CEF eInvoicing: Publication of the Electronic Address Scheme Code List
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The European Commission is happy to announce the publication of the Electronic Address Scheme (EAS) code list.
The management of this code list, undefined in the European standard on eInvoicing, was assigned to the European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eInvoicing team. The EAS code list is necessary when using electronic addresses to exchange invoices through transmission networks. Indeed, as the eInvoicing standard is designed to allow any transmission methodology, and because different methods may use different addressing schemes, each scheme must be defined in the EAS code list so that it can be used in compliant invoices.
The CEF eInvoicing team consulted with key stakeholders (such as the European Multistakeholder Forum on eInvoicing (EMSFEI), the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the OpenPEPPOL network) and established that identifier schemes supported with the CEF code list should be aligned with on the ISO-owned International Code Designator (ICD) list. The ICD list is already in use for other elements in the eInvoicing standard.
The first version of the EAS code list is currently available and includes 68 codes.
The European Commission provides a maintenance and support service through the CEF Digital 2018 Service Desk supporting stakeholders with:
- Questions concerning the code list;
- The submission of new codes to be added to a new version of the list;
- In registering to the ICD list.
You are therefore invited to visit the code list page and/or contact the CEF Digital 2018 Service Desk to get started using the EAS code list to access the code list, learn about its maintenance process and how CEF can support registration.
Context
The eInvoicing standard's semantic data model defines a set of essential business terms which an electronic invoice may contain to enable cross-border interoperability. These business terms can be of different data types, (e.g. text or date). Code-type business terms must only contain values chosen from a code list identified in the eInvoicing standard. Optional business terms "Electronic address" for both seller and buyer (BT-34 and BT-49) allow an invoice to include information about the buyers' electronic address, to which the invoice is being sent and sellers' electronic address, to which responses to the invoice should be sent. The identifier used as electronic address may be based on different identifier schemes, and the allowed codes for scheme identifiers must be chosen from a code list.
IHE Webinar Recording: Asynchronous AS4 Option Webinar
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Integrating the Healthcare (IHE) has published the recording of a webinar exploring new Asynchronous AS4 Web Services Option for XCA, XCPD, XDR and XCDR Profiles. The use of As4 supports the scaling of document sharing between communities to a large numbers of gateways, Asynchronous Web Services Exchange is critical to realize a more efficient handling of latency and scale.
The webinar follows IHE’s publication of new Technical Framework Supplements including the AS4 message exchange specification. At the time of publication, IHE noted
Today, AS4 is the message exchange protocol promoted by the eDelivery building block of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). Consequently, CEF maintains the European implementation guidelines of the AS4 specification developed by the Member States within the e-SENS LSP. These implementation guidelines, also known as the e-SENS profile, provide a secure baseline for users and reduce the complexity of options available for vendors and implementers.
AS4 condenses in a single specification a series of well-known web-services specifications, such as WS-Security and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) with Attachments. AS4 is typically used for the secure and reliable exchange of documents, attachments to these documents and data in general, and can be used in Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Administration (B2A) and Administration-to-Administration (A2A) exchange contexts.
AS4 can be used in virtually every sector or business domain
IHE works to enable seamless and secure access to health information that is usable whenever and wherever needed. IHE is an initiative by healthcare professionals and industry to improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information around the world, and is a non-profit organisation.
CEF eArchiving Presented at BAD Congress
The BAD Congress gathers many of the Archivists and Librarians Portuguese community, which is held only every three years.
The 13th BAD Congress was held this year in the town of Fundão, bringing together more than 500 professionals.
The team of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eArchiving Building Block, represented by professionals from KEEP Solutions and researchers from the INESC-ID, was able to use this opportunity for a wide dissemination of the CEF Building Blocks in general and of the eArchiving Building Block in particular, which raised a large interest among the participants (that also included services and technology providers present in the Portuguese market).
eArchiving provides the core specifications, software, training and knowledge to tackle the challenge of short, medium and long-term data management and reuse in a sustainable, authentic, cost-efficient, manageable and interoperable way.
A Connecting Europe Success Story
CEF welcomes eArchiving- a new CEF Building Block
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How can a large amount of data be managed efficiently and securely?
In all Member States there are legal obligations for public institutions to keep certain data and documents in the national archives for a certain amount of time. Taking the EU as a whole, several requirements justify the use of an EU-wide archiving solution.
This includes for example the digital preservation, Recommendation 2011/711/EU, which invites Member States to exchange strategies for long-term preservation of digital cultural materials.
What is eArchiving?
