€4 million available to implement CEF eArchiving and Public Open Data

The 2020-2 Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom call for proposals opened on 30 June 2020. The deadline to submit your proposal is 5 November 2020.

€1 million in CEF grant funding is available to co-fund projects deploying the CEF eArchiving building block. eArchiving provides technical standards and specifications for preserving, migrating and reusing data securely, while ensuring data integrity and interoperability with other systems.

This funding will focus on domains that need digital preservation services and tools other than national archives, such as digital libraries, justice, finance, environment etc. It will also aim to stimulate the integration of eArchiving tools and services with other CEF building blocks and other digital service infrastructures that can benefit from them.

Submit an eArchiving proposal

In addition, the Public Open Data call makes €3 million available in grant funding to projects looking to generate, make accessible and reuse public sector information in a way that creates direct and indirect benefits for EU citizens, businesses and public administrations. Projects looking to generate, disseminate and/or reuse open-access public data are strongly encouraged to do so using existing APIs, such as the CEF Context Broker building block. Context Broker is an API funded by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) that gathers data from various sources for visualisation and analysis in real-time. 

This call is aimed in particular at projects focused on the generation and reuse of datasets in specific domains set out in the Open Data Directive: geospatial, earth observation and environment, meteorological, statistics, companies and company ownership and mobility. Projects focusing on other domains may also be considered if justified. 

Submit a Public open data proposal

The Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA) is the EU agency supporting the European Commission by organising CEF calls for proposals. You can find all the information you need to apply on INEA's website.

To build a Digital Single Market, 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. 

CEF eTranslation is making multilingual information on COVID-19 more accessible

During an international crisis, the fast and accurate exchange of information across languages is key. The COVID-19 Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) initiative is a collective effort from the language technology community to improve information exchange about the virus, across all EU languages and more. This is with the view of making information more readily available to the general public, regardless of the source language, but can also support researchers and medical personnel.

Improving access to information on the virus across language barriers involves developing automated solutions for, firstly, gathering relevant, multilingual information on the virus and, secondly, accurately and reliably translating this information. 

In order to achieve this, the European Commission's Directorate-General for Communications Networks, DG CNECT, is spearheading the MLIA initiative. This will take the form of a series of research challenges in which teams develop solutions for directly improving access to information on COVID-19 across language barriers, through information extraction, multilingual semantic search and machine translation. The Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), which operates the eTranslation machine translation system, will be participating, as will international research challenges like Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) from the USA, NTCIR from Japan and the Conference for Machine Translation (WMT). 

However, these research challenges rely on the collection of a vast amount of language data, or linguistic resources, related to coronavirus. The more linguistic resources and data that machine translation tools and multilingual search engines have at their disposal, the better they work. 

Some of the most important language technology networks in Europe provide support and supply the language data necessary to drive this initiative. The European Language Resources Coordination (ELRC), part of CEF's eTranslation, the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), and the European Research Infrastructure for Languages Resources and Technology (CLARIN ERIC), are all directly involved in the organisation of the research challenges. 

The ELRC currently has 195 COVID-19 Language Resources 

How does eTranslation help?

The European Language Resources Coordination (ELRC) is part of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eTranslation Building Block. The ELRC has adapted pre-existing data gathering activities to specifically target multilingual resources related to COVID-19. The ELRC repository now hosts more than 260 such language resources, such as multilingual data from the European Vaccination Information Portal, all of which are vital to optimising the performance of multilingual semantic search and machine translation. This wealth of linguistic resources helps to both identify and categorise relevant information and translate it more accurately.

If information about coronavirus were made readily available in multiple languages, citizens all over Europe could access information from a variety of sources to check the latest public safety and travel guidelines, or even updates on promising new treatments, building a more complete picture to be as well-informed as possible. 

Ultimately, this initiative aims to pool our collective knowledge, creating open and accessible tools and resources that will not only improve access to multilingual information during the coronavirus pandemic, but also during moments of future crisis. 

How can CEF help you during and beyond the pandemic?

You can use CEF eTranslation's machine translation tool to share essential information in a vast variety of languages quickly, using state-of-the-art neural machine translation technology. eTranslation is freely available to all SMEs, and translates formatted documents or plain text between any EU language, Icelandic, Norwegian, Russian or Mandarin. Visit eTranslation to get started. 

If you want to know more about how our open, reusable digital solutions can help public administrations and businesses during the pandemic, visit our dedicated page.

