Hi ! 👋

Christmas is close 🎄! And we wanted to follow up from our last newsletter, talking about verifiable credentials in itself. This will be a short one but with a bunch of other important news!

Schematics of verifiable credentials

I guess alot of the readers here have heard about Semantic Web. This is an important mindset shift for where the web we browse today have to go. It will not affect the user directly, but will make our web much more efficient.

To make verifiable credentials outstanding, we need to wrap them into some semantics. The reason for this, is that we want a user, police officer, to be able to request "drivers license" when controlling a driver. Not having to request something specialised data field and it can vary from country to country.

This data model is called JSON-LD in the verifiable credential world. There are a lot of proponents for this way for packing verifiable credentials, because the semantical benefit of it all. For you who might be more used to a JWT format, there exists certain interoperability which shall make it possible to exisit in both formats.

We just wanted to highlight the importance of semantics. Because if we take the Norwegian "Felles datakatalog", it is a great attempt to make data available, have documentation on what data is produced out of the APIs, but the data in the API is not semantically provable in itself. That is where verifiable credentials really shine.

With that, lets leave it at this semantic web article

Other news 📰 🚨

📆📆 DigDir is holding a series of 5 open meetings in relation with a certain report they are delivering that comes from this specific government demand . They hope that they are able to get input, and establish contact with various people and companies that can help to illuminate the complexities from as many angles as possible so that DigDir can produce a good knowledge product.
📤📤 DIN recently held a usecase workshop, with great outcomes. Have a look at the summary and recording
🇩🇪🇩🇪 Germany is pushing forward the SSI interoperability space building out some powerful matrix models of what is what and how things fit together. They also came and presented during a DIF interoperability group session, and left with these notes for the agenda
🇩🇪🇩🇪 Germany do all this work in a big coalition agreement that seem to be working well
🇳🇿🇳🇿 New Zealand has launched W3C Verifiable Credentials COVID certs. The importance of this release is discussed more in this mail
⚠️🚨 DIDs see some troubled waters, read all about it here. In short, big tech is objecting the standard which is a clear signal to that the community are onto something

Offers 🛒 🎉

Drummond Reed has given DIN an offer on his book

We have read this book and it is amazing 💯Really puts SSI into context! Use the discount code ssievernym37 and get a 33% of the retail price when buying the book here