endorsements, badges) that substantiate signals and assertions.
Trust Assertion
A signed, context-scoped claim about a subject, verifiable independently of the intelligence engine's derived scores.
Trust Provenance
Metadata describing who attested data, when, through which channel, and under which verification level.
Roles and exchange
Trust Producer
An organization that ingests verifiable activity and emits trust events for subjects it serves.
Trust Consumer
An institution that requests trust lookups and applies context-scoped intelligence at decision time.
Trust Exchange
The routing and policy layer accepting events and assertions, enforcing entitlements, and triggering materialization.
Trust Registry
The authoritative directory for pti_id values, context and event catalogs, and tenant entitlements.
Trust Resolution
The process of mapping partner entity identifiers and identity hints to a pti_id with stated match confidence.
Trust Lookup
A decision-time request to retrieve context-scoped trust intelligence for a subject at an entitled tier.
Trust Verification
Confirmation that a report, assertion, or identity claim is authentic, unexpired, and issued under valid entitlements.
Trust Exchange (protocol)
See Trust Exchange above. In API nomenclature, also refers to the ingest and assertion publish service surface.
Intelligence and APIs
Trust Intelligence
Structured, context-scoped outcomes, scores, drivers, provenance, coverage gaps, produced for consumers. Not equivalent to a traditional credit bureau file.
Trust Intelligence Engine
The component that refreshes context scores and explainability from the trust graph according to policy tables.
Trust API
The collective Registry, Exchange, and Lookup HTTP (or equivalent) service surfaces defined by the PTI specification.
Trust Engine
Informal synonym for Trust Intelligence Engine in operator documentation.
Derived artifacts and mechanics
Trust Token
A short-lived, scoped credential authorizing a specific lookup or consent-gated operation.
Trust Credits
An implementation-specific metering unit for compute or lookup consumption. Billing semantics are deployment-specific and not normative in PTI v1.0.
Trust Index
An ordered registry of contexts, producers, or signals used for discovery and analytics, not a single consumer-facing score.
Trust Lens
A cross-cutting trust context derived from primary contexts (e.g., risk_compliance lens aggregating signals from multiple primaries).
Trust Router
A policy-aware component directing events, assertions, or lookup requests to the correct partition, region, or federation peer.
Trust Policy
Machine-readable rules governing entitlements, retention, consent, signal decay, and field visibility.
Governance and analytics
Trust Governance
The framework of consent, accountability, retention, dispute resolution, and audit obligations across producers, consumers, and registry operators.
Trust Analytics
Aggregated, privacy-preserving metrics on signal volume, lookup patterns, score distributions, and producer quality, distinct from individual trust reports.