CEF eDelivery: Modularization of e-SENS AS4 Profile Proposed
European Commission, 2017
The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eDelivery is a network of nodes for digital communications. It is based on a distributed model where every participant becomes a node using standard transport protocols and security policies. It helps public administrations to exchange electronic data and documents with other public administrations, businesses and citizens, in an interoperable, secure, reliable and trusted way.
The CEF eDelivery solution is based on a distributed model called the “4-corner model”. In this model, the back-end systems of the users don’t exchange data directly with each other but do this through Access Points. These Access Points are conformant to the same technical specifications and therefore capable of communicating with each other.
CEF eDelivery e-SENS AS4 profile and the ENTSOG AS4 profile of the European energy sector have strong similarities.
Consequently, the European Commission proposes to modularise its profile into a common core module with a number of optional, independent add-on modules. This will lead to a larger combined market for providers of AS4 solutions and at the same time continuity and backward compatibility with the previous versions of the e-SENS and ENTSOG profiles for which the market already provides solutions and which are currently in production.
This modularisation will subsequently increase choice of supplier to public administrations and other users. The core module is domain-independent and is in itself already sufficiently complete for most projects. Furthermore, the new extensibility option will make it possible for projects to create additional modules as required.
The proposed evolution of the e-SENS AS4 profile of CEF:
- Has no impact on existing implementations because no existing functionality is removed or changed. Hence, implementations currently conformant to e-SENS AS4 will continue to be conformant independently of the modular profile.
- The add-on modules derived from the e-SENS AS4 profile provide continuity to current and future users of the features specified in those modules. In the future, additional modules can be added to provide additional optional features without impacting current users and implementations that do not use those features.
The proposal is described in the CEF eDelivery User Community. It provides a detailed analysis of the profiles and describes the impact of the modularization on conformance, the profile test assertions and the conformance testing service. It also provides a roadmap for the proposed updates. Comments on the content of the proposal can be sent by email to CEF-EDELIVERY-SUPPORT@ec.europa.eu by Friday 08/09/2017.
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