How can Identity Matching improve the experience of citizens on online public services?

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There is a growing shift from paper-based documents and procedures towards electronic records and online services in Public Administrations of the European Union. This transformation means that large number of databases are getting connected to each other in order to exchange relevant information between the administrations.

However, those databases are often tailored to the service provided by each administration. Different information is collected about citizens and businesses and may identify people and organisation differently: the social security department may use a national social security number or an association of the name and date of birth of a person, while the taxation office may use a dedicated national tax number, a VAT number, etc.. In addition, differences in the spelling of the names, cities and different approaches with regard to the record of second names, married and maiden names add to this complexity, leading to a situation in which the same person is not always represented under the same identity data.

This means that when databases are connected, it may be difficult for an administration to match the identity of a person in one database to their record in another database. This situation, which is already complex at the national level, is now amplified by the interconnection of the EU-28 Member States' databases, which leads to a real challenge: how to perform identity matching in order to ensure citizens and businesses a smooth experience when accessing online public services accross-borders?

In recent years, EU Member States have been working hard to enable citizens and businesses to access online public services using their national electronic identification solution. These efforts fall directly under the scope of the eIDAS Regulation (EU) 910/2014 on electronic identification, authentication and trust services,  which aims at making national eID schemes interoperable across Europe in order to facilitate access to online public services. 

As a result of the eIDAS regulation, citizens and businesses are progressively able to identify and authenticate themselves with credentials they use in their own country on foreign online public services. However, if the service they want to access cannot match their identity to a record, the experience of the citizens and businesses may be disrupted. For instance, the access to the service may be declined, there might limitation of the service, or there could be the need to shift back to paper-based solutions as a fall-back option, as the citizen would not be recognized as a person for which a previous record already exists.

Conscious that this problem is posing a real barrier to the smooth access to online public services across borders, Member States are working together to exchange best practices on how to perform identity matching following an eIDAS cross-border authentication.

In Spring 2019, EU Member States have already organised two sharing sessions to discuss the topic of identity matching.

Member States discussed the following challenges among others:

• How to perform linguistic based matching ?

  Matching names from different contexts is not easy due to cultural differences concerning spelling and phonetics. For instance, some names may be transliterated from different alphabets. Whilst the process is easier for certain alphabets, e.g. one Greek character is equivalent to one Latin character, the situation becomes more complex with alphabets such as Cyrillic or Arabic. Regarding the former, the name Борис Ельцин would be known as Boris Yeltsin in English, yet it would be written Eltsine in French or Jelzin in German; whilst in Arabic, the name محمد can be written in Latin characters in many different ways, namely Muhamad, Mahomet or Mohamad.

  As a result, central governments and private relying parties are increasingly developing methods to ensure a reliable quality in matching names. With references to the examples mentioned above, if the spellings come to be matched against each other, statistics would align only the most similar ones. Dictionaries could store the most frequent variants and reduce the probability of missing a hit, but would probably be far from being exhaustive. In order to guarantee a match in all cases, a “back to the roots” approach is used, first reconstituting the original script, i.e. in this case in Arabic, then using the internal transliteration mechanism to get the same Latin references for matching.

• How to address false positive?

  False positive consists in creating links between identities that do not correspond to the same person.

  Initially, simple algorithms were developed to handle name matching relying on statistics to identify similarities. These simple approaches failed to produce correct results and often resulted in many false positives in matching two identities. This is especially the case with the phonetics of certain names, which produce similar characters but can be spelt in a variety of different ways. For example, one of the most common surnames in German-speaking countries is Maier, which could also be spelt Mayr, Maier, Meir and Meyer. Due to the magnitude of different matching results there is thus the probability of causing wrong connections, by matching a user to somebody else’s identity.

  Therefore, the current trend of innovation is implementing artificial intelligence techniques and in particular machine-learning algorithms to reduce the number of false positives and allow for auto-resolution. This approach has been adopted by some Member States, where probability calculations are made to reduce the chances of false positives in the national database.

Member States are facing similar challenges linked to the digitalisation of their public services and national records. The European Commission will therefore continue to support them by facilitating the exchange of information and best practices between EU Member States in the upcoming months. 

The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eID Building Block primarily supports the Member States in the roll-out of the eIDAS Network (the technical infrastructure which connects national eID schemes). CEF eID is a set of services (including software, documentation, training and support) provided by the European Commission and endorsed by the Member States, which helps public administrations and private Service Providers to extend the use of their online services to citizens from other European countries.

