European Commission Publishes 2021 eInvoicing Country factsheets
The European Commission is pleased to announce the 2021 update of the CEF eInvoicing Country factsheets and the publication of the CIUS overview.
Since 2016, the European Commission monitors this data collection, yearly, to provide an accurate overview of the transposition of Directive 2014/55/EU on eInvoicing in public procurement, the adoption of the European standard on eInvoicing (EN) and Business-to-Government (B2G) solutions.
These country factsheets provide country-specific information about the national legal frameworks, eInvoicing platforms, implementation of the European standard (EN), and the strategy in place to receive and process electronic invoices in each country and monitoring strategy. This year exclusively, several factsheets include additional information on the eInvoicing national initiatives from countries willing to go beyond the scope of the Directive.
The publication of these factsheets further enhances transparency and cooperation among eInvoicing stakeholders and encourages a harmonised eInvoicing implementation. To support users in their cross-border eInvoice exchange, our team also published an updated CIUS overview presenting a snapshot of the CIUS in use in the EU market.
All country factsheets and the CIUS overview are now shared on CEF Digital, and more information on eInvoicing is available on Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eInvoicing Building Block.
eDelivery's role in the monitoring of goods entering the EU
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union (DG TAXUD) has a new import control system. It comes as a significant reinforcement of the Customs Union's "first line of defence" against security and safety threats posed by illicit traffic in goods across the EU's external borders.
Known as ‘ICS2’ (Import Control System 2), the programme has been operational since March 15, 2021, and it's one of the main contributors towards establishing an integrated EU approach to reinforce customs risk management under the Common Risk Management Framework (CRMF).
How the EU Customs System works
EU Customs is divided into five distinct parts: entry, import, transit, export, and exit. ICS2 focuses on the entry part, which gathers the necessary information before the goods even leave their country of origin. That information is sent in three stages. The first one is called the 'pre-load stage,' which happens before the goods are even loaded onto a plane or ship. From the analysis done at the 'pre-load stage,' officials might determine the goods are too risky to be sent. There is a second round of check-ups in the "pre-arrival" stage, which occurs while the plane is still in the air, or the ship at sea. Once they reach their destination, the shipments go through another round of check-ups before entering the European internal market.
ICS2 and how it works
ICS2 will help establish an integrated EU approach to enforce the risk of the customs management framework. It is a core delivery of the Union Customs Code, the EU customs risk management strategy and action plan adopted by the Council in 2014. It will support adequate risk-based customs controls whilst facilitating legitimate trade across the EU external borders. It will do this through improved data-driven customs security processes adapted to global business models.
Paolo Gentiloni, Commissioner for the Economy said: "The launch of this new import control system will bring a step-change in the capacity of customs to protect our citizens and the EU's internal market from threats posed by the traffic of dangerous and illicit goods. It will help deliver a more efficient and effective risk-based approach to customs controls in our rapidly evolving supply chains, while supporting a level-playing field and facilitating legitimate trade across our external borders."
Background
In 2018, DG TAXUD decided to use the AS4 message exchange protocol in their ICS2.
Following joint work in DG TAXUD and DIGIT, ICS2 now uses eDelivery in its Shared Trader Interface (ICS2 STI) to provide economic operators who bring the goods into the European Union a single instance of a harmonised trader interface with the customs authorities.
By connecting to an AS4 Access Point, any economic operator with a role in the commercial supply chain can easily submit electronic entry summary declarations to a Member State customs authority. The streamlined process considers international standards and avoids unnecessary point-to-point interaction for businesses and customs controls.
The secure eDelivery channel between the economic operator’s Access Point and the STI’s Access Point prevents data loss, damage, unauthorised alterations and provides evidence that information has been sent and received.
CEF's eDelivery contribution
In a year, the ICS2 Shared Trader Interface (STI) system can generate over 1.5 billion consignments, resulting in three times as many messages transmitted via the eDelivery AS4 message exchange protocol.
eDelivery is a CEF building block that provides technical specifications and standards, installable software, and ancillary services to allow projects to create a network of nodes for secure digital data exchange. By building with eDelivery, public and private organisations from different sectors can easily create a secure and interoperable channel to transfer documents and data among each other over a public or private network.
AS4 is the core standard promoted through eDelivery. Using the eDelivery AS4 Dynamic Receiver profile, DG TAXUD could reuse the pre-existing UUM&DS authentication system, where economic operators can register their digital certificates to authorise messages arriving at their eDelivery Access Point.
The use of eDelivery allows each economic operator to select its preferred eDelivery-conformant software product to establish its Access Point, which avoids vendor lock-in and allows organisations to make the best possible product selection according to their constraints.