The new eArchiving building block is based on and continues the work delivered by the European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation (E-ARK) projects.
At the core of eArchiving service platform are technical specifications and compliant software developed and piloted under the E-ARK project. The E-ARK project ran between 2014 and 2017 and was partially funded by the Commission.
eArchiving offers short-,medium- and long-term benefits, such as:
- easier ways for data owners to exchange data between organisations and with individuals (which will help meet the data portability requirements in the General Data Protection Regulation);
- better marked opportunities and increased competitiveness for IT providers, thanks to easier archival data exchange across borders;
- increased cross-border availability of commercial eArchiving services for the public and private sectors alike;
- greater government transparency as a result of improvements in eArchiving capability and public access to archived digital records;
- the ability to create new innovative services based on archived digital data;
- enhanced training and employment opportunities for staff by using a common system;
- improved long-term storage and availability of public and private sector use.
In addition, eArchiving will help achieve a significant reduction in the cost of implementing and maintaining electronic archiving solutions (e.g. economies of scale), and lead to greater efficiency.
Discover how the Danish National Archives and The Republic of Slovenia National Archives already utilised eArchiving in their day-to-day operations.
Meet eArchiving
DLM Forum (Members Only) Meeting in Vienna, 28th-29th November, 2018
CEF new Building Block launch event in Brussels, 7th December, 2018
Discover eArchiving
CEF eInvoicing event- Four months until the European standard deadline.
The European Commission is hosting one last eInvoicing event on 4 December 2018 to help Member States implement the eInvoicing Directive 2014/55/EU ahead of its scheduled deadline in April 2019.
This is one of the last chances you may have to get acquainted with the technical and practical implementation processes to successfully implement eInvoicing.
Speakers will include members of the EU administration, Member States’ policy makers and representatives from the private sector. The speakers’ achievements and key contributions to eInvoicing will be presented in dedicated panel conversations.
Nikita Stampa
| Nikita Stampa is Head of Unit for Innovative and eProcurement in DG GROW and is in charge of eInvoicing policy. Before that, he was appointed as the Deputy Head of the Unit "Services to consumers" in the Directorate General for the Internal Market and Services in the European Commission. The unit's main responsibility is the full implementation and enforcement of the Directive on Services in the Internal Market. Nikita also worked in DG Enterprise and industry where he was involved in international matters such as international trade negotiations and regulatory dialogues in particular with China on textiles and toys products. Before joining the Commission, Nikita acquired an extensive overseas experience mainly in South America and Africa, in particular in microfinance and fair trade. |
Irena Rivière-Osipov
| Irena Riviere-Osipov is Policy Officer in charge of eInvoicing and IT procurement. Irena's passion for Digital is a long, beautiful and strong professional story. Shortly after she graduated law in Paris, specializing in both European Law and International Economic Law, she joined the European Commission, always working in the Internet world, from the Digital Agenda for Europe since 2009 to eProcurement today. She is currently managing 2 key projects: the set-up of an IT procurement policy for the EU and the eInvoicing Directive implementation. Since 2008, she is at the core of the main achievements of the European Commission related to the digital economy. With passion and commitment, she built together with other members of her team the Digital Agenda for Europe, a strategic policy implemented from 2009 to 2014 which had a huge impact on the development of Internet in Europe. She moved on the to the eProcurement world, to ensure that the public money in Europe is spent to the best benefit of all EU citizens. |
Andrea Caccia
| Andrea Caccia is a chartered information system engineer and a senior consultant for process digitalisation. He is Chair of CEN/TC 434 on electronic invoicing, member of the European Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Electronic Invoicing (a European Commission Expert Group) and member of the Italian e-invoicing forum. He is also member of CEN/TC 440 on public procurement and CEN/TC 445 on digital information exchange in the insurance sector and other initiatives at national, European and international level related to e-invoicing, e-procurement and eIDAS trust services. |
Caroline Corneau | Caroline Corneau works at the European Commission Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT) as Project Manager for the CEF eInvoicing Building Block. Her background is in knowledge management, information architecture and user research. She first joined the EU institutions in 2009 as website administrator for the European Parliament Library, and proceeded as online services manager for the European Parliamentary Research Service. |
Christian Rasmussen
| Christian Rasmussen is currently working as a senior Business Development Manager at e-Boks A/S. Since 2009 he has been advising the European Commission on digitisation projects and strategy, including Horizon2020 and Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), by acting as ambassador for the developed ICT components funded by EU. Christian has a vast experience in working with governments, private sector, consulting and research/development in Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Middle East. He was one of the first agile managers to be trained and educated at LEGO, and he was the first portfolio manager hired to build up an agile PMO within the Danish government. |
Andre Hoddevik
| André Hoddevik is Head of e-procurement unit in the Department for public procurement in the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi) and Secretary General in OpenPEPPOL AISBL. He was the Project Director of the Pan-European Public Procurement Online (PEPPOL) project 2008-2012. He is member of the European Commission Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group on eProcurement (EXEP) and Multi-Stakeholder Forum on eInvoicing (EMSFEI). André has been working with shared services and eProcurement in the public sector since 1999 and are currently in charge of Norwegian public sector eProcurement activities at national level. |
Join us at the event
Find out more about CEF eInvoicing
eIDAS Toolkit for Businesses
The European Commission has published a rage of online resources to help your business take advantage of cross-border business opportunities, increase efficiency, security and improve user experience through electronic identification (eID) and trust services.