Visit CEF eID Here

CEF eSignature TLManager “Non-EU”: Spreading the benefits of secure electronic signatures

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The European Commission launched the TLManager "non-EU" to help countries outside the European Union and EEA countries, or international organisations, willing to issue trusted lists in accordance with European standards. Specifically, the compliance with these standards fosters the mutual recognition of trust service providers (e.g. providers of certificates for electronic signatures) listed in these trusted lists with European trust service providers.

According to the eIDAS Regulation (910/2014) each Member State shall establish,  maintain  and  publish  trusted  lists,  including  information  related  to  the  qualified  trust  service  providers. The European Commission helps with this process by offering the EU Trust Backbone. This is composed of the List of the Trusted Lists (LOTL) and the different Member States' Trusted Lists, a critical common asset upon which rely electronic signatures in Europe. The TL manager helps European Trusted List Scheme Operators (TLSOs). 

TLManager "non-EU" designates the version of the application designed for Trusted Lists that are not pointed by the list of the lists published by the European Commission. This application provides more appropriate tools for Trusted Lists that do not figure in the List of the Lists published by the European Commission. Therefore, constraints on the conformance and the signature of Trusted Lists are alleviated and some services as notifications, statistics and EU Trust Backbone have been removed.

TLManager "non-EU" allows the creation, the edit, the signature, the validation and the monitoring of Trusted Lists. Access below if you would like more information on the installation, configuration and user manuals of the TLManager “non-EU” version.

TLManager "Non-EU"

In complete alignment with eIDAS, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eSignature Building Block helps public administrations, businesses and citizens sign electronically through a number of practical supporting services (including TLManager and TLManger "non-EU").

Q1 2019:  New figures published on the CEF Dashboard

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The latest quarterly figures for the CEF Digital Service Infrastructure (DSIs), including Building Blocks, show that their adoption continued to increase in Q1 2019. You can consult these figures directly on the CEF Dashboard.

Below you can find highlights of the latest figures broken down into high, medium and low levels of reuse.

Examples of very high uptake and/or reuse trends

• +500% in projects reusing CEF Context Broker with Italy and Austria representing new Member States;
• Increase in CEF Context Broker trainings;
• Increase in EESSI Implementations: +40% (more than three times amount of documents exchanged).

Examples of medium uptake and/or reus trends

• eSignature: +47.5% conformance tests (steep growth since 2018 Q2);
• eSignature: +50.3% Trusted list conformance tests (steep growth since 2018 Q3),
• eTranslation: +69.7% translations performed by the eTranslation service;
• Public Open Data: +33% software downloads.

Examples of slightly lower uptake and/or reuse trends

• Pre-notified eID Schemes: 2 Member States in 2017 Q4 and 17 in 2019 Q1;
• Peer Reviewed eID Schemes: +66.7% Steep growth since 2018 Q2;
• Notified eID Schemes: +14.3% Slow down in the growth of the previous quarter;
• CEF Big Data Test Infrastructure: +29.4% (projects making use of BDTI service).

The European Commission updates the CEF Dashboard on a quarterly basis with new data and features to improve the visibility on the progress made by the DSIs and to enhance transparency.

To find out more visit the Monitoring Dashboard, the Reuse and CEF Digital.

Romanian Presidency 2019: European Archivist Group and CEF eArchiving meeting

EAG meeting in Bucharest, Romania 6 June 2019 

In order to be available over the long-term, digital information has to be regularly migrated between generations of software, bringing about issues of cost and risks concerning the authenticity and integrity of data. The European Commission's CEF eArchiving team strives to continuously develop, and improve the CEF eArchiving Building Block. In this context, the team attended the 26th European Archivist Group (EAG) meeting in Bucharest, Romania on 6 of June 2019.

The EAG, as CEF eArchiving Building Block's expert group, provides advise and overall strategic input to the Building Block. The EAG consists of one representative per Member State national archive and facilitates cooperation and coordination.

At this meeting, Fulgencio Sanmartin, the CEF eArchiving Building Block owner, and Kelly Liljemo, head of the CEF Stakeholder Management Office in the Commission, presented the CEF programme and status of the Building Block to the EAG.

