Designing Consent for the Real World: Inside the CONSENTIS Schema

In today’s digital systems, consent has grown far beyond a simple checkbox. It must function as a verifiable, auditable, and machine-readable agreement that works across many technologies and regulatory contexts. Within the CONSENTIS framework, this challenge inspired a focused objective: to design a machine-readable format for consent records that remains valid regardless of how consent is issued or stored. A key idea behind this work was technological independence. Consent might be issued as a token, represented as a verifiable credential, embedded in a smart contract, or managed through other decentralised mechanisms. Instead of favouring any single implementation model, CONSENTIS seeks to define a representation capable of operating consistently across all of them. This decision reflects a broader reality of digital ecosystems, where infrastructures and standards evolve quickly and rigid designs can easily become obsolete.

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