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 also occur on the public-vc-wg mailing list.

Verifiable Credentials Working Group

• Group page: https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/
• Charter: https://www.w3.org/2022/06/verifiable-credentials-wg-charter.html
• Chairs
  • Brent Zundel - @brentzundel

Verifiable Credentials github repos

• Use Cases
• Data Model
• Implementation Guide
• Data Model Test Cases

Discussion Forums

• W3C Credentials Community Group Mailing List (Incubation)
• W3C Verifiable Credentials WG Mailing List (Standardization)

Process Overview for VC Data Model Pull Requests

1. Anyone can open a PR on the repository. Note that for the PR to be merged, the individual must agree to the W3C Patent Policy.
2. Once a PR is opened on the v2.0 branch, chairs and editors make judgement call on whether changes are substantive or editorial.

   Editorial

   Mark with "editorial" tag

   Substantive

   Mark with "substantive" tag.

3. W3C CCG is automatically notified of PRs as they are raised and discussed.
4. PRs are usually merged in 7 days if there is adequate review and consensus, as determined by the Chairs and Editors.

Roadmap for 2022-2024

The VCWG has a set of deliverables and a timeline listed in the most recent VCWG charter

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.

Local Development

This spec is built with respec.

To develop locally, first install respec; then, you can build the spec locally using the following command, run from the project's root:

respec --localhost index.html out.html --verbose -e

Next open up out.html in a web browser and review the document.