CEF Building Blocks presented at the COP25
©Council of the European Union
The European Commission presented the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Blocks during the UN Climate Change Conference in 2019.
The presentation took place in a session “Supporting urban decision making to address SDG goals and compliance with climate change mitigation regulations”.
This session was opportunity to learn about concrete real use cases where smart software solutions are helping to mitigate climate change effects in urban areas. It paved the way for an open debate around the role that open source, standard-based, Data Models and APIs can play in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by means of fostering Open Innovation and the support of a "Develop Once, Replicate Everywhere" principle that accelerates deployment, therefore multiplies positive impact of smart solutions.
Connecting remotely, Thomas FILLIS – a consultant for the Commission’s Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT – presented several CEF Success Stories, looking how the use of CEF Building Blocks is building smarter services for a greener future, namely:
- How the province of Utrecht fosters cycling by equipping bikes with air quality sensors to map healthier routes and to create a healthy urban space for all;
- Air pollution is a major problem for public health in urban environments. Many European cities are confronted with increasing air pollution and associated health problem. Barcelona, the second most populous city of Spain, is one of them.
- How Saint-Quentin uses CEF to address stakeholders’ concerns about the use of water in the city’s green spaces
- How Finland is using eInvoicing to reach its climate targets;
Download the presentation and see the success stories
To build a Digital Single Market in Europe, the CEF programme funds a set of generic and reusable Digital Service Infrastructures (DSI), also known as Building Blocks. The CEF Building Blocks offer basic capabilities that can be reused in any European project to facilitate the delivery of digital public services across borders and sectors. Currently, there are eight Building Blocks: Big Data Test Infrastructure, Context Broker, Archiving, eDelivery, eID, eInvoicing, eSignature and eTranslation.
A Blockchain DSI (the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI)) will soon become a fully operational Building Block, and the Once Only Principle (OOP) is a preparatory action under CEF.
CEF eInvoicing Conformance Testing extended to automated script
The CEF eInvoicing Conformance Testing service have been extended with automated script, making your compliance tests easier to access.
You will have the possibility to upload your test evidence onto the server directly accessible to the Innovation & Networks Executive Agency (INEA) and therefore fulling your test evidence requirement for your granted project.
In addition, you can access your test reports directly on the server GUI.
This Conformance Testing service allows solution & service providers and public entities to check conformance of their eInvoicing solution against the European standard on eInvoicing (EN16931) in a specific syntax (the structure of the electronic message containing the invoice).
The European Commission funds the Conformance Testing service through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eInvoicing Building Block. In addition, CEF eInvoicing currently offers public and private sectors on-site eInvoicing Trainings and Workshops; supporting webinars; a User Community hosting online discussions, a Registry of supporting artefacts to implement European standard.
European Blockchain Service Infrastructure to be presented at EEMA High Level Fireside Briefing
On 25 February 2020, Joao Rodrigues Frade – Head of Sector for the CEFBuilding Blocks in the European Commission – will present the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) during a EEMA High Level Fireside Briefing on 25th February 2020
EEMA is a leading European independent, not-for-profit, Think Tank, active in the area of identification, authentication, privacy, risk management, cyber security, the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and mobile applications.
EBSI is a joint initiative from the European Commission and the European Blockchain Partnership to deliver EU-wide cross-border public services using blockchain technology. This year, EBSI is set to become a Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Block. As of this month, European Blockchain Partnership members will start a preliminary testing of the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure.
An emerging technology, Blockchain has the potential to permeate general economic activities and public services at large. How? Have a look at this video and see!
EEMA briefings explore the latest technology and solutions. Led by charismatic experts, in an informal setting, to gain knowledge and practical implementation techniques for their organisations. You can register for this briefing here.
Visit the CEF Digital site to see how EBSI - and other CEF Building Blocks - can support your digital transformation.
Access point accreditation: EU, AU, NZ & SG - first in the world in all four PEPPOL territories
©Adobe Stock
Europe's Digital Single Market is built on pan-European legislation, which enable convenient cross-border online digital services. Currently, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eDelivery Building Block supports the use of the AS4 messaging protocol by public and private entities (including SMEs) to create a secure channel for the transmission of documents and data by electronic means, over the internet or via a private network.
