Verifiable Credentials Working Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2023-07-26

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Hiroyuki Sano, Shigeya Suzuki, Ivan Herman, Will Abramson, Sebastian Crane, Dave Longley, Brent Zundel, Ted Thibodeau Jr., Michael Jones, Dmitri Zagidulin, Greg Bernstein, Manu Sporny, Andres Uribe, Joe Andrieu, Gabe Cohen, Phillip Long, Oliver Terbu, Kevin Griffin, Andrew Jones

Regrets:

Guests:

Chair: Brent Zundel

Scribe(s): Sebastian Crane, Manu Sporny

Content:

1. Work Item status updates/PRs.

1.1. Add confidenceMethod to table of reserved terms and v2 @context (pr vc-data-model#1142)

See github pull request vc-data-model#1142.

Manu Sporny: 1142 is about confidence method. Progress has been made on it; we should be able to merge the pull request shortly.

1.2. Add “author” and “party” to terminology, rewrite “claim” terminology (pr vc-data-model#1172)

See github pull request vc-data-model#1172.

Manu Sporny: Discussion continues on 1172.

Joe Andrieu: I would like to remove the Pre-CR tag on 1172.
… There’s some interest in editorial adjustments, but the consensus is that it won’t change normative statements.

1.3. Add section on JSON Processing. (pr vc-data-model#1202)

See github pull request vc-data-model#1202.

Manu Sporny: For the section on JSON processing, there are a few remaining points. oliver, are you objecting to the proposal or something else?

Oliver Terbu: I have to re-read the pull request. To me it seems rather random and written in a very condensed style.

Manu Sporny: There was a PR by kristina that removed all the statements about JSON processing. There was consensus for this, but others misinterpreted it as us removing support for JSON-only processing.
… This new PR is to add a condensed list to compensate for the removed sections on JSON processing.

Oliver Terbu: I was just reading 1203 where it was proposed that the transformed document has to follow linked data best practices. This means that VCs have to follow linked data practices, not just plain JSON.

Manu Sporny: The two different PRs address different things. 1203 does not introduce a normative requirement; it is guidance for those transforming data to JSON-LD.

1.4. Add section on Ecosystem Compatibility. (pr vc-data-model#1203)

See github pull request vc-data-model#1203.

Manu Sporny: I think JoeAndrieu was objecting to the language in 1203.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: I don’t think there’s any place for implementors to find out which methods are recommended or not. We also say that a proof that is broken in the future becomes not allowed for VCs, but don’t describe what to do if the VC can’t be reissued.

Joe Andrieu: The W3C defines what a VC is. I object to our specification using the term VC to apply to non-W3C-defined methods.

Sebastian Crane: +1 JoeAndrieu.

1.5. Other PR-s.

Manu Sporny: https://github.com/w3c/vc-data-integrity/pulls.

Manu Sporny: There are a lot of data integrity PRs outstanding that are ready to be merged.

Manu Sporny: https://github.com/w3c/vc-di-ecdsa/pulls.

Manu Sporny: I plan to wait until IETF before merging the vc- di-ecdsa pull requests.

Manu Sporny: https://github.com/w3c/vc-status-list-2021/pulls.

Manu Sporny: I think we have consensus to rename vc-status-list-2021 to something without a date and with a more unique name.

Dave Longley: +1 to approach outlined by Manu.

2. Issues (to be assigned and marked relative to CR).

Brent Zundel: https://github.com/w3c/vc-data-model/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+-label%3Apost-CR+-label%3Abefore-CR+-label%3A%22pending+close%22+sort%3Aupdated-asc+.

2.1. Evidence extension point (was: Improve tests for Evidence) (issue vc-data-model#870)

See github issue vc-data-model#870.

Brent Zundel: Issue 870. Should we do this before or after CR and who to assign?

Manu Sporny: https://w3c.github.io/vc-specs-dir/#evidence.

Manu Sporny: https://www.imsglobal.org/spec/ob/v3p0/.

Manu Sporny: https://1edtech.github.io/openbadges-specification/ob_v3p0.html#evidence.

Manu Sporny: I think we need to resolve it before CR. It’s missing 1EdTech - they very clearly use this extension point.

2.2. Allowing expanded type values in conforming documents (issue vc-data-model#1206)

See github issue vc-data-model#1206.

