Open Badges spec v1.1 Release
I’m excited to share with you all the work we’ve been devoting ourselves to in the Badge Alliance Standard Working Group over the past several months. We are releasing the latest Open Badges v1.1 specification today. Yay!!!!
Details here: https://openbadgespec.org
This work has been done in collaboration with the W3C Credential Community Group under the leadership of Nate Otto from Concentric Sky with the support and stewardship of Kerri Lemoie, Chris McAvoy, John Knight, myself, and the larger standards working group and open badges community - so truly a community driven effort with no shortage of contributors and folks who have guided and helped us along the way!
A couple things to note about this release:
This specification is fully backwards compatible with v1.0.
We have adapted the specification to use Linked Data/JSON-LD technology which is increasingly being adopted by the big players such as Google, Yahoo, Yandex and Microsoft. You can read more about that here. This only requires adding three new JSON-LD properties to new badges to make them fully understandable Linked Data: @context, id and type.
What are the benefits of JSON-LD?
This will enable all 1.1 Open Badges to be indexed and understood better by search engines and directories.
Key stakeholders in the ecosystem such as issuers, earners and badge consumers will benefit from well-understood, well-defined and context-driven metadata.
The biggest feature introduction is the extension specification. As many of you know, open badges metadata fields are clearly defined, and there has long been the ability to add additional data to badges but nothing was ever done with this additional data. Increasingly members in the community have been requesting the ability to add additional fields to satisfy the particular needs of their communities in a way that can be understood across different issuers. The extension specification enables just that. We think this has a couple advantages:
We can keep the open badges foundational metadata itself lean.
We can experiment with additional fields through the extension field first. If we see increasing use of a particular extension, say geolocation extension, we can start a discussion around the utility of bringing it into the foundational specification.
As many of you already know, Open Badges are comprised of 3 objects: Assertion, Badge Class and Issuer. Any of these 3 badge objects may be extended.
We think this is an exciting development for the Open Badges community.
We will be making sure to dedicate some time to this release during our next open badges community call on May 13! Come with your questions!
In the mean time, Nate Otto and Tim Cook have been putting together this FAQ.
Please reach out to us with any feedback, comments or questions. Thank you all for your ongoing support of this important work.
