Verifiable Credentials Working Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2024-02-21

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Ivan Herman, Ted Thibodeau Jr., Brent Zundel, Manu Sporny, Michael Jones, Mircea Nistor, Dave Longley, Jennie Meier, Paul Dietrich, Will Abramson, David Chadwick, Dmitri Zagidulin, Gabe Cohen, David Lehn, Przemek Praszczalek, Phillip Long

Regrets:

Guests:

Chair: Brent Zundel

Scribe(s): Michael Jones, Manu Sporny

Content:

Brent Zundel: Welcome to the VCWG call.

Manu Sporny: I responded to a privacy review by Ping.

Jennie Meier: I’m Jennie Meyer. I’m here with Digital Contract Design.

1. PING Review Report.

Manu Sporny: https://github.com/w3cping/privacy-request/issues/127#issuecomment-1932531261.

Manu Sporny: PING did a review on Bitstring Status List 2 weeks ago.

Manu Sporny: Response here: https://github.com/w3cping/privacy-request/issues/127#issuecomment-1956903375.

Manu Sporny: including by Martin Thompson of Mozilla and Nick Doty.
… I responded about an hour ago.
… Nothing new came up.
… The spec could talk more about correlation and tracking with the identifiers used.
… Please look at the response to them.
… I’ve requested that they raise issues for things they want us to address.
… If they don’t raise issues, we may have to read the tea leaves.

2. Work Item Status Updates/PRs.

Gabe Cohen: We’ve been making excellent progress on jose-cose.
… We have 10 remaining issues for Before CR - 4 with PRs.
… We hope to get to CR by the end of the month or not much later.

Brent Zundel: PR #239 adds securing with JWS.

Michael Jones: Gabe has done good work so that rendering of examples are consistent.
… People are encouraged to review the issues and PRs.

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

Manu Sporny: I processed PRs on VCDM. We have another set that appear to be non-controversial.

Manu Sporny: Jeffrey has reviewed the algorithm alignment work here: https://github.com/w3c/vc-data-integrity/pull/244.

Brent Zundel: Are there other VCDM PRs that could benefit from discussion in the group?

Gabe Cohen: the PR https://github.com/w3c/vc-data-model/pull/1439 should be ready for merge, will do after this call.

3. PR Review.

Ivan Herman: There’s also the item on media types we should look at.

3.1. Added the “Validate” action to the life cycle details diagram (issue 1331) (pr vc-data-model#1441)

See github pull request vc-data-model#1441.

Ivan Herman: I don’t want to get into a discussion of the details of the diagram here.
… The question is whether we want to keep it.

Manu Sporny: We should keep it. I’ve referred to it.

Manu Sporny: lifecycle of VC: https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/#concrete-lifecycle-example.

Manu Sporny: We should update the diagram and move it to the lifecycle section.

Gabe Cohen: +1 to what Manu said.
… I find the diagrams very useful.
… More pretty pictures please.

Manu Sporny: +1 to “more pretty pictures please”.

Brent Zundel: Where in the DM is the diagram currently?

Manu Sporny: See current diagram.

Gabe Cohen: we also have https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/#concrete-lifecycle-example without a diagram.

Ivan Herman: Let’s keep it.
… I propose that I edit the diagram to incorporate comments from David Lehn, etc.
… Later we could move it, but I don’t want to mix the two issues.
… I’m happy to do the required changes.

Brent Zundel: We should probably combine sections.

Ivan Herman: See The new, temporary version of the diagram.

Phillip Long: pdl-asu has joined #vcwg.

Manu Sporny: We need to figure out what we’re doing with these sections.
… Let’s start by updating the diagram first.
… Then later editorially move things around.

Ivan Herman: +1 to manu.

Brent Zundel: The PR that modifies the diagram will be merged after Ivan updates it.
… I will open a PR proposing combining sections.

3.2. Changed the term mediaType to encodingFormat (pr vc-data-model#1440)

See github pull request vc-data-model#1440.

Ivan Herman: We had a call on this issue. We decided to change the term “Media Type” to “Encoding Format”.

See github issue vc-data-model#1408.

Ivan Herman: Discussions are ongoing.
… We shouldn’t spend that much time on this.

Manu Sporny: The goal is for activity streams to be able to use this without changes.
… We may just be incompatible with the activity streams context.
… If changing this one thing doesn’t fix it, then we shouldn’t make the change, since the problem wouldn’t be addressed.
… The way activity streams and schema.org define the context are neither right.
… We probably don’t want to do this.
… Maybe we should define IANA media type and have it refer to the IANA registry.
… I’m leaning towards that being my preference.
… The downside is that we’re creating yet another term.

Ivan Herman: Note that the two things you mentioned are orthogonal to one another.
… What term should we use?
… Should we define it ourselves?

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: ianaMediaType was my idea, fwiw. its domain & range remain vital.

