Registers: Systems of Record with Guaranteed Integrity

A register is a single authoritative source of truth for structured data within a particular domain. Many parts of the UK government are responsible for maintaining many different registers in diverse domains. A good register preserves the full history of updates, and provides cryptographic guarantees of the integrity of the data. It also makes data available in machine-readable hypermedia formats so that services can easily consume the data it provides. The talk will report on experiences building several registers. It will also report on experience working with an append-only data model and what this means in practice for services that consume data from the register, and also for services that wish to update the register.

Talk objectives:
- discuss registers and design considerations when maintaining a canonical system of record
- share experiences of using cryptography to provide guarantees of integrity
- share experiences of modelling data as an append-only system of record

Target audience:
- anyone who consumes data published by someone else
- anyone who publishes data consumed by someone else