This is the list of proposed Community and Business Groups. To express support for a group, you must have a W3C account. Once a group has sufficient support (5 supporters), W3C announces its creation, lists it on the current groups page, and people can join it to begin work.
Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
The mission of the Universal Object & Resource Attestation (UORA) Community Group is to develop a vendor-neutral, decentralized protocol for the identity, state verification, and lifecycle tracking of physical assets. By bridging the gap between physical objects and digital identifiers, UORA enables every resource to function as a first-class citizen of the internet, fostering global trust, transparency, and interoperability across supply chains and industries.
Scope The group will focus on the technical specifications required to bind physical objects to the digital world using the W3C's foundational standards for Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs).
Universal Addressing: Develop protocols for assigning and resolving DID-native addresses to discrete physical units (at Batch, SKU, or Serial-level granularity).
Attestation Schemas: Define data models and vocabularies for "Event-Based Attestations" that document a physical asset's lifecycle. Core event types include, but are not limited to:
Origin: Proof of creation, mining, or manufacture.
Transfer: Change of custody or ownership.
Transformation: Processing, assembly, or modification.
Disposition: Recycling, decommissioning, or end-of-life.
Secure Physical Binding: Establish best practices and specifications for the tamper-evident linking of a digital DID to a physical anchor (e.g., via NFC, QR, cryptographic hardware, or IoT sensors) to verify possession and state.
Implementation & Interoperability: Create guidelines for integrating UORA with existing business systems (e.g., ERP, SCM) and networks to ensure practical adoption.
Deliverables
UORA Core Specification: A technical document defining the architecture for DID-native object addressing and resolution.
Universal Resource Attestation Schemas: A library of vocabularies and data models for cross-industry lifecycle attestations.
Secure Physical Binding Protocol: A specification outlining methods and best practices for securely linking digital DIDs to physical objects.
Implementation Guidelines and Use Cases: Documentation providing practical integration pathways, reference architectures, and business case examples to accelerate adoption.
Success Criteria
The Community Group will be considered successful when its core specifications are used by at least two independent, interoperable implementations to track physical assets across a multi-party supply chain.
Out of Scope
Development of new blockchain or distributed ledger protocols.
Creation of new cryptographic primitives.
Mandating specific commercial hardware, sensor, or IoT platforms.
The mission of the Verifiable Supply Chain Community Group is to accelerate the adoption of decentralized, verifiable data standards in global supply chains. We develop industry-specific profiles, interoperability frameworks, and certification guidelines that enable businesses to exchange cryptographically verifiable proofs of origin, custody, compliance, and sustainability—building trust, reducing fraud, and unlocking new efficiency across multi-party industrial networks.
Scope
This group focuses on the practical implementation, industry alignment, and certification of supply chain applications using the W3C's Verifiable Credentials (VC) ecosystem and related protocols like UORA.
Industry-Specific Profiles: Develop and maintain VC/UORA profiles and data schemas tailored to key verticals (e.g., pharmaceuticals, automotive, food & beverage, critical minerals, luxury goods). These profiles map regulatory and business requirements to verifiable data formats.
Interoperability & Compliance: Create test suites, mapping documents, and implementation guides to ensure interoperability between verifiable supply chain systems and legacy standards (e.g., GS1 EPCIS, ISO standards, regulatory frameworks like DSCSA, CBAM, EUDR).
Certification & Trust Frameworks: Define governance models, trust anchor requirements, and conformance criteria for organizations issuing and consuming verifiable supply chain claims.
Use Cases & Business Value: Document high-impact business cases, ROI models, and reference architectures that demonstrate how verifiable credentials solve specific supply chain problems (anti-counterfeiting, ESG reporting, duty/tax compliance, recall management).
Relationship to UORA CG
This group is a downstream adopter and specializer of the UORA CG's core technical specifications. While UORA defines the universal protocol for asset attestation, this group focuses on industry-specific constraints, business rules, and multi-stakeholder governance required for real-world supply chain deployment. The two groups will maintain a formal liaison for synchronized development.
Deliverables
Industry Blueprints: A library of public, reusable VC/UORA profiles for major supply chain verticals, starting with Pharmaceuticals and Critical Minerals.
Interoperability Toolkit: Specifications and software tools for translating between existing supply chain event data (e.g., EPCIS events) and verifiable, DID-anchored attestations.
Trust Framework Template: A customizable template for supply chain networks to establish governance, accreditation, and compliance rules for verifiable credential issuers.
Business Implementation Guide: A non-technical playbook for executives and solution architects, detailing steps to pilot and scale verifiable supply chain systems, with quantified case studies.
Success Criteria
The group will be considered successful when:
Out of Scope
Developing new core cryptographic protocols or decentralized identifier systems.
Creating competing generic standards for VCs or DIDs (builds on W3C standards).
Mandating specific commercial platforms or blockchains.
As AI systems increasingly determine what web content people see, there is no shared vocabulary, framework, or measurement approach for understanding how content becomes visible — or invisible — within AI discovery and response systems. Publishers, website developers, platform operators, agencies, AI system developers, and researchers lack common reference points for evaluating how content is discovered, understood, trusted, and surfaced by AI systems. The AI Visibility Lifecycle Community Group will provide a collaborative forum to explore these challenges, with the aim of developing shared vocabulary, measurement approaches, and best practices for understanding content visibility within AI discovery and response systems. The 11-Stage AI Visibility Lifecycle framework (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18460710) is intended to serve as a starting point for discussion within the group, but is not intended to constrain the group's discussions or decisions about future deliverables.