The full coming into force of the eIDAS Regulation in September 2018 has created one single framework for electronic Identification (eID) and trust services making it more straightforward to deliver business services across the 28 countries in the EU.
What is eIDAS and how will it benefit my business?
eIDAS stands for electronic Identification (eID), Authentication and Trust Services. The eIDAS Regulation established the framework to ensure that electronic interactions between businesses are safer, faster and more efficient, no matter the European country they take place in.
The eIDAS Regulation will increase the level of security of transactions for businesses and offer many other benefits including:
- less administrative burden in electronic transactions with other business, customers and public administrations.
- more efficient business processes and, as a result,
- a significant reduction in costs and increased profits.
- safer electronic transactions leading to increased consumer trust and a bigger potential consumer base.
The eIDAS Toolkit
A set of online resources has been developed to help businesses in Europe understand the benefits of eID and trust services and to assist them in the implementation of these solutions into their daily operations. SME leaders, business organisations and service providers are invited to test, learn and discuss the latest developments and emerging opportunities of electronic identity (eID) and trust services. Get involved now!
- VISIT the eIDAS for SMEs web page for an introduction to the eIDAS Regulation and how it will affect your business, including a short video, quickstart guidebook and a checklist.
- DISCOVER how your business can implement eID and trust service solutions through sector-specific information for the transport, online retail, professional services and financial services sectors.
- LEARN more about the different aspects of the eIDAS regulation, the different services available and how they can benefit your business through our knowledge and learning material including a webinar programme and additional course material. All webinars are recorded and are available online.
- TEST eIDAS solutions in a simulated environment through our interactive tool using real life use cases.
- DISCUSS eIDAS-related issues with other organisations and like-minded businesses in the eIDAS Observatory.
Register for the upcoming webinars:
- “The Benefits of eID and Trust Services in the Professional Services Sector” on the 15th of November 2018 at 13h00. Please register here.
Lithuania hosted an eInvoicing workshop
Christian Vindige-Rasmussen, Martin Forsberg, Arūnas Cijūnaitis,
Aurelija Kriščiūnaitė, Petras Jakavonis, Virginijus Jasaitis, Jonas Žalinkevičius
The creation of a European standard on eInvoicing in public procurement prevents the continued proliferation of non-interoperable standards and syntaces in the Member States. Directive 2014/55/EU established the European standard and set 18 APril 2019 as the legal deadline for Member States to transpose the Directive into national law.
On 25 October 2018 the Lithuanian Ministry of Economic Affairs hosted service providers, public sector representatives and tax authorities to learn about the European eInvoicing standard and prepare for the upcoming deadline. The European Commission prepared and presented the workshop.
"The workshop couldn't have come at a better timing for Lithuania. It provided an excellent overview of eInvoicing and encouraged participants to ask questions. We feel that the eInvoicing workshop helps countries engage in the European eInvoicing process more deeply."
Arūnas Cijūnaitis
Senior Adviser, Ministry of Economic affairs
Republic of Lithuania
What is the Lithuanian status on eInvoicing?
The Lithuanian government is currently considering several draft laws transposing Directive 2014/55/EU, foreseen to enter into force on 18 April 2019. This legislation ensure compliance with the Directive, enabling senders adhering to the European standard on eInvoicing to use freely chosen platforms. Other eInvoices should be send using the national platform 'E-saskaita'.
E-saskaita is maintained by the Lithuanian government 'Centre of Registers', one of two recognised established PEPPOL eDelivery access points in Lithuania, the other being 'SLS' that is run by a private company. 'Centre of Register' is currently adopting changes to be able to accept eInvoices. Lithuania decided not to create additional CIUS.
