Presentations
Verifiable Presentations are an open standard for exchanging Verifiable Credentials
Verifiable Presentations are an open standard at defined at the W3C for exchanging Verifiable Credentials over the internet. This profile can be found at the traceability interoperability Repository on GitHub here: https://github.com/w3c-ccg/traceability-interop.
Sending a Presentation
Functionality related to presentations is located under the "Credentials" section of the left hand menu. Similar to emails, there are "Sent" presentations, which are sent from you to others. And then there are "Received" presentations that others have sent to you.
This guide will cover the process of sending a presentation to another party. This will assume you have a Contact in order to send. Please read the Contacts section of this documentation if you need information on how to add or manage contacts.
Sending your first Credential
When you navigate to the Sent presentations list item, you should be greeted with a hero encouraging your to send your first credential, which is exactly what we're here to walk through.
Once you click on the button + SEND CREDENTIAL, you will be taken to the following screen to compose a Verifiable Presentation.
We want to first focus our attention on the first two inputs. The "Recipient" input is a a drop down of your Contacts. A contact is a method of storing and referencing an end-point for sending a Verifiable Presentation with the Traceability Interoperability Profile.
The second input is the DID which will be used as the holder for the presentation. Your DID is an identifier for your organization, and members in that organization can control keys within those identifiers. Signing a presentation with your Decentralized Identifier will act as a way to identify you to the other party. For now there should be no need to change your identifier and you can use the default did:web provided by the platform.
For the purpose of this guide we will not go into including this presentation as part of a workflow. That will be covered in the Workflow section of this documentation.
Select a Contact to Send to
In the first input we will select a Contact from our list of contacts provided by the dropdown.
Once we have a contact selected, the next step will be to add a credential to the presentation. Click on the + Add Credential button.
This will bring up a modal with a list of credentials from you Vault. You can click on the checkbox to include it in the presentation. If you don't have a credential, you can follow our Issuing Your First Credential Guide in this documentation.
Once you have one or more credentials selected, you can click on the Select button to add them to your Presentation which is being composed.
Once you have selected one or more credentials, you will see it in the list of credentials included for that presentation. Once you have prepared the presentation, you can send it with the Send button at the bottom of the page.
Sent Presentation
Once you can clicked on the Send button, the Verifiable Data Platform will send the network requests to deliver the Verifiable Presentation to the information defined in the contact. If the contact was defined correctly, then you should see a tool tip indicating the presentation has been sent.
The Verifiable Data Platform will keep a record of all of the Verifiable Presentations you have sent to other people as a record for transactions. You can always refer back to these records to see what credentials were sent to which parties.
This is just scratching the surface of using Verifiable Presentations. Its true potential comes from using Workflows, which are a way to define a specific use-case for exchanging specific credentials between parties. Business logic such as steel imports can be expressed as a set of credentials that need to be exchanged between parties. And Verifiable Credentials makes the whole process have data that is tamper-proof and signed by the party which issued it.
Continue reading our Workflow section to see how to use them.
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