DG TAXUD chose to use eDelivery because it is a standards-based, well-established message exchange protocol providing security, reliability, and scalability. More than 35 countries have deployed almost 600 eDelivery Access Points to date. ICS2 STI and systems like it can, through eDelivery, accommodate vast numbers of economic operators in a market-friendly and future-proof way.
How can CEF help you?
At the Connecting Europe Facility, we give you access to free tools, support, and funding to help you build your digital services. Here are some other Building Blocks you might be interested in.
Collect data from sources and support intelligent decisions at the right time
A free and secure translation tool to break language barriers in the EU
Offers digital services capable of electronically identifying users from all across Europe
Call for reviewers: eArchiving specifications, procedures, and guidelines
The Digital Information LifeCycle Interoperability Standards Board (DILCIS Board) is seeking reviewers for eArchiving specifications and guidelines in the area of geodata.
Created by the E-ARK project, these specifications are a core component of the CEF eArchiving Building Block.
eArchiving aims to provide the core specifications, software, training, and knowledge to help data creators, software developers, and digital archives tackle the challenge of short, medium, and long-term data management and reuse in a sustainable, authentic, cost-efficient, manageable, and interoperable way.
What you need to know
The specifications and documents for review will be released in five groups over 2020-2021. The fifth group of documents available for review are:
- Documents
Please provide feedback through the DILCIS Board website review page. All of the specifications, procedures and guidelines are listed, with a short description, a link to the full document, and a set of questions to answer. The review will close on 18 July 2021.
If you have any queries regarding the review process please contact the DILCIS Board: info@dilcis.eu
The eArchiving Building Block and its services are offered at no cost to projects and organisations wishing to ensure secure, long-term data preservation. Visit the CEF Digital platform to learn more.
When his grandfather was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) in 2018, Adam Milton-Baker felt compelled to try to do something to help other families that may face the same fight in the future.
A software developer, Adam was interested in creating systems that integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Robotics in web-based user interfaces. He also had previous experience with developing Artificial Intelligence for the detection of Breast Cancer. When Adam's grandfather was diagnosed with AML, he started the Peter Moss (his grandfather's name) Acute Myeloid & Lymphoblastic Leukemia AI Research Project. Two years later, in 2020, the Asociación de Investigacion en Inteligencia Artificial Para la Leucemia Peter Moss was founded. Its mission is to advance leukemia medical research and medical tech using the latest technologies while keeping it open-source and free. One of the Association’s most important developments is the Hospital Intelligent Automation Server (HIAS).
Making decisions based on contextual information
HIAS is an open-source server that stores all the data gathered by various AI & IoT devices. To make sense of all that data, the team was looking for a tool that could put all that information into context.
"We work a lot on IoT devices," Adam told CEF. "The idea is that people can go into our repository, download a particular project, and set up on their own HIAS network as a device."
The role of CEF's Context Broker
The Context Broker holds all of the contextual data from those devices (configuration, name, etc.). What ends up being shown in the User Interface (UI) is all the information gathered by the Context Broker.
"When we are inside the UI, and we want to have a look at a device or change some of the information, the UI requests the Context Broker, and the Context Broker returns all the information for that device. That's how Context Broker powers the network, it basically holds all of the information, everything that's on the network, and we can use that information to display on the UI," Adam explained.
With the Context Broker’s help, the Magic Leap Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Detection System, one of the open-source projects the team developed, aims to make physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real-time. In this so-called mixed reality, the goal is to utilize an artificial intelligence algorithm trained to detect Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) in images of peripheral blood samples and display the results in Mixed Reality. The Context Broker used is a Python implementation developed by the team to align with the NGSI V2 specs.
The dataset that made this project possible is the Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Image Database for Image Processing by Fabio Scotti, Full Professor at Università Degli Studi di Milano Dipartimento di Informatica. The classifier used - an artificial intelligence model that "classifies" data - achieves 98% percent accuracy and works well at classifying unseen images (images it has never seen before) on a small test set. However, to really validate the model, the Association needs to make partnerships with hospitals and medical centers that may provide the amount of data required to be confident that the model works well in the real world.
The classifier is homed on a Raspberry Pi 4, which hosts a local endpoint, making the classifier accessible to the Magic Leap Application. It then allows the near real-time classification of ALL in Mixed Reality over the local network. The Raspberry Pi 4 is connected to the HIAS IoT JumpWay MQTT broker; requests are authenticated using the HIAS private blockchain via the MQTT IoT Agent; and classifications are stored in the historical database with a hash of the category for data integrity.
In the future
It was not that long ago that applying these technologies to everyday medicine seemed like a distant dream. However, increased cooperation among the scientific community has come to accelerate technological advances, especially in healthcare.
