Towards Interoperable Vaccination Certificate Services

Against the background of the new corona virus and its far reaching impact on our everyday life there have been numerous initiatives around the globe, which work on the design and implementation of services related to certificates containing information about the vaccination, testing and/or recovery status of citizen (“Vaccination Certificates”). Due to the distributed and largely independent development under high time pressure there is a risk that the resulting services for the creation, presentation and verification of the aforementioned Vaccination Certificates, will in the end not be interoperable and hence finally turn out to be of limited interoperability. To contribute to the mitigation of this risk, the present paper aims at creating a compact overview with respect to the relevant underlying technologies and an up to date survey with respect to the most relevant initiatives around the globe, before elucidating the system requirements for Vaccination Certificate Services and then outline a technical reference architecture accordingly. This reference architecture, which is as far as possible based on open standards, seeks to integrate all relevant currently existing and emerging approaches and hence may facilitate well-grounded discussions and the exchange of ideas between the different communities and the harmonization of specifications and related schema artifacts in this area. The present contribution concludes with an outlook towards future developments, which includes a long term perspective towards the integration of the Vaccination Services with electronic health records and data exchange infrastructures supporting the International Patient Summary.