An open, vendor-neutral standard for publishing, signing, and federating ski & snow agentic resources. Built on Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) and the ai-catalog standard. Free to adopt. No central gatekeeper.
AI agents are starting to discover tools at runtime instead of being hand-configured. ARD defines how that works in general. This standard profiles ARD for one domain — ski & snow — and adds the piece travel agents actually need: verification. A skier's assistant should be able to find, and trust, the data answering it. Open Snow specifies exactly how a resort, pass platform, weather/avalanche service, or ski-data provider becomes discoverable and provably authentic.
Host a static ai-catalog.json at /.well-known/ listing your MCP servers, APIs, agents, or datasets — each with 2–5 natural-language representativeQueries. HTTPS, application/json, CORS-open.
Anchor identity to a did:web DID, publish your key at /.well-known/did.json, and add an Ed25519 entry-bound detached JWS (RFC 7515 over RFC 8785 JCS) to each entry's trustManifest. Tamper-evident by construction.
Submit your domain to a conforming discovery registry. It crawls your catalog, verifies every signature against your DID, and ranks your resources — so any AI agent searching for ski/snow tools finds yours.
| Level | Requirement | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Listed | Valid ai-catalog.json at /.well-known/, HTTPS + CORS. | Crawlable & indexable. |
| Verified | Above + did:web identity + Ed25519-signed, entry-bound trust manifests that validate against the published DID document. | Ranked first; carries the verified badge. Registries may index verified-only. |
Verification follows the ai-catalog Trust Manifest scheme: canonicalize each entry with JCS (RFC 8785) minus the signature field, sign the bytes as a detached JWS (RFC 7515, EdDSA), resolve the signer's key from did:web.
The first conforming discovery service is an ARD POST /search endpoint that federates the verified network:
curl -sS -X POST https://www.snowsure.ai/search \
-H 'content-type: application/json' \
-d '{"query":{"text":"best powder in the Alps this week"}}' \
| jq -r '.results[] | "\(.score)\t\(.source)\t\(.displayName)"'Five independent publishers serving signed, verified catalogs today — 44 resources indexed, 41 cryptographically verified.
Run a ski or snow MCP server, API, agent, or dataset? Publish, sign, and submit your domain — verified indexing is free and permissionless.
ai-catalog.json (part 01).did:web key (part 02) — reference signer available on request.