Meeting minutes
Brent Zundel: welcome everyone to the VCWG meeting. We are meeting under the IPR agreements folks have signed as members. If you are here and are not yet a member of the WG or W3C, please let us know how we can help.
… Today we will discuss the face to face meeting, vocabularies, the Data Integrity task force, and VCDM maintenance.
Joe Andrieu: We have the first meeting of the confidence method task force tomorrow.
<Manu Sporny> https://
Manu Sporny: The CCG has published the final CG version of the post-quantum cryptosuite.
… Another general announcement on groups like VCALM, recognized entities, etc is that we are preparing to do a bunch of threat modeling work for horizontal review.
… the VCALM work will probably have the most involved threat model.
F2F Meeting
Brent Zundel: We are having a face to face meeting in Brussels at the beginning of next month. We are building an agenda and anticipating talking about threat modeling and each task force.
… If there are other topics folks would like to cover please let us know.
Carolynn Bernier: is there an agenda yet?
Brent Zundel: We are in the process of building the agenda.
Carolynn Bernier: There was discussion of a vocabulary meeting but I would prefer to cancel that.
Brent Zundel: There is an option to do a vocab meeting on Thursday afternoon.
Carolynn Bernier: That does not work for me either.
<Brent Zundel> Joe Andrieu
Joe Andrieu: Friday morning some of us are playing disc golf, if you can fit that into your schedule we would love to have you.
Brent Zundel: Let's do some introductions, if you are on the call and have not said hello we invite you to do so.
… Let us know who you are and what you are hoping to work on.
Ted Guild: I work for GeoTab, heavily involved in automotive standards. I used to work for W3C. We are working on vehicle specific Verifiable Credentials with COVESA.
Olvis Enrique Gil Ríos: Pleasure to be here. I'm an inviTed Guild expert, member of ISO and do standards work in European groups, excited to be part of this work, especially related to DIDs and VCs for payments.
Ivan Herman: If anyone would like to join any of the task forces please send me an email.
Brent Zundel: Currently the process to join a task force is Manu Spornyal and needs Ivan Herman, we are hoping to automate this.
PQ Data Integrity Task Force
Brent Zundel: The next topic is the post-quantum Data Integrity task force.
<Carolynn Bernier> For Ted Guild, DPP vocab meetings are Mondays 16h30-17h30 Paris time.
<Manu Sporny> https://
Brent Zundel: The CCG release a CG final report, using the DI framework with post-quantum algorithms. This is within the charter if there is interest.
… Do we want to form another task force for this?
Manu Sporny: The good news is that we do not have to, the VC Barcodes/Data Integrity call already contemplaTed Guild including the post-quantum work.
… There is crossover there in post-quantum security over physical barcodes.
… It's possible that the work will expand such that we need a separate task force, but should be fine for now.
Brent Zundel: When there is something to share or a FPWD we will get that on the agenda.
Manu Sporny: A question is, in theory we could move the document over to FPWD, typically we want to see IPR agreements from major committers, largely right now it's Greg Bernstein and folks from Digital Bazaar. I think we're waiting for 4-5 signatures to establish the main IP, and at that point we can pull it over. Question to the group: once we get those signatures, should we work with Ivan Herman to migrate it over to the WG?
… We already resolved to move it.
Brent Zundel: yes, that makes sense since we have already resolved to do so.
… Next up we will discuss vocabularies.
What to do with Vocabularies
w3c/vc-wg#12
Brent Zundel: Ivan Herman raised an issue in the VCWG repository. When the VCDM 2.0 was published, the WG decided to consider the vocabulary to be normative, but the context to not be normative. As a result the vocabulary was published at a stable link where it could be retrieved and where folks could look at the normatively supplied hash value of the document.
… There are a number of task forces that are doing their own vocabularies, with some intention of adding terms to the VCDM vocabulary. It's important that this group have a conversation about how to handle that, since the vocabulary is a normatively defined document.
… There are some things where it would be straightforward to say additions to the VCDM make sense, where some additions might not make as much sense.
<Carolynn Bernier> p+
Ivan Herman: At the moment the vocabularies are defined in different formats. Three different formats have been copied to a stable place in W3C space. Additionally, in the VCDM spec there is a hash that is generaTed Guild for the JSON-LD version of the vocabulary and normatively referred to.
… The hash value is normatively defined.
… I have been glancing through some of the new specifications, and most of them define new vocabulary terms. VCALM may be separate, since I don't think it defines terms in the JSON-LD sense, terms for a protocol are slightly different.
… It would be good to make a decision in advance on where these terms will go.
… Another question is regarding the hash, we are not supposed to change that without changing the version of the rec.
… We also must make structural decisions about the vocabularies.
Manu Sporny: +1 to everything that Ivan Herman said, and we need to be careful about making them. We are probably going to have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether these vocab terms go into the core VCDM or not. A general rule is "are these terms generally applicable to the ecosystem, or are they focused on a market vertical or some other vertical".
<Dave Longley> +1 to keeping it decentralized
Manu Sporny: For the things relaTed Guild to a specific vertical, those can exist independently and do not need to be merged into the core. The purpose behind the way we built this ecosystem is to encourage decentralized innovation, no need to recentralize here.