The EAG decided to establish an EAG subgroup to produce guidance on 'archiving by design'. The Building Block programme will support their work in the future. 

In addition, Jan Dalsten Sørensen, head of digital preservation in the Danish National Archive, and Ricard Pérez Alcázar, Programming and Archival Coordination in the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport, presented how CEF eArchiving is applied in their respective national context. These two practical use case presentations,  of how the roadmap to digital preservation can look like, helped EAG members to understand how to apply eArchiving. 

Interested to learn more about CEF eArchiving . The minutes of the EAG meeting are available to the public. 

Release of CEF eIDAS-Node software version 2.3

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The European Commission is pleased to announce the release of the CEF eIDAS-Node software version 2.3 on 20 June 2019.

Electronic identification (eID) and electronic Trust Services (eTS) are key enablers for secure cross-border electronic transactions and central building blocks of the Digital Single Market. The Regulation (EU) N°910/2014 on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market (eIDAS Regulation) is a milestone to provide a predictable regulatory environment to enable secure and seamless electronic interactions between businesses, citizens and public authorities.

The eIDAS Network consists of a number of interconnected eIDAS nodes, which can either request or provide cross-border authentication. It is the responsibility of each country to implement their eIDAS node.

Release 2.3 of the eIDAS sample implementation for Member States is an all-in-one package for the Java platform. This release is based on version 1.1 of the eIDAS technical specifications.

Most notably, the following changes have been introduced:

• Improvement in logging for better traceability of messages
• Support of JCache: Ignite as default implementation
• Migration to Java 8
• Updated list of supported Web application servers:
  o   Glassfish 4: Full Platform replaced by Web Profile
  o   Dropped Tomcat 7, introduced Tomcat 9
  o   Dropped JBoss7, introduced Wildfly 15
• Bugs and security fixes
  

In addition, the following updates have taken place in dependencies in order to avoid reported related vulnerabilities:

• BouncyCastle dependency was upgraded to v1.60
• Bootstrap dependency was upgraded to v4.3.1
• jQuery dependency was removed from the node (i.e., from the Generic parts)

Finally, this release was successfully tested for interoperability with previous releases of CEF eIDAS-Node v2.2 and v1.4.5, and with the German Middleware v1.1.0

For a more detailed description of the changes introduced with this release please consult the release notes and section 3 "Changes” found in the eIDAS-Node Migration Guide.

Member States can use this release as a sample implementation for demonstration purposes or they can adapt it as a basis for their own eIDAS scheme.

The testing tools (demo SP, demo IdP), the supplied Specific part and the Simple Protocol, should be used for demo purposes only on your local machine, and should not be deployed in your infrastructure.

With each release, the CEF eID Team strives to improve users' CEF eID experience. Future versions of the technical specifications will be updated based on feedback received on this current version.

eIDAS-Node v2.3

CEF eTranslation Upgrade: eTranslation 2.7

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On 19 June 2019, the European Commission released version 2.7 of CEF eTranslation. This release is a major upgrade with significant benefits for users.

The CEF eTranslation service provides the ability to translate formatted documents and plain text between any pair of EU official languages, as well as Icelandic and Norwegian (Bokmål), while preserving to the greatest extent possible the structure and format of those documents.

eTranslation can be used in two distinct ways.

• One-off translations, where eTranslation provides a web user interface for direct use by individuals (human-to-machine use);
• As an integrated translation solution. In this case, eTranslation provides machine translation capabilities for web content and digital services through an Application Programming Interface (API) for machine-to-machine use.

 eTranslation 2.7 improvements include:

 Engines:

• Upgrades for pre/post-processing for all engines, including:
• Capitalisation of month name placeholders (CZ, EN);
• Normalisation of backtick to apostrophe (all languages);
• Cleaning of spaces, normalisation of quotes and apostrophes (all languages);
• Regular expression correction (PT);
• Closing doublequote (ET);
• Adjustments to placeholder capitalisation (LT);
• Hyphens (n-dash, m-dash, etc.) according to style guide (ET, HU, LT); and
• Avoid capitalisation within a compound (DE).
• New release: Court of Justice Case Law domain-specific engines (BG, CZ, DA, EL, ET, FI, HR, HU, LT, LV, MT, RO, SK, SL, SV → FR, FR → BG, CS, DA, EL, ET, FI, HR, HU, LT, LV, MT, RO, SK, SL, SV);
• Upgrade: Cutting-edge domain engines (EN → ES, IT, PT);
• Upgrade: Bundesbank domain engine (EN↔DE);

 Front-end

• Web page responsiveness

 Dashboard

• CAT tool statistics: new breakdown, counted by page

 Back-end (cloud)

• GPU core assignment services
• Memory allocation improvements (GPU0 lock removed)
• Redis clustering

My Europe my language

Ensuring that cross-border, digital public services are multilingual is a central component of the Digital Single Market.