AS4, a Conformance Profile of the OASIS ebMS 3.0 specification, both provides evidence relating to the handling of the transmitted data, as well as protecting it against the risk of loss, theft, damage or any unauthorised alterations.
Storecove, a SaaS e-invoicing solution provider based in The Netherlands, with offices in Australia, and a fully AS4 compliant Peppol Access Point, managed in December 2019 to become the first access point in the world to be accredited by the authorities in all four PEPPOL territories: the EU, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
The PEPPOL network enables businesses across Europe to communicate electronically with public buyers in various stages of the procurement process and is being used by various European governments, service providers and private companies, but is also being used beyond in countries such as Singapore, New Zealand and Australia.
The PEPPOL Authorities decided to make support for the PEPPOL AS4 profile mandatory in the PEPPOL eDelivery Network. This decision will take effect as of 1 February 2020 and it means that every participant in the PEPPOL network must be capable to support the AS4 protocol.
The European Commission welcomes the increased use of AS4 within OpenPEPPOL, together with OpenPEPPOL's own international growth as a network. This demonstrates clear progress towards the adoption of open, secure standards in Europe.
Successful integration of eID Schemes notified in 2018 with EU Login
©Adobe Stock
2019 ends with good news following successful integration of eID Schemes notified in 2018 with EU Login to fulfil the European Citizens’ Initiative.
As of 2019, the European Commission is pleased to announce that five new Member States – Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg and Spain – have been able to successfully integrate their respective notified eID (electronic identification) Schemes with EU Login. These follow the previous integrations with Germany and Estonia.
What is EU Login?
EU Login is the European Commission user authentication service, which allows authorised users to access a wide range of Commission web services. EU Login now serves as an entry point for over 1000 information systems with more than 5 million active users, composed of collaborators from the European institutions but also citizens wanting to access EU Services. This system is integrated with the eIDAS network, allowing users to identify and authenticate to the services thanks to their nationally-issued eIDs. The eIDAS network falls under the scope of the eIDAS Regulation (EU) 910/2014, which aims at making national eID schemes interoperable across Europe in order to facilitate access to online services.
To authenticate through EU Login, users can use their EU Login accounts or social media accounts, but also their notified eIDs, provided that national eIDAS-Nodes are connected to the Commission eIDAS-Node with which EU Login is integrated.
According to article 10 of the new Regulation (EU) 2019/788 on the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI), Member States are obliged to connect their nodes to the Commission eIDAS-Node by 1 January 2020. This would support the recognition of notified eID schemes by the central online collection system developed by the Commission. In this way, the successful integration of eID schemes notified in 2018 allows the Member States mentioned above to fulfil the Regulation (EU) 2019/788 on the ECI by 1 January 2020.
How to integrate eID Schemes with EU Login?
According to the eIDAS Regulation, Member States are obliged to recognise eID schemes from other Member States for accessing online public services no later than 12 months after their publication in the list of notified eIDs. Because of that, the process for integrating notified eID schemes with EU Login follows the order set by the date of publication, and consists of four main steps:
- The Commission invites notifying Member States to start the Integration.
- Notifying Member States provide the Commission with the connection data of their nodes.
- Notifying Member States and the Commission configure their respective eIDAS-Nodes.
- Member States perform some tests and confirm that the integration is working properly.
What will happen next?
The aim for 2020 is to proceed with the integration process with the Member States that notified their eID Schemes in 2019. These include Czechia, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Latvia and Slovakia, as well as the second eID schemes notified by Italy and Belgium.
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.
Introducing eArchiving in Latin America
During the last quarter of 2019, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eArchiving Building Block was presented in Latin America. In the framework of SITA (Archival Technological Innovation week) 2019, an annual event held by the General Archive of the Nation of Colombia, experts from across Latin America presented examples of technological innovations for archives. The presentation of EU's eArchiving Building Block was warmly received, raising a great interest within the audience.
Click on the file to watch video (Spanish)
Many national archives in Latin America have started to implement repositories that allow them to preserve digital content produced by the public sector. Public sector transformation is currently experiencing an important level of development. In this sense, the General Archive of the Nation, Organiser of the event, and the National Archive of Chile, one of the main guests, have started to develop their own projects of digital preservation repositories and are keen to learn from experiences being developed elsewhere.