<Carolynn Bernier> +1 to the idea that application-specific vocabs are stand-alone (and can be used outside of VCs !)
<Joe Andrieu> +1 for specialized vocabulary for domain-specific terms
Manu Sporny: The render method work is a good example of the kind of stuff that should be added to the main VCDM, things like the barcodes are less clear and the task forces should discuss individually.
… The general approach is to do this on a case-by-case basis, if it's per-vertical, leave it out of the VCDM, if something crosses verticals it is a good candidate for putting in the VCDM.
Ivan Herman: That sounds good but is only part of the problem, another issue is that we need to have some level of consistency among all the documents and vocabularies.
… So far, what we did is create a GitHub folder that contains HTML, JSON-LD, and Turtle versions of the vocabularies.
… We develop this as a document on GitHub without formal status in terms of W3C, then when the document goes to Rec we move it to W3C space to make it stable and provide the appropriate redirects.
… And we add the JSON-LD hash into the specification. The question is, is this the approach we use for all of them?
… It would be good if URLs for these things could be consistent and easy to find.
… An orthogonal question is where are the JSON-LD files and who maintains them.
Manu Sporny: Yes, we need concrete answers to those things. I feel that the way we have answered these questions in the past has been fairly successful. Some of this comes down to allowing innovation outside the group (i.e. decentralization).
<Dave Longley> +1 to some extra urls being a good trade off to enable innovation and decentralization
Manu Sporny: Ivan Herman, you went through a fairly long list of items, perhaps we should have a unified place to make these decisions for all the groups.
… I think the approach is unified, but we should write down the results in a single place.
Ivan Herman: I'm happy to gather all the material in one space and put it into a markdown document on the WG repo.
<Manu Sporny> That sounds like a great path forward, thank you for taking that on, Ivan Herman!
VCDM Maintenance
<Brent Zundel> w3c/
Brent Zundel: next and final topic is VC Data Model maintenance.
… There are currently no open pull requests, so we will start with issues.
… There is one issue with no labels, we will look at that first.
http://github.com/w3c/vc-data-model/issues/1627
Manu Sporny: This feels like an LLM generaTed Guild issue. I don't quite know what they're asking for.
… It feels largely editorial.
Brent Zundel: I had the same experience. It's unclear what changes they are requesting.
… My inclination is to propose closing this, happy to hear other perspectives.
<Phillip Long> perhaps we need a new github tag "AI Slop" ;-)
Joe Andrieu: I also think we should close it. This is a request to have a use case added, we have a use case document, we could respond by saying they could propose this over there. If there is a human behind this, maybe there is something here that would fit the use case document.
<Dave Longley> +1 to close with no action ... and we might need to start saying more about our requirements around AI generaTed Guild issues
Manu Sporny: +1 to requesting they raise a use case PR.
<Phillip Long> +1 to requesting they raise a PR
Ivan Herman: The person's GitHub profile is inactive. I think it should be closed.
<Dave Longley> +1 to Brent Zundel's comment and action
<Manu Sporny> +1 to Brent Zundel's suggestion.
Brent Zundel: Ivan Herman will close the issue, I will add a label and add the discussed comment.
w3c/vc-data-model#1628
Manu Sporny: This was raised because in another spec, I think recognized entities, the concept of should we use digestSRI or digestMultibase keeps coming up.
… The reason we support two digest schemes is because we couldn't agree on a single one. This is impacting downstream specs that build on the core data model. My suggestion is that we deprecate digestSRI because it is the less flexible of the two. We don't need to remove it from the spec, just mark it for deprecation/removal in 3.0.
… If anyone really likes the feature they can add it into the vocabulary for their use case.
… There were companies that pushed for digestSRI, we may want to ask them where they are on it currently.
… The proposal is to deprecate digestSRI.
Ivan Herman: whoever writes the PR should ping me so the term can be deprecaTed Guild in the vocabulary as well.
Manu Sporny: I'll take this PR if we have consensus.
<Dave Longley> +1 to deprecate digestSRI
<Phillip Long> +1 for the proposal to go forward with standardizing the use of digestMultibase and deprecate digestSRI
Brent Zundel: I will ping folks that are no longer members of this group that pushed for digestSRI in the past.
… I am not hearing any objection from the group here.
Manu Sporny: I want to know if anyone in this group has implemenTed Guild and is currently using digestSRI and they will not be able to use digestMultibase.
… Let me look at the implementation report, to see if it shows who is using this feature.
… The test was to support either, we did not split them apart.
Brent Zundel: If we don't hear from the people we reached out to, there is no opposition to moving forward as proposed.
ISO PAS
Ivan Herman: We have a pattern for an explanatory document that has to be produced for the PAS process. Hopefully this conversion will become straightforward.
Manu Sporny: At what stage can we submit something for ISO PAS? Can we do a preliminary on a working draft that is standards track? Can we submit it as a provisional to ISO PAS, to let them know that we intend to take it through the PAS process?
Ivan Herman: The PAS process means that it is a recommendation. Informally, depending on what contact you have with the relaTed Guild ISO group, there is a possibility to give them a version for pre-review (CR).
… This can shorten the PAS process.