The session will discuss the possibility of extending the GA4GH Passport Visa encoding to the Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0 proposed by W3C for credentials in digital wallets. The model is based on the semantic-web Linked Data model enabling references to ontologies, like the GA4GH Data Use Ontology. 

The current GA4GH Passport Visa encoding uses JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format with a mixture of standard JWT (JSON Web Token) claims e.g. sub, iss, exp (abbreviations for subject, issuer, expiration) and custom visa claims e.g. type, value, source.

Verifiable Credentials Data Model 2.0 proposed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) uses JSON-LD (JSON Linked Data) format, which is a semantic data format for encoding RDF (Resource Description Framework) statements about subjects using controlled vocabularies or ontologies. Thus it may work nicely with the GA4GH’s DUO (Data Use Ontology) which is an ontology for describing data use conditions, particularly for research data in the health/clinical/biomedical domain.

The session will include short presentations of the background technology, presentations of initial ideas on how to implement this identified extension and possible issues that would need to be solved. The second part will be an open discussion trying to get an initial consensus on the suitability of the ideas discussed.