Verifiable Credentials Undefined Terms

As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.

The base context of a Verifiable Credential, as defined in Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0 [vc-data-model-2.0], provides a mapping from the standard terms used in credentials to the vocabulary items defined by the Verifiable Credentials Working Group, through different vocabularies such as the Verifiable Credentials Vocabulary. Applications using additional, application-specific terms of their own are encouraged to create their own formal vocabularies and corresponding JSON-LD context definitions, to ensure the interoperability of the credentials they produce and/or consume.

There may be cases, however, where the creation of such formal vocabularies and context definitions is too much of a burden, such as for closed applications, experiments, or examples. The Undefined Terms context has been constructed in such a way that issuers may use new, hitherto undefined terms by adding this context to their Verifiable Credentials, which will cause such terms to be mapped onto URLs of the form https://www.w3.org/ns/credentials/undefined-term#TERM. If a conforming document does not use JSON-LD Contexts that define all terms used, it is required to include https://www.w3.org/ns/credentials/undefined-terms/v2 as the last value in the @context property.

This document provides a proper landing place for those URLs, without any additional definitions for the terms themselves.