Verifiable Credentials Data Model and Representations

Credentials are a part of our daily lives; driver's licenses are used to assert that we are capable of operating a motor vehicle, university degrees can be used to assert our level of education, and government-issued passports enable us to travel between countries. This specification provides a mechanism to express these sorts of credentials on the Web in a way that is cryptographically secure, privacy respecting, and machine-verifiable.

We encourage contributions meeting the Contribution Guidelines. While we prefer the creation of issues and Pull Requests in the GitHub repository, discussions often occur on the public-vc-wg mailing list as well.

Verifiable Credentials Working Group

• Group page: https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/
• charter: https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/charter.html
• Chairs
  • Brent Zundel - @brentzundel
  • Wayne Chang - @wyc

Verifiable Credentials github repos

• Data Model
• Use Cases
• Data Model Test Cases

Other useful links

• Public group email archive

Process Overview for VC Data Model Pull Requests

1. For now, we will focus only on merging new errata PRs into this repository, but encourage activity related to new features.
2. Once a PR is opened, chairs and editors make judgement call on whether changes are substantive or editorial.

   Editorial

   Mark with "editorial" tag, merge into branch "v1.1"

   Substantive

   Mark with "substantial" tag. Bug fixes are merged into separate branch "v1.2". New Features stay around as an open PR.

3. W3C CCG is notified of PRs that will be merged in the next 14 days if there are no objections.
4. When it's determined a new recommendation should go out, the W3C Verifiable Credentials Working Group members meet, review all the PRs that have been merged, and make a formal recommendation if agreement is reached.

Roadmap for 2021

• one editorial update (v1.1?)

• one substantive update (v1.2?)

• VC Test Suite Refactoring

• Start planning VC v2 Work, request a rechartering 3-6 months before end of year to keep VC WG functioning.

Focus areas

• [v1] Fixing a specific bug
• [v1] Update examples in the spec to make them modern
• [v2] VC @context needs updating, possibly with security vocab modularized into smaller components instead of all included into a large context file.

Debugging Github Pages Build Errors

There are times where Github Pages will fail to build with nondescript errors such as "Page build error." or "Symlink does not exist within your site's repository". You will need to run github-pages locally to debug such errors. To run github-pages, which uses Ruby and Jekyll locally, you will need to set up a working Ruby and Bundle environment.

After you have installed Ruby and Bundle, you will need to do the following:

gem install jekyll github-pages

Then create a Gemfile file in the top level directory with the following contents:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'github-pages'

Then run the following command:

bundle exec jekyll serve --watch --force_polling

You should be able to see the page build errors in detail upon running the command above.