For these projects, the existence of common specifications and reference tools, as those within eArchiving, constitutes a great reference that can facilitate the completion of their objectives.
The National Archive of Costa Rica, whose project has the same acronym as the Colombian project, ADN (Archivo Digital Nacional) deliberately coincidental with the Spanish acronym for deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA contains information to build and maintain an organism, similar to how archives contain a nation’s or an organisation’s information.
The CEF eArchiving Building Block 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.
The CEF programme supports a number of Building Blocks: Big Data Test Infrastructure, Context Broker, Archiving, eDelivery, eID, eInvoicing, eSignature and eTranslation. A European blockchain infrastructure (the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) will soon become a fully operational Building Block, and the Once Only Principle (OOP) is a preparatory action under CEF.
eArchiving Building Block promoted at the SEDIC professional Breakfast in Madrid
Since 2011, the Spanish Society for Scientific Documentation and Information (SEDIC) has organised an annual “professional breakfast” to address the different current issues faced by records and document management professionals. SEDIC is one of the biggest professional organisations of the Spanish records and documents management community, Since 2015 these events has been organised in collaboration with the Faculty of Library and Information Science of the Complutense University of Madrid allowing the event to reach specialised academia and the future professionals.
The 2019 Breakfast discussed “The challenge of digital preservation: Current situation and perspectives”. This event gave voice to different experts and professionals who have been working in projects related to the field of digital preservation, so they could share their experiences developing these projects. Carlota Bustelo, lead consultant of Gabiente UMBUS SL and partner of the EARK3 project, presented the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eArchiving Building Block.
Carlota Bustelo took part in the central panel debate along with Josetxo Cerdan, Director of the Spanish Cinematheque; Juan Ramón Romero, Director of the National Historical Archive; Ricard Perez, Head of the e-documents management and administration unit of the State Archives; and Mar Morillo Director of the digital processes and services division of the National Library of Spain.
During the debate the different speakers shared their experience implementing their digital preservation strategies and the challenges that they have faced when implementing them. Among the different challenges, funding and the multitude of actors involved, infrastructure and technological development where some of the more mentioned.
The eArchiving Building Block was presented as a European open solution under permanent construction with the intention of not only answering to the challenges that digital preservation presents, by guaranteeing that the data preserved in any part of Europe is interoperable so it can be accessed and reused anywhere in the EU. The idea of the Building Block was welcomed by an audience willing to hear of new solutions that came from shared experiences at a European level.
4th ELRC Conference in Helsinki: Why Language Data Really Matters
On 26 – 27 November 2019, the 4th European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) Conference took place at the Radisson Blu Seaside in Helsinki (Finland). More than 150 participants attended from all EU Member States, Norway and Iceland.
Overall, the conference marked a major milestone in the life of ELRC, as for the first time, the ELRC White Paper “Sustainable Language Data Sharing to Support Language Equality in Multilingual Europe” was published. The White Paper includes the results of a two-year investigation on the infrastructures for sharing language resources in Europe and how language data sharing could be improved (cf. the dedicated article further down).
The 1st Conference Day focused on the major obstacles and barriers that were found to limit the sharing of language resources, one of them being the lack of understanding for the importance and value of language data.
ELRC Project Manager Dr. Andrea Lösch summarising event key takeaways (L)
Countdown to the ELRC Country Expo (R)
The 2nd Conference Day consisted of a Country Expo with one booth per Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)-affiliated country to facilitate match-making between different countries, public services and academic/non-academic solution providers.
The detailed programme and all conference presentations are available here.
The ELRC Network manages, maintains and coordinates the relevant language resources in all official languages of the EU and CEF-affiliated countries. It also Implements the acquisition of additional language resources and related language processing services, as well as their provision to the language resource repository of the CEF eTranslation Building Block.
The CEF eTranslation Building Block allows for easy access to the machine translation service for both people and machines and guarantees continuous service of high quality, with due consideration for the confidentiality and security of data during the translation process.
CEF eTranslation is a machine translation tool, which draws upon decades worth of work by EU translators and is designed to retain the format of structured documents during translation. It can translate multiple documents to multiple languages at once and guarantees continuous service of high quality, with due consideration for the confidentiality and security of data during the translation process.
CEF eTranslation can be integrated into an online site or service, making it multilingual; or used by officials in public administrations directly as a secure machine translation tool.