The EU now has more than 500 million citizens, 28 Member States, 24 official languages and 3 alphabets. The harmonious co-existence of many languages in Europe is a powerful symbol of the EU's aspiration to be united in diversity - a cornerstone of the European project.

The CEF eTranslation Building Block draws on decades worth of work by EU translators. It offers excellent results for EU policy related and legal. It passes the Intellectual Property Rights of the translation back to the owner of the original text submitted for translation. CEF eTranslation further allows for the fast translation into multiple languages at once and is compatible with a large variety of formats(doc, pdf,...).

 Use CEF eTranslation

Study on the evaluation of invoicing rules of Directive 2006/112/EC

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The Study on the evaluation of invoicing rules of Directive 2006/112/EC on the common system of value added tax was carried out for the Commission and is intended to contribute to the evaluation of invoicing rules.

The Study has four main objectives, namely i) measuring the decrease in the administrative burdens for businesses; ii) assessing the degree to which the new rules on electronic invoicing (eInvoicing) have contributed to the uptake of this technology; iii) assessing the role played by the new invoicing rules to support EU Member States’ efforts to tackle VAT fraud and improve tax compliance; iv) formulate evidence-based possible ways forward.

Regarding the eInvoicing the findings of the Study are of significant relevance following the creation of the European standard on eInvoicing. Directive 2014/55/EU on electronic invoicing in public procurement mandated the creation of the standard, which makes it possible for sellers to send invoices to many customers by using a single eInvoicing format and thus not having to adjust their sending and/or receiving parameters to connect with individual trading parties.

The Study concluded that increased adoption of eInvoicing is the main driver for the reduction in administrative burdens for companies estimated at € 920 million in the period 2015-2017. These savings represent the bulk of the regulatory cost savings generated by the Directive, which, overall, amount to € 1.1 billion over the same period.

The VAT Directive introduced three main changes to the European legal framework for eInvoices: the definition of an eInvoice, the principle of equal treatment and the principle of technological neutrality. As a result, both the fragmentation and complexity of eInvoicing rules across the EU were largely addressed by the Directive,

According to the study, the Directive had a measurable impact on increasing the rate of adoption of unstructured eInvoices, because of the simplifications which encouraged companies to switch from paper invoices to PDFs. Other significant factors behind eInvoicing uptake were the behaviour of customers and suppliers, that can either push for or start accepting eInvoices, and - for structured eInvoices - the imposition of an obligation to use eInvoicing in B2G transactions, via Directive 2014/55/EU.

The Study notes that the eInvoice definition adopted by the VAT Directive and the Directive on the use of eInvoicing in public procurement is different, as the latter only refers to automatically-processable eInvoices. While it does not create practical problems, some stakeholders pointed out that the definition adopted by Directive 2014/55 is more up-to-date and better supports the full realising of eInvoicing benefits.

The European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eInvoicing Building Block helps EU Member States continue to adopt eInvoicing respecting the European standard by offering on-site eInvoicing Trainings and Workshops; supporting webinars; a User Community hosting online discussions and a dedicated Conformance Testing Service.

Read the Report

New version of the EAS code list

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On 17 June 2019, the European Commission published an updated version of the EAS code list. 

The European standard on eInvoicing defines the business term "Electronic Address" to support the identification of sending an receiving parties in electronic addresses when exchanging eInvoices through transmission networks. The identifiers used in the an electronic address can be from any identification scheme. The Electronic Address Scheme (EAS) code list contains a list of the identification schemes that can be used in the eInvoicing standard. The EAS code list does not imply or recommend any particular delivery mechanism or standard.

The new version of the code list includes four requests for change. The Commission received 13 requests for change, consisting of 12 additions and one update. Four requests were accepted for change and nine placed on hold pending further information on the business case.