Considering the ongoing changes and efforts, the Lithuanian government is working hard to ensure to be compliant with the Directive on 18 April 2019.
Did you know that you can customise your workshops?
Lithuania, for example, chose the following workshop modules:
- Introduction to eInvoicing
- The European norm and its content
- eInvoicing from a user perspective (including ordering and payments)
- Understanding OASIS UBL 2.1
- Understanding UN/CEFACT CII D16B
- Funding and grants for eInvoicing
- Introduction to the eInvoice DSI resources and tools
- Introduction to CEF Digital 2018 and eInvoicicing readiness checker
A customised workshop enables the European Commission to prepare workshops that directly address a Member State's wants and needs. This is most beneficial for the Member State and event attendees.
Are you interested to host a workshop?
Request a workshop and consult the presentations from previous sessions. The European Commission is also running a webinar series looking at understanding the technical side of eInvoicing, recordings of which are posted online.
Directive 2014/55/EU
Background on the eInvoicing Directive: The creation of a European standard on eInvoicing in public procurement prevents the continued proliferation of non-interoperable standards and syntaxes in the Member States. The European Parliament and Council therefore adopted Directive 2014/55/EU, establishing the European standard. The CEF eInvoicing Building Block supports the adoption of this standard.
Register for the upcoming eInvoicing event on 4 December in Brussels
CEF eTranslation Presented at Translating Europe Forum 2018
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On 8-9 November 2018, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) organised the Translating Europe Forum.
The fifth edition of the Translating Europe Forum focussed on how translators can work in a rapidly changing industry. The event addressed pressing issues in translation domain, including:
- How can translators benefit from the data they produce?
- How will artificial intelligence affect the language industry and individual translators?
- How is neural machine translation changing the translation profession? What is the EU doing? What about sharing translation data – what are the legal and practical aspects?
During the event, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)-financed eTranslation Building Block was presented to the Forum’s participants.
CEF eTranslation aims to help European and national public administrations exchange information across language barriers in the EU. It provides machine translation that will enable trans-European digital services to be multilingual. Public administrations, citizens and businesses in the EU will thus be able to benefit from digital services in the language of their choice.
eTranslation can be integrated into such digital services, but it also offers direct translation of documents or text snippets through its web page. If you work in a public administration in any EU country, Iceland or Norway, or in EU institutions or EU agencies, you can use this website to request translations to and from any of the 24 EU languages, plus Norwegian and Icelandic.
Closing the final panel of day one, Khalil Rouhana, Deputy Director-General of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CNECT), noted the importance of enabling multilingual digital services through programmes such as CEF.
Context Broker joins CEF
Get to know our new Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Block: the Context Broker. The new CEF Building Block will help build the next generation of European digital public services.
In August 2018, CEF successfully went live with the Context Broker, developed by the FIWARE platform and available for any interested public entities and service providers.
The Context Broker, which is able to handle context information on a large scale by implementing standard REST APIs, allows the European Data Model and EU Member States to collect, manage, use, and share data. Public administration as well as private companies will be involved in this revolutionary way to manage context information. Context Broker enables organisation, including public administrations, to share data in real time at the right time.
Meet Context Broker
Meet the CEF Context Broker to discover how to implement the open standard to manage context information:
- Smart City Expo World Congress,13-15 November in Barcelona, Spain
- 5th FIWARE Summit 27 and 28 November in Malaga, Spain
- CEF New Building Blocks, 7 December in Brussels, Belgium
Registration for the CEF new Building Blocks is open and we hope to see you soon in Brussels!
Get to know Context Broker
Join the conversation on Twitter! #ConnectingEurope #CEFDigital #ContextBroker
CEF eDelivery AS4 adds support for Pull Feature
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The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eDelivery team is happy to announce a new version of eDelivery AS4, one of the technical specifications for eDelivery. This new version, version 1.14, adds a new optional profile enhancement to support the “Pull” feature. The “Pull” feature provides an alternative mode of message transfer that is more suited to some organizations for networking or availability reasons. This new feature is added as an optional Profile Enhancement rather than as a change to the eDelivery AS4 Common Profile. This means that it becomes a selectable option for users that need it but that it can be ignored by other users. Apart from this optional enhancement, version 1.14 is technically identical to the previous version. Users that do not intend to use Pull do not need to upgrade their software or change their configuration.
What is Pull?