Building Blocks against COVID-19

Zipper Services in Romania excels in product development and compliance thanks to CEF eSignature

Need for compliance

Zipper Romania specialises in optimising companies’ internal data and document management processes. Serving the needs of both public and private organisations, their solutions range from document archiving to invoice automation with the objective of increasing operational efficiency while reducing costs. As digital solutions play an important role in Zipper Romania’s service offering, the company actively seeks to stay on top of relevant technical standards, specifications and open-source software.

When Zipper Romania designed a solution for e-archiving, one requirement in particular turned their attention to the European Union’s existing solutions provided through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme: the Romanian e-archiving law (Nr. 135/2007) requires documents to be signed by the issuer using a qualified certificate. Zipper Romania must therefore validate the resulting electronic signature before a document can be archived to ensure adequate proof of the issuer and origin.

In Europe, electronic signatures are regulated by the eIDAS Regulation, which mandates the use of certain standards and specifications in the process. To support organisations like Zipper Romania, CEF provides a solution, called the eSignature Building Block, which packages these standards with sample software and other support services to help Europeans build e-signature solutions valid in all EU countries (and beyond).

Sign securely across borders

The main component of CEF eSignature is the open-source library for Digital Signature Services (DSS). In essence, the DSS is a collection of standards, called baseline profiles, which specify how electronic signatures can be created and validated anywhere in Europe. CEF eSignature also provides open-source sample software, demos and support services to make it swift and easy for anyone to adopt electronic signatures that work across country borders.

Benefits of CEF eSignature

While Zipper Romania researched a suitable long-term solution, they developed an intermediary, proprietary e-signature solution for their e-archiving service. However, they quickly switched to the DSS for its open-source community committed to European standards. Solutions developed in such communities benefit from a wide range of expertise. In addition, adopting a CEF solution based on European standards eliminates the risk of misinterpreting specifications – and gives a company like Zipper Romania extra credibility in front of new clients.

The DSS is a ready-made solution that Zipper Romania found easy to adopt and use for creating and validating electronic signatures. It eased the learning curve and shortened the analysis, implementation and testing phases of the project, which took a total of three months. Zipper Romania estimates that without the DSS, similar functionality would have taken four months longer to accomplish. Reduced development time also reduced development costs, which made it easier for the company to offer the final solution, RepoZIP, to customers at a competitive price.

Zipper Romania promotes and acknowledges the value of common standards coordinated at the European level to bring benefits to all. Furthermore, they perceive standards as an opportunity to grow and prosper outside national borders. This is a European vision, where common standards pave the way to a Digital Single Market.

Implementation

When designing the RepoZIP solution, the company came across several approaches to the long-term preservation of documents. This raised essential questions about the role of electronic archiving: was it to preserve a document for the long term? Or to ensure integrity by providing evidence that a document has not been modified? DSS’s sample software and demos made it effortless for Zipper Romania to test potential solution scenarios and to decide on the best approach for them and their clients. Zipper Romania wanted to make it easy to send documents to RepoZIP directly from the file browser or from different applications (ERPs, CRMs, CMSs etc.) via a standardised Restful API.

The solution that Zipper Romania found the best uses eSignature DSS to first validate a given document’s electronic signature before the document is approved for archiving. In this step, the DSS is used, for example, to check whether the signature is qualified and what type of a certificate was used. The document to be archived is then packaged in a digital container together with the proof that the signature was validated, as well as other metadata detailing the archiving process, as required by the Romanian law. In the next step, the container is encrypted to safeguard integrity. The encryption happens by applying a Long-Term Archival signature (also called an LTA-level signature) with a qualified time stamp provider. Zipper Romania's way of creating and encrypting containers is also based on eSignature DSS specifications: the Associated Signature Container (ASiC) baseline profile for the container and the CMS Advanced Electronic Signature (CAdES) for the encryption.

The steps in blue are conducted with CEF eSignature.

Future prospects

With an eye on further benefiting from CEF services and solutions, Zipper Romania is looking into integrating other CEF Building Blocks, such as eDelivery and eInvoicing, in their service offering. The company also aspires to become a Qualified Trust Service Provider in the near future.

CEF eTranslation now includes Simplified Chinese Mandarin (Chinese)

The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eTranslation Building Block can now process requests in Simplified Chinese Mandarin (Chinese).

You can access this service on the eTranslation web-browser page (first time users can register here). Select the “General Text” domain in “Advanced options”. Please note that for whole-document translations, PDF is not supported.

During 2020, collaborative language resources and tools projects will also cover the take-up of language tools and resources for the following economically, scientifically and socially relevant non-EU languages: Arabic, Japanese, and Turkish. Russian became the first such language to go-live in December last year.