Requests for Change may be submitted through the CEF Service Desk. The next foreseen code list publication is September 2019. This means requests for change should be submitted by the end of August.

The Commission supports the adoption of eInvoicing respecting the European Standard with the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eInvoicing Building Block. The services of this Building Block help European administrations to comply with the eInvoicing Directive, and helps solution providers to adapt their services accordingly. CEF eInvoicing provides:

• eInvoicing Service Desk
• eInvoicing on-site and remote Trainings
• eInvoicing Conformance Testing

CEF Big Data Test Infrastructure presented at the workshop ‘Public sector data: still a missed opportunity?

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How do European public administrations deal with the challenges relating to data availability, data silos?

On 4 June 2019, the Italian Digital Transformation team, hosted by the European Commission, held a workshop exploring best practices and solutions to the identified problems.

The EU has sought to address these issues through a number of policy initiatives, such as the European Data Portal, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Digital programme, the ISA² programme and the free flow of non-personal data, to name some examples.

In the eGovernment Action Plan Steering Board, several EU Member States have intensified their collaboration to help tackle these issues related to Data Analytics, with Italy leading the workstream on Data Analytics. 

In the Survey on “Public Sector Data Analytics”, recently promoted by the Italian government’s Digital Transformation team, results showed that for many Member States, these challenges persist. As such, Italy decided to hold this workshop.

One of the most important takeaways from this workshop was that Member States should take the opportunity offered by the CEF Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI) Building Block, which allows users to experiment with big data.

During the afternoon session dedicated to interoperability, Bram de Schouwer and Lorenzo Carbone, from the Commission’s BDTI team presented the Building Block and what public administrations stand to gain.

CEF BDTI offers virtual environment templates to explore and experiment with various data sources, software tools and big data techniques. This allows public administrations to focus on gathering knowledge, insight and value from their data, instead of setting up and maintaining a complex experimental environment. CEF BDTI provides:

• Interoperability through environments and tools make use of open source and widely accepted technologies and standards;
• Performance through an architecture that can easily scale its resource;
• Scalability as data sets can increase or decrease in size over time;
• Reliability and availability as data is stored securely and pilots don't fail mid-process;
• Knowledge base and advisory through a knowledge base; and
• Proven best practices and tools

During this workshop, the CEF BDTI team presented how CEF BDTI promotes ‘interoperability by default’ and applies interoperability principles at the various levels of government, local, regional, national and international. They also demonstrated how CEF BDTI fosters interoperability between different sources, which can be improved through big data techniques to allow the reuse of data and, ultimately, transform it into knowledge.

Learn about CEF BDTI

The Commission is also organising a webinar on the CEF Service Offering Canvas for Digital Agencies. Digital Agencies develop and manage a number of open, reusable solutions that cover common needs in the field of digitisation, such as login, authentication, secure delivery of data, electronic signatures and others.

Register here

Context Broker's smart services are making the city of Eindhoven a safer place

Context Broker enables the use of IoT data to predict and prevent hostile behaviour and noise pollution on the city’s biggest party street, Stratumseind, to keep the city festive and safe.

@Downtown Eindhoven at night by Ljupco Smokovski / Adobe Stock

Quick facts

• Country: The Netherlands
• Organisations: Municipality of Eindhoven and the Dutch Institute for Technology, Safety & Security (DITSS)
• Project: Living Lab Stratumseind 2.0
• Challenge: How to maintain the festive atmosphere while increasing safety and security?
• Solution: Context Broker enabled IoT-based smart services to predict and prevent hostile behaviour and to help enforce local regulations
• Building Block: Context Broker
• EU funded: No

Smart services to make a smart city

In 2010, Mr. Tinus Kanters, responsible for code enforcement at public events in the Municipality of Eindhoven, attended an interactive event called the ‘STRP Art & Technology Festival’. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Near-Field Communication (NFC) technologies allowed visitors to get involved and do things such as provide feedback on artwork via touch screens. Inspired by the festival and talks of the new wave of technology we now call the Internet of Things (IoT), Tinus Kanters came up with the idea that such devices could also be applied in the context of managing a city. He developed this thought further, and so the Municipality of Eindhoven and the Dutch Institute for Technology, Safety and Security (DITSS) launched the Living Lab Stratumseind 2.0’ project in 2012. Living lab is an innovation and research concept where ideas are sourced and co-developed in an open community and tested in real life. This gives everyone, including citizens, a unique opportunity to get involved and have a say.

