Credentials
Evidence
Supporting artifacts (submissions, recordings, portfolios) referenced from a credential to back up the claim.
Evidence, in the W3C Verifiable Credentials and Open Badges 3.0 sense, is the set of artifacts a recipient can point at to back up a credential. An OB 3.0 evidence entry typically includes id (a URL to the artifact), type, name, description, and genre.
Evidence is optional in the spec — a credential can be fully valid without it — but it's where a credential goes from "we say this" to "here's what they actually did". A LinkedIn certificate without evidence is a claim; a verifiable credential with evidence links to the submitted capstone project is a claim plus an audit trail.
In the current LearnCoin signing pipeline, evidence references are stored with the credential as display metadata rather than cryptographically committed to the signed JSONLD. This is because the current OB 3.0 v3.0.3 JSON-LD context doesn't cleanly canonicalize evidence under URDNA2015 safe-mode; when the LearnCoin extension context ships, evidence will move into the signed document.
Related terms