ICF Claim Catalog

The ICF Claim Catalog is developed and maintained by the ICF Schemas Working Group (see the full Working Group roster).

Claims are the fundamental unit of information on an Information Card. A claim might be as simple as a person's first name, email address, or birthdate. However claims can be used to transmit any type of information that a users, sites, and applications may wish to share. That is why claims extensibility is a key feature of Information Cards. To accommodate this, each claim on an Information Card is identified with a URI - the standard identifier for any resource on the Web. Anyone can create their own URIs for identifying claims.

While this design creates an open architecture that anyone can extend with new claims, it can also create interoperability problems if different Information Card providers use different URIs for the same claim (for example, two different URIs to identify the claim for an email address).

The purpose of the ICF Claim Catalog is to avoid this problem by creating a shared public dictionary of claim URIs and data type definitions that any Information Card provider can use.

If you are an Information Card provider and need standard claims, look here first! If you don't see the claims you need, please feel free to make a request directly of the ICF Schemas Working Group -- or consider joining ICF and this Working Group directly.