This notable upgrade comes as Europe’s SMEs and startups can join public administrations in benefiting from this state-of-the-art online machine translation service, which guarantees the confidentiality and security of all your translated data.

Public administrations in Europe may integrate eTranslation with their systems to make digital content and services multilingual.

Use etranslation

CEF eTranslation engines upgrade 3.5

In May 2020, the European Commission updated the translation engines of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eTranslation Building Block.

Some highlights of this upgrade include:

New Engines:

• EU Formal Language:
• English↔Irish (mapped to same engine as "General Text")
• Valtioneuvoston Kanslia ("Finnish Prime Minister's Office"):
• Finnish↔English, Swedish (data from the Finnish Prime Minister's office combined with a selection of other sources)

Web user interface:

• Direct link to disclaimer on data privacy page
• Multiple file download bug corrected

Front-end:

• New category of user: "EU Freelance Translator"
• Improve proxy detection for call-backs to avoid failed connections
• Web service documentation updated

 Dashboard:

• Request history for external clients with STATS access
• Statistics page for quick view/stats aggregation

Back-end:

• DRA enabled release for dynamic allocation of engines (as from 13 May)
• Conversion bug fix for certain txt-to-tmx documents

The CEF eTranslation Building Block is a state-of-the-art online machine translation service. This service is offered free of charge and will help public authorities save time and money translating documents and text between any the EU’s 24 official languages plus Icelandic and Norwegian in a fully secure way.

This tool is also now open to European startups and SMEs. This mean small businesses can translate any document or plain text in an easy, free and secure way in more than 24 languages.

European Commission is making is making up to €4 million of CEF grant funding available for multilingual, digital projects that want to use or contribute to the CEF eTranslation Building Block. Apply by 25 June 2020.

Use cef etransaltion

Three new CEF EBSI Blockchain Use Cases

In May 2020, the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP) voted on a set of use cases to be implemented in the second iteration of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI).

Via the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure the European Blockchain Partnership aims to see a Europe where EU-wide cross-border public services use blockchain technology. The European Blockchain Services Infrastructure will be materialised as a network of distributed nodes across Europe (the blockchain), leveraging a number of applications focused on specific use cases. Since 2019, the use cases consisted of: Notarisation, Diplomas, European Self-Sovereign Identity and Trusted Data Sharing.

In the upcoming months, the EBSI team will work on the specifications and technical aspects of three new use cases: SME financing, European Social Security Identification Number and Asylum process management.

These use cases aim to contribute to the EU's goal of digitalising European public administrations. They will further reinforce the goal to establish the digital single market by using methods that are univocally recognised in each Member State, while still ensuring the integrity and resilience of data infrastructure networks and communications.

The three newly selected use cases

For each use case, a Member State led and composed user group is established. These user groups aim to deliver a prototype application on the EBSI blockchain.

SME financing: this use case will create an EU-wide platform for debt financing to open up new sources of (co)-finance political efforts in the area of sustainable economy, innovation and SMEs modernisation. The EBSI-powered public platform will offer services provided by a consortium of private and public entities. Its goal includes facilitating the flow of private financing from capital owners to SMEs or green projects.

European Social Security Identification Number: this use case will aim to prevent fraud or errors by ensuring easier communication and data exchange between European countries and the EU Institutions. The ESSIN will be a process carried out by public authorities providing welfare services to securely analyse the data of EU citizens and guaranteeing a uniform level of service. In addition, it will secure rights portability for citizens between different Member States. It will further be a solution to fight frauds, errors, and duplication of identities.

Asylum process management: this use case will aim to expand the scope of EBSI to a wide range of public sector processes. It will facilitate the management of cross-border and cross-authority processes in dealing with asylum applicants. This use case will use EBSI to securely propagate between the competent asylum authorities process updates and certain process data, and subsequently contribute to the digitalisation of cross-organisational processes.

The European Commission is currently making €3 million available to support the roll-out of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure. You can apply until 25 June 2020.

visit ebsi:

Experimenting with CEF BDTI led to new dimensions in labour market intelligence

©Adobe Stock by Kzenon

With a significant share of job offers advertised online, the data contained within them hold valuable pieces of information about the current job market. Tapping into this data with big data technologies can help to understand, for example, trends in existing and emerging skills required and the number of job vacancies. Establishing objective information about the labour market is important for policy and decision makers to ensure Europe's competitiveness and that the skills of the workforce meet demand. When working on new data-driven solutions, the European Commission’s big data testing tool helps to experiment with real data before starting system development.

