The ISC program, within the federal Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) is designed to support the development of early stage, pre-commercial innovations by businesses that demonstrate the capacity to develop an innovative solution to a Federal Department or Agency challenge. The UCVDC Challenge involved assessing solutions with the underlying capability to issue, verify, and share user-centric verifiable digital credentials.
Phase 1 of the UCVDC Challenge resulted in businesses developing proof-of-concepts. Phase 2 had two Challenge participants (Vendors) developing prototypes. IDLab provided independent testing to the challenge participants as required by ISC. The purpose of the testing was to ensure that a digital credential could be issued, presented, verified, and validated so as to conduct digital transactions.
IDLab completed the following activities:
- Facilitated the co-creation of an interoperability assessment framework that:
- defined interoperability in the context of verifiable credentials
- described a methodology to test for interoperability
- focused at the level of guiding principles, not technical implementation, in its first iteration.
This assessment framework was developed in collaboration with teams from the Government of Canada as well as the two challenge participants.
- Assessed the solutions developed by two challenge participants.
- Findings were reviewed and analyzed against current best practices, industry trends, emerging standards and frameworks and documented in a report format.
- Developed recommendations for implementing a scoring model for this user-centric interoperability assessment framework.