Ivan Herman: The definition of a data type for media types can be added.
… It’s not a huge deal.
… I question altogether whether we should do.

Dave Longley: another option is to go with encodingFormat today and then potentially add ianaMediaType or mediaType in a future WG.

Michael Jones: It would be strange to change from a term that is well known “media type” to “encoding format”, which we’d be entirely making up.

Ivan Herman: We are not making it up, schema.org defined it.

Michael Jones: That’s not authoritative for us.

Ivan Herman: That’s debatable.

Manu Sporny: Dmitri is on the call and is chairing the Social Web Community Group.

Dmitri Zagidulin: We’re the ones shepherding the activity streams formats.
… We want to be able to sign activity streams objects.

Manu Sporny: We shouldn’t use schema.org.
… We shouldn’t use activity pub.
… We should point to IETF and IANA and get this right once and for all.
… It probably shouldn’t go in our vocabulary.
… It could go in our security vocabulary.
… We should call it something that people understand.

Ivan Herman: See IANA pointer.

Ivan Herman: I have put this pointer into the minutes.
… From an RDF point of view, would the pointer be the URL of the property?
… I don’t really like that.
… Instead we can define a media type for RDF.
… This is where the string format is defined.
… We define a property in one of our vocabularies.

Manu Sporny: I wouldn’t object to that.
… But we’d be repeating what the social web and schema.org did and we’d be creating another property.

Ivan Herman: I don’t know exactly how activity streams defined it.
… If its compatible with IANA, we could use it.
… If Dmitri gives me a pointer to the definition, I could look at it.

Manu Sporny: It’s defined here: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-mediatype.

Dmitri Zagidulin: What’s the objection to reusing the mediaType definition?

Manu Sporny: They made it too specific to activity streams (by defining domain restrictions).

Dmitri Zagidulin: That could be changed so it can be applied to any domain.

Ivan Herman: That would be perfect.

Dmitri Zagidulin: We could change that.

Michael Jones: It’s not clear to me, are we taking a dependence on an externally defined vocabulary?

Manu Sporny: We already point to a bunch of externally defined vocabularies.
… We’d be reusing the URL they use for the definition.
… This would be more correct than using the schema.org encoding.
… We could actually call this media type.

David Lehn: ?Question?
… Equivalency checking.

Manu Sporny: agree with Dmitri, I don’t think this is an issue to re-use AS as long as it’s aligned.

David Lehn: How much do people do full RDF processing?

Dmitri Zagidulin: Zero.

Brent Zundel: The proposal to raise an issue on the activity streams repository sounds right.
… For our PR, the consensus is to not merge that PR.

Ivan Herman: I’m happy to close it.
… Who has the action to raise the PR in the right place?

Brent Zundel: I’m willing to do it but I’m not sure I could accurately reflect what we want.

Ivan Herman: I’m willing to do it.

Michael Jones: The activity streams repository is https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/.

4. VCDM Issue Processing.

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

4.1. Section title and contents mismatch on “Complex Language Markup” (issue vc-data-model#1254)

See github issue vc-data-model#1254.

Manu Sporny: This text is in the internationalization write-up.
… I think it’s fine where it is.

Ivan Herman: +1 to manu.

Manu Sporny: It doesn’t need to be in the Security Considerations.
… I think we should mark the issue pending close.

Brent Zundel: Any objections to that?
… No objections.

4.2. Clarify what “reserved properties might be more formally defined in future versions” means (issue vc-data-model#1098)

See github issue vc-data-model#1098.

Brent Zundel: This is about setting up a mini registry inside the spec.
… What are the next steps?

David Chadwick: The issue sets it out clearly.
… It’s a question of semantics.
… If something is already defined, what does it mean to more formally define it?

Manu Sporny: The distinction is between a term being defined, referencing a URL, and writing text about the definition.
… For example, we may reserve render method but we won’t write normative text about it.

David Chadwick: I can buy that.
… We have a table of reserved properties anyway.
… We can say that “these terms are reserved” and may be defined later.

Manu Sporny: +1 to that suggestion.

David Chadwick: I can create a PR.

4.3. Define verification material find replace public keys (issue vc-data-model#1197)

See github issue vc-data-model#1197.

Michael Jones: The term “public key” is well known, “verification material” is not, why would we do this?

Manu Sporny: There are verification methods that don’t use public keys.

Brent Zundel: A response to this issue entails going through the spec and inspecting the places we use the term “public key”.

4.4. [Terminology] claim (issue vc-data-model#995)

See github issue vc-data-model#995.

Manu Sporny: I am against continuing this discussion.

Brent Zundel: Marking “pending close”, per the previous minutes.
… If we are pretty sure we’re not going to get to something, we should close it.
… I don’t have confidence that a future group will pick up on leftovers we leave them.