Conformance

A record either reproduces the manifest, or it disagrees with the standard

Four levels in the specification, eighty-three issue codes in the profile, and one fixture per code so the profile can be run rather than read.

83Issue codes67 error · 16 warning

95Fixturescorpus 1.1

§11

The four levels

M = mandatory, S = SHOULD, — = not required.

Pixels only

CPNP-1, both identity hashes, and at least one canonical visual embedding with a full space descriptor. Nothing else is required.

Raw metadata preserved

Every metadata family preserved byte-exact, with an availability state recorded for each.

Reconciled and trusted

A reconciled normalized view with precedence and conflicts, trust tiers, and redaction-with-proof.

Provenance and context

Acquisition and custody chain, C2PA validation, contextual embeddings with source provenance, and a record signature.

Capability	L0	L1	L2	L3
CPNP-1, content_hash, pixel_hash	M	M	M	M
≥ 1 canonical_visual embedding + full space descriptor	M	M	M	M
Byte-exact raw metadata preservation	—	M	M	M
Availability states per family	—	M	M	M
Reconciled view, precedence, conflicts[]	—	—	M	M
Trust tiers; redaction-with-proof	—	—	M	M
Acquisition + chain; C2PA validation	—	—	—	M
Contextual embeddings w/ source provenance	—	—	—	M
Record signature (JWS/COSE over JCS)	—	—	—	S

Profile vera-profile/1.0

Seventeen stages, run in order, none of them skipped

Every stage runs. The validator does not stop at the first error, because a producer fixing one defect deserves to see the rest.

Stage	What it checks	Codes
0	The validator itself, not the record	VER001
1	Parse and size	VER101 VER102 VER103 VER104 VER105 VER106
2	Structure and formats	VER201 VER202
3	Conformance level gates	VER301 VER302 VER303 VER304 VER305 VER306 VER307 VER308
4	Space descriptors	VER401 VER402 VER403 VER404 VER405 VER406 VER407 VER408 VER409 VER410 VER411
5	Referential integrity	VER501
6	Dimensions, dtypes and component values	VER601 VER602 VER603 VER604 VER605 VER606 VER607 VER608 VER609
7	Role and kind agreement	VER701 VER702 VER703 VER704 VER705
8	Perceptual digests	VER801 VER802
9	Availability completeness	folded into VER303
10	Availability basis and raw-segment carriage	VER901 VER902 VER903 VER904
11	Trust, conflict, redaction	VER1001 VER1002 VER1003 VER1004 VER1005 VER1006 VER1007 VER1008 VER1009 VER1010 VER1011
12	C2PA state	VER1101 VER1102 VER1103
13	Provenance chronology and action tokens	VER1201 VER1202 VER1203 VER1204 VER1205 VER1206 VER1207 VER1208
14	Checksums	VER1301 VER1302 VER1305
15	Signature	VER1401 VER1402 VER1403
16	Lineage	VER1601 VER1602 VER1603 VER1604 VER1605 VER1606

The issue-code registry Validator reference

The corpus

One code, one fixture, one expected verdict

Every issue code has exactly one fixture registered against it, or an explicit exemption saying why it cannot have one. A code with neither, or two fixtures claiming the same code, is a corpus defect.

14Conformant recordsvalid/

81Seeded with one defectinvalid/

291.1-draft codesvera-profile/1.1-draft

2Documented exemptionscovered by unit tests

Manifest 1.1, corpus ver-conformance/1.1-draft, generated 2026-08-25. The default schema for a run is 1.0.1.

How the corpus works Browse the fixtures

shell

# every fixture, judged against the profile it declares
PYTHONPATH=packages/ver-validator/src python -m pytest \
    tests/test_conformance_fixtures.py -q
# one record, one verdict
ver-validate --schema 1.0.1 --format json \
    conformance/invalid/ver101-unparseable-json.json
# → VER101 error

Reference

Conformance documents

Three documents describe what a validator does, how it says it, and what holds it honest.

9 sections

High-trust conformance profile

vera-profile-high-trust/1.1-draft — one severity promotion over the base draft profile.

draft

9 sections

The conformance validator

ver-validator: what each of the seventeen stages checks, the JSON report contract, and the Python API.

stable

7 sections

The fixture corpus

Ninety-five executable fixtures: one per issue code, with the expected verdict recorded in a manifest.

stable