Stratumseind is one of the biggest party streets in the Netherlands located in Eindhoven with around 20,000 visitors every weekend. The challenge with Stratumseind comes from the large crowds and parties that cause noise, arguments, confrontations, and sometimes, luckily only rarely, violence. The idea was to use IoT devices for enforcing noise regulation, crowd management and for identifying, preventing and de-escalating potentially hostile behaviour and incidents.

Co-creation in a Living Lab

Eindhoven, a city of approximately 230,000 citizens, is a hub for technology and IT. It’s a city of pilot projects with a lot of cooperation between research institutes, universities and businesses consisting of multinationals, SMEs and start-ups.

After Tinus Kanters decided to turn Stratumseind into a living lab, many local start-ups and even global companies pitched in the development and testing of technologies, such as microphones or cameras, in real-life scenarios. By 2015, there were already many actors and technologies involved, tests conducted and proofs of concept developed. Therefore, the living lab started to look for a standard or framework to integrate the bits and pieces into one holistic solution. In order to share knowledge and collaborate with others, the Municipality of Eindhoven became a member of the Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) and adopted the recommendations from the Venturespring report “A Spotlight on Smart City Eindhoven”. Among its recommendations, the report suggested evaluating FIWARE-based solutions, such as Context Broker.

Eindhoven chose Context Broker as it was deemed the most advanced standards-based solution in the market. It enables the collection of IoT-based data from various different sources and formats, and collectively analyses them for correlations and insight. Among the IoT sensors were microphones, cameras and ground monitors. Wireless microphone arrays now automate noise level regulation. If music is too loud, an automated notification is triggered. If noise continues, law enforcement will issue a violation notice, or even a ticket. Cameras were installed to analyse images and track crowds. Ground monitors help to make sure that public squares do not get too crowded for safety. In addition, Eindhoven uses specific street lighting as IoT actuators.

Smart City solution for all

Based on five years of the Living Lab’s continuous innovation, Eindhoven now has a scalable and reusable solution (incorporating Context Broker) that can be expanded to the whole city – and even to other cities. The municipality has built relationships with innovative hardware developers, without being ‘locked-in’ to any specific vendor or technology. When all data is in one system, the Context Broker, it is easier to create value-added services. 

The municipality has created a four-tier framework to simplify the common challenges faced by smart cities. The solution has been shared with regional, national and European network organisations, such as Creative Ring, ENoLL, Eurocities, EIP-SCC, LUCI and OASC, and is available for all as the Smart City StarterK!t. The kit consolidates five years of research into creating software prototypes for the following applications:

• Sensors that help enforce local laws and regulations.
• Video cameras for safe crowd management during popular events.
• Software to identify early signs of violent encounters and to get police assistance faster.

The Context Broker was also adopted by the Europe Horizon 2020 programme’s SynchroniCity project as the core component to realise two of the three Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs): the de-facto European standard open Context Information Management API and the Shared Data Models. Synchronicity is based on the concept that smart-solution interoperability can be achieved even if technical implementations are different, as long as the MIMs are the same. Therefore, Context Broker and the MIMs are integral parts of the common architecture and approach to connect IoT technologies, applications and services, which in the end, provide the real added value. Eindhoven is also an active member of Synchronicity.

Next steps

The project team is now working with the Netherlands Standardisation Institute (NEN) to standardise their implementation of Context Broker in the context of improving a smart city’s safety on a party street. They are also planning on expanding the solution throughout the city with more Context Broker connected sensors.

Digital Assembly 2019: Trusted eGovernment: Interoperability & once-only principles for a Digital Europe

Europe’s Single Market is one of the EU’s greatest successes. It has stimulated considerably intra-EU trade in goods, which more than quadrupled from € 800 to € 3.063 billion per year, with 3.5 million people crossing an internal Schengen border every day.

Meanwhile, the digitalisation of services and procedures means citizens and businesses can interact with public administrations with greater ease. But ensuring trust in digital transactions is fundamental to their increased adoption. In addition, an absence of interoperability between digital public services means that Europeans risk not taking full advantage of what Digital has to offer.

The European Commission has launched a wide-range of initiatives, from Europe-wide platforms promoting interoperability to leading-edge legislation supporting all policy domains.

