Once-Only and eDelivery presented during the International Data Spaces Symposium 2023 in the Hague
23 March 2023 | 2 minute read
On 21-23 March 2023, the International Data Spaces Symposium brought together the diverse landscape of data space initiatives together, to learn from successfully mature data space projects, discover the business benefits of utilising sovereign data sharing and, ultimate, to co-create the future of data spaces.
The Commission presented the Once-Only Technical System and eDelov in a lightning pitch and info stand within the event’s exhibition area.
On 23 March 2023, the European Commission organised a panel discussion looking at the Once-Only Technical System (a recognised data space) and how the eDelivery Building Block contributes to the Once-Only architecture.
On 21 February 2023, the European Commission organised the fourth instalment in the 2022-2023 OOTS Implementers’ Café webinar series.
The Once-Only Technical System (OOTS) connects EU public authorities, so they can exchange official documents and data at the citizen’s request. It puts into practice the Once-Only Principle, which states that citizens should not be forced to provide information to authorities if another authority already holds that information in electronic format.
The first part of this online event looked at evidence exchange from a UX perspective.
The opening presentation considered a fictional example. For the preposes of explaining the ‘Once-Only’ user experience, a character is defined as having a nationality (Italian), to have competed secondary school in Italy, have moved to Belgium, where she completed a bachelor's degree and got married. She is also defined as disabled and wants to apply for a study grant from Germany.
To complete this procedure, the relevant German online portal would ask the user to provide several evidences (in this case, secondary school diploma, bachelor's degree, marriage certificate and disability certificate), to be accessed through the Once-Only Technical System.
This example therefore explored evidence requesting and evidence location through the Once-Only Technical System.
Experts from the Commission then moved to discuss ‘OOTS common services’. These are interoperability solutions that are necessary for the proper execution of the evidence exchange process within the Once-Only system.
During this Implementers’ Café, experts from the Commission presented two OOTS common services:
- The Data Service Directory (DSD), a catalogue of Evidence types that the evidence providers can provide upon request. It is used in the Evidence Exchange process by the evidence requesters to discover the evidence providers that can provide the evidence they require; and
- The Evidence Broker (EB), an authoritative system that maps specific data sets as evidence types that prove specific requirements. The evidence requester consults the EB to find which types of evidence can be requested as evidence for a specific Evidence Subject, taking into account the subject's location and/or jurisdiction.
The Semantic Repository (SR) is another common service, which acts as a data portal for the technical system and is currently still in development. This will be explored in a future Implementers’ Café.
In addition to the OOTS common services, the European Commission and Member States have further developed a catalogue of reusable services including:
- e-Government Core Vocabularies: simplified, reusable and extensible data models that capture the fundamental characteristics of a data entity in a context-neutral fashion
- Various testing services and resources;
- The eDelivery building block, a package of technical specifications based on open standards to allow Member States to create a network of nodes for secure digital data exchange;
- The eIDAS eID building block for cross-border authentication.
As with previous Implementers’ Cafés, the second half of the event specifically addressed the preparation of the 2023 OOTS Projectathon series.
The OOTS Projectathons enable national teams to pair up with others to run tests, using different actors, roles and testable profiles to check the status of their Once-Only Technical System implementation. The first Projectathon takes place in April 2023.
Participation in Projectathons is specifically for national implementation teams working on the implementation of the Once-Only system.
Participants learnt about the Projectathon registration processes and an overview of the test scenarios that will be explored during the Projectathon.
Have a look at this article to learn more about the configuration of eDelivery Access Points ahead of the April Projectathon.
You can download the slides from the event page.