Perfect partners

About a half a decade ago, CEDEFOP and Eurostat realised that they were working hard on the same data to produce similar insights into the European labour market. On the one hand, CEDEFOP is an agency that needs labour market data to help policymakers and other labour market actors on EU and national levels to understand trends in the supply and demand of vocational labour and skills, as well as any imbalances between the two. On the other hand, Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Union, helps policy and decision makers by gathering and providing the official statistics on the EU society, economy and environment, including the European labour market. Both want to use Online Job Advertisements (OJAs) to explore and extract new kinds of information using big data technologies.

In March 2019, CEDEFOP launched the Skills Online Vacancy Analysis Tool for Europe (Skills-OVATE), which already in its first limited-scope implementation proved the system’s potential to process and analyse OJA data for skills demand. Eurostat has been promoting the use of OJA data by the NSIs to enhance the labour market official statistics, supporting the ESSnet Big Data since 2015. CEDEFOP and Eurostat are now taking steps towards expanding CEDEFOP's Skills-OVATE to adapt it to the production of European official statistics; and to extend it to the exploration of many other sources of web data with the creation of the European Web Intelligence Hub.

Benefits of BDTI

Before taking on the European Commission's big data tool, BDTI, NSIs tried to collect and analyse OJA data by themselves, but they ran into technical issues with regards to insufficient computing power and memory. The big data nature of OJAs required a more robust infrastructure, which CEF provided in BDTI free of charge. BDTI provides a readily available testing environment with customisation possibilities and support services. Its virtual environment templates work with various data sources, software tools and big data techniques. BDTI allowed the agencies to focus on gathering knowledge, insight and value from their data, instead of putting effort into setting up a complex experimental test space. This enables the creation of quick prototypes to verify and test data hypotheses, methodologies and visualisations. 

In 2019, the BDTI team set up a data testing environment for a four-month period and organised a training session for selected NSIs. The objective was to teach and empower NSIs to explore real OJA data from their national points of view. This data had been collected by CEDEFOP over the course of more than one year. BDTI helped to save time, costs and effort in innovating and validating which statistical data products are feasible and worth developing in Skills-OVATE. As part of this implementation, BDTI handled 15 terabytes of OJA data and millions of queries.

“BDTI helped us tremendously by allowing us very quickly to have an appropriate environment for the training event and the following exploration of the OJA data.”

Fernando Reis, Big Data Statistician, Eurostat

What’s new in OJAs?

OJA data enable the creation of unique and innovative indicators to complement traditional official statistics. They will not be used to replace existing statistics, but to bring new dimensions to labour market intelligence. The traditional means for achieving statistics involve more time-consuming processes through surveys, which explore the labour force (supply side) and job vacancies (demand side). OJA data brings to the table near real-time statistics and more details about skills and skill demand.

Here are some more benefits to statistics based on OJA big data:

• Can be produced more often and faster than traditional statistics (released quarterly)
• Provides information about jobs omitted in traditional channels e.g. international jobs
• Effective way to study even sub-national labour markets
• Possibility to extract more detailed information about title, occupation, skills and location

How it works

Extracting data from OJAs requires converting the digital footprint left by companies in the online labour market into 10 relevant statistical variables. Since none of the data collected and analysed relate to personal information, the system falls outside the scope of EU data protection legislation (GDPR). The two types of data collected are:

• Structured data contained in data fields, such as job location and publication date, quickly collected by data scrapers.
• Natural language found in free text. Here, Artificial Intelligence (AI), combining Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms, are used to clean the free text and extract relevant data on the occupation, education and skills required, salary and so on.

BDTI helped to plan for more targeted use of resources in extending Skills-OVATE to statistics, and to refine the technical requirements for producing them. For example, NSIs knew that OJAs do not always translate to job vacancies. A job vacancy can be advertised on several platforms, and there may be multiple job vacancies behind a single OJA. Thanks to BDTI, the workgroup has a better understanding for establishing a method to calculate indicators without bias, before taking the time and effort to code functionalities in Skills-OVATE. 

Next steps

Skills-OVATE now collects OJA data from all EU Member States and more than 94,000 webpages, including Public Employment Services (PES), private job boards, recruitment agencies, company websites and online newspapers. Skills-OVATE is expected to be fully operational later on in 2020 and provide a single, centralised pan-European system for all stakeholders on all levels: EU, national and regional. 

The next steps for the Web Intelligence Hub include setting up data quality monitoring procedures, defining a governance model and expanding the system for the large-scale production of official statistics in labour market intelligence and beyond. The Hub will be based on the Skills-OVATE system and leverage the collaboration between the NSIs kick-started by the BDTI environment and training.