Manu Sporny: It’s fine to use full URIs in normal JSON-LD documents, however if publishing in JSON-only mode implementors would have to add support for both shortened and full URIs.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: This reminds me of a discussion about MIME types for VCs, and that to be able to use the JSON media type for JSON-LD documents the URI has to be expanded.

Ivan Herman: There is nothing specific to the ‘type’ property here. It would apply to any JSON-LD property.

Manu Sporny: Yes, agree with Ivan, which is not a good developer experience, which is why we don’t do/require that today.

Sebastian Crane: Plain JSON processing is not about avoiding implementing something w/ JSON-LD… it’s more important to view the case where you don’t have an active internet connection, you need to be stuff w/o active connection to Internet.

Joe Andrieu: In production systems, you don’t want to retrieve context values… you want to understand which context which software your software has been written to… and write to that.

Sebastian Crane: From ease of use, you don’t want to require active internet connection to pass something. For example, ticket machine loses WiFi and then you can’t get through… this needs to work w/o fetching stuff from the Web.

2.3. Define Controller Documents in the Core Data Model (issue vc-data-model#1205)

See github issue vc-data-model#1205.

Dave Longley: JSON can’t be understood without a spec and we have one of those, it’s fine how it is.

Manu Sporny: We had a discussion about 1205 in yesterday’s special topic call. I think this is pre-CR.

Ivan Herman: this is a larger issue on the overlap between DID and VC terms, also affects the security spec. We discussed it yesterday. These must be handled pre-CR.

See github issue did-core#845.

Manu Sporny: I wouldn’t mark it pending-close yet.

Sebastian Crane: I’m happy to speak about this later, but in yesterday’s meeting, Dave Longley said that controller documents have been a part of data integrity for a decade… work in W3C has not been going on for that long.

2.4. Spec does not contain “name” and “description” terms in the context (issue vc-data-model#1214)

See github issue vc-data-model#1214.

Brent Zundel: If I recall correctly, we’ve had several issues similar to 1214. That makes me think we should have specification text for this.

Manu Sporny: After VC 1.0 came out, we couldn’t add it in 1.1 as it was technically a breaking change.
… Now we can introduce it so we can finally address the issue.

Ivan Herman: Just to clarify, these are schema.org terms, no change on the vocabulary.

3. Before-CR issues reviews.

Brent Zundel: https://github.com/w3c/vc-data-model/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Abefore-CR+sort%3Aupdated-asc.

3.1. termsOfUse is insufficiently specified (issue vc-data-model#1010)

See github issue vc-data-model#1010.

Brent Zundel: 1010 was raised by manu and assigned to pdl_asu.

Phillip Long: There was a conversation when the issue was created, but not much discussion since then.

Manu Sporny: Terms of Use is labelled as ‘at risk’, so it will be removed unless work is done on it.

Joe Andrieu: I don’t understand who is bound to the terms of use in our three-party system.

Brent Zundel: +1 Joe, all that you say indicates we really need to see a spec.

Joe Andrieu: I think it’s far more complicated than anything we’ve done so far, so I don’t think we’re ready. However I think we should keep it reserved.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: I think it is OK to go into CR with only one implementation.

Brent Zundel: It sounds like the section of the specification to do with Terms of Use ought to be removed, because there is nothing concrete to describe. Leaving it in the reserved terms is best while we experiment.

Manu Sporny: +1 to brent’s summary, that sounded accurate to me.

Joe Andrieu: For all the terms that we have reserved, we should explain what we intend to use them for.

Manu Sporny: https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/#reserved-extension-points.

Manu Sporny: We can use the description from 1.1 if it gets removed during CR.

3.2. Why does the Data Model context file define a DataIntegrityProof RDF class? (issue vc-data-model#1089)

See github issue vc-data-model#1089.

Manu Sporny: I think we need to keep this issue open as there is no other tracking issue.

Brent Zundel: We already have a marker to indicate that the content might change with CR. Do we therefore need a before-CR label?

Manu Sporny: Yes, I believe so. I think we should have a before-CR label for implementation requirements.

Brent Zundel: I believe the consensus now is to have a ‘kitchen sink’ model with everything defined centrally.

Manu Sporny: +1 to brent, that’s my understanding as well.

Dave Longley: +1 to brent’s characterization.