Human readable credentials?

I have a question for the group about displaying credentials to humans.
Credentials, being JSON, are machine readable, okay, but when the machine
is told to display the credential on screen, what does the machine do?

Does this matter? It would appear so. A holder may wish to make a visual
check of a credential he holds. An issuer may wish their credentials to
display their logo, etc. In fact, one can imagine it being useful to
display virtually any credential, except possibly login credentials and
that kind of thing.

Since credentials have emerged from linked data on the web, one idea would
be to continue to do what the web does generally and have a web page render
a credential. But the integrity of that web page and of the credential are
guaranteed in different ways. How then would the view and the credential be
tied to the same issuer?

It seems you could address this question in two ways. One would be to embed
the view data into the credential itself. For example, a credential could
contain a field like "view": "*some mime message or whatever*". Another
would be to use a content-addressable link, such as a hashlink, where the
content contains the same info.

The problem here is neither of those approaches are standard in the data
model. Seemingly, it would be useful if they were standard because an
arbitrary wallet, given an arbitrary credential would know how to display
it.

So finally, my question. What ways are people using to display credentials,
are they robust and is there any best approach that might be worthy enough
to standardise?

Many thanks,
Jeremy Townson

ps: I've enjoyed watching the CG list file through my inbox. It seems a
very coherent group, which hopefully gives as good a chance of success in
this world.

pps: To introduce myself, I have been working on a Scala implementation of
the VC data model.

Received on Monday, 8 June 2020 16:47:38 UTC