Depreciation of "Evidence"

[rceleste125]

The Open Credentialing Initiative (OCI, oc-i.org) develops and maintains W3C-based Verifiable credentials, openAPIs, and conformance criteria for use by the US Pharmaceutical industry supporting the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). We have been asked by the industry to explore the use of Evidence as a means of providing transparency to the due diligence that backs up a claim.

There is significant interest in using this extension and we would like to request that depreciation be reconsidered.

Bob Celeste
rceleste@oc-i.org

[decentralgabe]

Deprecation does not mean you cannot use the property. In fact there are uses of the property here: https://w3c.github.io/vc-specs-dir/#evidence

What deprecation does mean is that there is not a normative evidence spec we can reference to pass CR. Because the data model is JSON LD, which provides a mechanism for decentralized extensibility, you will always be able to add an evidence property to a credential.

[brentzundel]

The evidence keyword is still being reserved, but the section that describes how to normatively use the evidence extension suffers from a lack of implemented specifications that can be pointed to from the VC data model.

Removal of the evidence section does not prohibit implementers from continuing to explore the use of evidence within VCs, but rather makes clear that currently, work on evidence is in an exploratory state.

[TallTed]

There is significant interest in using this extension

Perhaps some of that interest could lead to participation in this work at W3C, including adding implementation experience and specification detail...?

We have VERY limited time remaining in this Working Group, so it may be too late to move in that direction for VCDMv2 (the current effort), but such interest and involvement could certainly help speed the process to VCDMv3.

[brentzundel]

No objections raised since marking pending close.
Closing, but note that w3c/vc-test-suite#134 is open to continue tracking the evidence extension point.