General-purpose Digital Ticket Framework

A digital ticket is a certificate that guarantees certain rights of the ticket owner. There are many applications for digital tickets but the ticket properties vary depending on the application. This variety makes the digital ticket processing system expensive, especially if dedicated systems must be developed for each application. This paper thus addresses issues on developing a common data schema and processing architecture for various types of digital tickets. This paper clarifies requirements for a general-purpose digital ticket and shows four features in contrast to digital cash: 1) parameterization of ticket properties on anonymity, transferability, and divisibility; 2) machine-understandability of ticket contents; 3) state-transitionality of ticket status; and 4) composability of multiple tickets. To achieve parameterization of ticket properties and machine-understandability, we propose a Resource Description Framework (RDF)-based ticket description method. Its metadata facility enables various ticket properties to be defined using multi-layered schemata. To achieve state-transitionality and composability, we propose describing a ticket using a set of signed descriptions linked with restriction-specified incomplete/complete links. Finally, this paper proposes a set of common ticket processing components.