In the OASIS AS4 standard on which eDelivery AS4 is based, two modes of message transmission are defined. In the first exchange mode, called “Push” mode, the sender of a message initiates the transfer of the message, opens the network connection to the receiver AS4 messaging server and transmits the data, as a messaging client. In the other exchange mode, called “Pull” mode, it is the sender rather than the receiver that operates a messaging server. The sender merely makes the message available on its server to be “pulled” and lets the receiver initiate, as a messaging client, the actual transfer of the message. Pull mode is similar to the concept of mailboxes.
As a profile, the aim of eDelivery AS4 is to limit options to more precisely fit the requirements of its users and to make implementations and deployments easier, more consistent and less expensive. While the OASIS AS4 specification offers two transmission modes, all previous versions of eDelivery AS4 mandated the use of “Push” mode exclusively and did not allow use of “Pull” mode. The reason is that “Push” mode fits the requirements of the vast majority of users for timely exchange of documents or data better than “Pull” mode, and involves less unnecessary network traffic.
Why add Pull?
In the governance of eDelivery, users can make change requests if they want eDelivery specifications to be changed or extended. Such a request to add support for Pull was made by some organizations that cannot use Push exchanges because, for reasons of security policy or to simplify network management, they do not allow incoming network connections. At the request of the OMB, the eDelivery team prepared a draft profile specification for Pull as an optional enhancement. As with other features of AS4, this eDelivery profile specification restricts and clarifies some features specified in OASIS AS4. The eDelivery team subsequently and issued a public consultation to get input on the specification from the eDelivery community. Since no concerns were raised in this consultation, this draft is now incorporated into eDelivery AS4 as a new subsection in the eDelivery AS4 specification.
Pull as a Profile Enhancement
Starting with version 1.13, eDelivery AS4 is structured as a Common Profile and a set of optional Profile Enhancements. Implementations conform to eDelivery AS4 if they conform to the Common Profile and to zero or more Profile Enhancements. The new “Pull” feature of eDelivery AS4 that is introduced in version 1.14 is specified as a new additional optional Profile Enhancement. The specifications of the Common Profile and of the existing Profile Enhancements in version 1.14 are technically the same as they were in version 1.13. This means that implementations that implemented and conform to the Common Profile (and possibly one or more of the existing Profile Enhancements) for version 1.13 are not affected by the change and automatically conform to 1.14.
Conformance Testing
CEF intends to update its eDelivery AS4 conformance testing service with a test module covering the new eDelivery AS4 pull functionality. This will allow vendors that implement Pull in their products to check that their implementation conforms to the specification of the Profile Enhancement.
What is eDelivery?
CEF eDelivery helps public administrations to exchange electronic data and documents with other public administrations, businesses and citizens, in an interoperable, secure, reliable and trusted way. The CEF eDelivery solution is based on a distributed model called the “4-corner model”. In this model, the back-end systems of the users don’t exchange data directly with each other but do this through Access Points. These Access Points are conformant to the same technical specifications and therefore capable of communicating with each other.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Pull replacing Push?
No, Pull is added as an option, so that it can be used if needed but can otherwise be ignored. We expect most users to (continue to) prefer to use Push.
Is Pull support mandatory in eDelivery implementations?
No, it is an optional Profile Enhancement introduced in 1.14. Implementations are not required to implement the Profile Enhancements. The eDelivery Common Profile, which mandates support for Push, is not changed between 1.13 and 1.14.
At what level is Pull configured?
In AS4, Push or Pull is selected at the level of a so-called Processing Mode (P-Mode). A P-Mode can be specific to a particular Service/Action, or even to specific communication partners.
Domains that use eDelivery AS4 may document, in their domain-specific data exchange specifications, whether or not they require or expect support for the Pull Profile Enhancement for all or subsets of exchanges in their domain.
I’m a user of eDelivery AS4 1.13, how do I upgrade to version 1.14?
If you don’t intend to use Pull, then there is nothing to change.
If you do intend to use Pull, you may have to upgrade your eDelivery software as (the current version of) your product may not have conformant support for pull.
Some products today may be hardwired to use Push (i.e. do not have a configuration parameter to select Push or Pull). If your supplier adds support for Pull, the selection of Push or Pull may need to be configured explicitly for all (including current) exchanges.
I’m a vendor of AS4 software, do I have to implement Pull to be conformant to eDelivery AS4?
Since version 1.13, implementations conform to eDelivery AS4 if they conform to the eDelivery Common Profile and to zero or more of the optional Profile Enhancements. It is up to you as a vendor to decide if you implement the new Pull enhancement. As the Common Profile is mandatory, any eDelivery AS4 implementation must support Push, so you cannot implement just Pull.