The Single Digital Gateway will facilitate online access to the information, administrative procedures and assistance services in the Single Market. A fundamental enabling principle of the Single Digital Gateway is the 'once-only' principle. This means that citizens and businesses provide diverse data only once in contact with public administrations, while public administration bodies take actions to share and reuse these data – even across borders – with the consent of the citizen and always respecting data protection. This means that by 2023, citizens can ask their public administration to share certain documents with other European public administration, which makes it possible to perform a number of procedures, such as registering a car or claiming a pension, in all EU member states without the need to submit documents that the citizen already submitted elsewhere.

The European Commission supports cross-border use of the once-only principle with the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eID, eSignature and eDelivery Building Blocks. More than just standards-based modular solutions, these Building Blocks directly support not only the Single Digital Gateway but also the implementation of the eIDAS Regulation (on electronic identification and trust services). eIDAS ensures that people and businesses can use their own national eIDs to access public services in other EU countries and creates a cross-border market for e-signatures, electronic seals, etc. In addition, the ISA² programme's Framework for Base Registry Access supports the cataloguing of existing data sources at EU level, the so-called Registry of Registries. It is composed of a data model and few taxonomies to classify and harmonise at EU level public public services, life and business events and evidences.

The European Commission will present these at the stand Trusted eGovernment: Interoperability & once-only principles for a Digital Europe, during the Digital Assembly 2019, held in the context of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU.

Publication of the eArchiving Building Block technical specifications

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The European Commission is happy to publish updated technical specifications for the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eArchiving Building Block.

Karin Bredenberg, Activity 2 lead on behalf of the whole CEF eArchiving team from the National Archives of Sweden, noted:

"The DILCIS Board is proud to announce the official release of the next generation of E-ARK specifications! The new releases include a number of bug fixes and other updates which were only possible thanks to the huge amount of valuable feedback from the archival community in early 2019! We would like to thank you all and welcome everyone to both use and contribute to the specifications!"

https://dilcis.eu/13-news/27-new-specification-releases-published

The specifications can be found here:

“Common Specification for information Packages (CSIP)”

Textual document online: https://earkcsip.dilcis.eu/

Pdf: https://earkcsip.dilcis.eu/pdf/eark-csip.pdf

XML: https://earkcsip.dilcis.eu/schema and https://earkcsip.dilcis.eu/profile

 “E-ARK SIP”

Textual document online: https://earksip.dilcis.eu/  

Pdf: https://earksip.dilcis.eu/pdf/eark-sip.pdf 

XML: https://earksip.dilcis.eu/schema and https://earksip.dilcis.eu/profile

 “-E-ARK AIP”

Textual document online: https://earkaip.dilcis.eu/

Pdf: https://earkaip.dilcis.eu/pdf/aip-specification.pdf  

“E-ARK DIP”

Textual document online: https://earkdip.dilcis.eu/

Pdf: https://earkdip.dilcis.eu/pdf/eark-dip.pdf  

XML: https://earkdip.dilcis.eu/profile  

 “Common Specification for Electronic Records Management Systems”

CS ERMS specification as pdf: https://github.com/DILCISBoard/E-ARK-ERMS/blob/master/Specification/CSERMS_v2.0.0.pdf

XML-schema: https://github.com/DILCISBoard/E-ARK-ERMS/blob/master/Schema/ERMS.xsd

XML-schema documentation pdf: https://github.com/DILCISBoard/E-ARK-ERMS/blob/master/Schema/ERMS_Schema_Documentation/pdf/ERMS.pdf

“Common Specification for Geospatial data”

CS Geospatial data as pdf: https://github.com/DILCISBoard/E-ARK-Geodata/blob/master/Specification/CSGeo_v2.0.0.pdf

“Common Specification SIARD”

More work is going to occur with SIARD. Comments have been gathered during the review: https://github.com/DILCISBoard/SIARD/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+label%3A%22Review+comment%22+

SIARD format 2.1 (English): https://github.com/DILCISBoard/SIARD/blob/master/specification/2018-12-04_SIARD_Format_Version-2_1-English.pdf

SIARD format 2.1 (German): https://github.com/DILCISBoard/SIARD/blob/master/specification/2018-12-04_SIARD_Foramt_Version-2_1-German.pdf

SIARD format XML-schema: https://github.com/DILCISBoard/SIARD/blob/master/schema/metadata.xsd