search

w3c-ccg / vc-ed-models

https://w3c-ccg.github.io/vc-ed-models/
Other
9 stars 5 forks source link

Standard definitions of issuers #6

Open kimdhamilton opened 3 years ago

kimdhamilton commented 3 years ago

Is it possible to supply guidance for authors of Verifiable Credentials for easy methods of defining issuers and standard metadata. Are there neutral/standard suggestions?

Open Badges 2.0 defines an Issuer Profile which is a useful definition, but is it valid to repurpose it as a generic issuer of educational (or other) VCs, given that OB's issuer profile seems specific to Open Badges[1]?

The VC data model has limited requirements for the issuer field[2], but recommending a common type (or set of types) would be helpful for implementors. An example use case might be for someone wanting to issue a schema.org EOCred (not necessarily an Open Badge or other standard), but wants to provide additional issuer metadata.

Can we at minimum recommend a common set of issuer types?

[1] "a collection of information that describes the entity or organization using Open Badges." Source: OB Issuer Profile

[2] Source: VC Data Model Issuer

The value of the issuer property MUST be either a URI or an object containing an id property. It is RECOMMENDED that the URI in the issuer or its id be one which, if dereferenced, results in a document containing machine-readable information about the issuer that can be used to verify the information expressed in the credential.

philbarker commented 3 years ago

The Credential Engine has profile requirements and reccomendations for CTDL properties used to describe an organization offering a credential, and for a QA organization accrediting credentials

kimdhamilton commented 3 years ago

The organization properties look aligned. To discuss: CTID and general purpose of this field

philbarker commented 3 years ago

CTID is the identifier scheme Credential Engine uses. If you're uploading data about an organization (or other entity type) to the Credential Engine Registry you need a CTID for it (or get allocated one), hence it's in the minimum required data. It's used to form URIs for entities described in the Registry, and can be used to fetch that information. If you're not interacting with the Credential Engine Registry it's not really relevant.

jeannekitchens commented 3 years ago

@kimdhamilton here's some links to information about CTIDs.

CTDL Handbook https://credreg.net/ctdl/handbook#ctid LER Guide https://credreg.net/quickstart/ilwrguide#ctdlsupport

It could be relevant outside the registry. It is the unique identifier that is to resolve back to the resource (e.g., credential). Whether in the Registry or on the Web, the CTID is useful.

As @philbarker noted CTDL has terms for agents/organizations and describing them https://credreg.net/ctdl/handbook#superclasses.

kimdhamilton commented 3 years ago

Sorry, I wrote that tersely. That was more of a note-to-self around generalized alignment of the unique identifier concept across standards, but that's probably more the domain of the mapping tool, which I've only recently started digging into.

anthonycamilleri commented 3 years ago

I'm quite happy with the CTDL Handbook definition of issuers of within the type. We also need a way to describe what an issuer actually represents. A frequent use case is to have one organisation issuing a credential technologically, based on a claim that is made by another organisation.

Thus, we would want to capture: Organisation A attests and signs that Organisation B claims X about CredentialSubject