Thanks to the internet, we now live in an era where information and data are more easily available to researchers. One of the challenges now is finding easy-to-use, regulated ways to aggregate that information, enabling them to arrive at the best decisions. In that regard, the Context Broker can play a vital role not just in the fight against Leukemia but also against many other diseases for which we have not yet found a cure.
The CEF Context Broker
Context Broker is a digital platform component that enables the integration of gathered data, including insights for further exploitation. It acts in three distinct ways:
- Data Broker - assembling information from different systems, eventually belonging to various organisations, instead of performing in separate silos.
- Leveraging investments - by enabling the Digital Single Market with portable and interoperable solutions in a data marketplace.
- Easy development - by reducing costs and time in developing context information-based platforms and solutions, it is possible to create meaningful dashboards in a few days.
How can CEF help you?
At the Connecting Europe Facility, we give you access to free tools, support, and funding to help you build your digital services. Here are some other Building Blocks that might be of interest to you.
Collect data from sources and support smart decisions at the right time
A free and secure translation tool to break language barriers in the EU
Offers digital services capable of electronically identifying users from all across Europe
The BIG Hackathon, Bridging Interoperability Gaps featuring X-Road
The European Commission invites ethical hackers to the BIG Hackathon featuring X-Road® from 28 June to 5 July 2021.
The 'BIG Hackathon' is an online hackathon organised by an open source initiative funded by the ISA2 Sharing and Reuse Action (2016.31). It will build a generic bridge able to connect national systems to the CEF eDelivey network.
Working with NIIS, the hackathon will use the generic bridge to connect X-Road® (the national data exchange system used in Estonia and Finland) to link with software products in the market that use the eDelivery European interoperability protocol.
Find out how to get involved on Joinup!
Published: E-ARK in New Review of Information Networking, Volume 25, Issue 2
Leading publisher of academic journals and books, Taylor & Francis, has published its New Review of Information Networking, Volume 25, Issue 2 (2020).
This issue contains four articles about the E-ARK project, E-ARK being the consortium providing the standards and much technical support for the eArchiving Building Block. One of the portfolio of digital Building Blocks funded by the European Commission through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF).
The articles on this issue consist of:
- The E-ARK Project: An Introduction to the European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation Project;
- The Application of E-ARK Tools for Archival Interoperability to Support a Long-term Sustainable Digital Single Market;
- Beyond Relational Databases: Preserving the Data;
- The Role of the Data Warehouse in the Archive;
You can access these articles for free if your organisation has an account with Taylor & Francis, or through individual payments for the respective articles.
Data and documentation are strategic resources, the preservation of which is fundamental to a sustainable digital transition. The eArchiving Building Block provides core specifications, software, training and knowledge to help people preserve and reuse information over the long-term.
The eArchiving Building Block and its services are offered at no cost to projects and organisations wishing to ensure secure, long term data preservation. Visit the CEF Digital platform to learn more.
Exchanging messages with CEF eDelivery at DigitALL Public 2021
In April 2021, the European Commission's CEF eDelivery team participated in the DigitALL Public conference, a three-day virtual event that looked back at the joint achievements of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) and the Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens (ISA²) programmes over the last years and set the scene for the digital journey ahead under the new Digital Europe Programme.
The eDelivery session “Exchanging messages with CEF eDelivery” demonstrated CEF eDelivery in a very practical way.
Following an introduction to the CEF eDelivery building block, the session showed participants how to send AS4 messages using two eDelivery Access Points. During the webinar, attendees first watched a live technical demonstration of sending and receiving AS4 messages where SoapUI was used to simulate the two backend IT systems that interact with Domibus via web services. In the second part of the demonstration, sending and receiving AS4 messages using the file system were shown.
eDelivery is a Building Block that provides technical specifications and standards, installable software and ancillary services to allow projects to create a network of nodes for secure digital data exchange. eDelivery provides the following services:
- Access Point software & specifications
- SMP software and specifications
- SML software, SML service and SML specifications
- PKI Service
- Security Controls guidance
- Connector specifications
- eDelivery Stakeholders onboarding
- eDelivery Conformance and connectivity testing
- Cost estimation tool
- Self-assessment tool
- eDelivery Service Desk
- eDelivery Training and Deployment
- eDelivery Developers Community management
- Trust Models Guidance
- Guidance on Digital Certificates
Participants to this webinar learned about:
- The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eDelivery Building Block specifications and services
- Domibus - the European Commission open source sample implementation of the eDelivery AS4 profile that can be used to get familiar with the technical specifications in a test environment or can work as a solution in a production environment
Only recordings from the DigitALL Public main stage are public. So take a moment to see the ‘aftermove’ and recordings form the event main stage.
You can visit the European Commission’s CEF Digital platform to learn more about the eDelivery Building Block and deploy it in your project or organisation.