eDelivery bringing immediate value to the OOTS, EHDS and eFTI projects

In December, the eDelivery team engaged closely with the Once-Only Technical System (OOTS), European Health Data Space (EHDS) and electronic Freight Transportation Information (eFTI) communities to demonstrate the added value of eDelivery for these projects, on the one hand, and to help them understand how they can adapt eDelivery to their specific needs, on the other hand.

The OOTS community was given a presentation to explain the role of eDelivery in the OOTS architecture in the OOTS Implementers Café #2. The OOTS is the first EU-wide cross-sectoral and cross-domain data space that enables the sharing of information between public administrations across borders between EU countries. It is cross-sectorial and can be expanded beyond the current scope of life events set out in the Single Digital Gateway Regulation. 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 presentation of the eDelivery Building Block in the OOTS Implementers Café was followed by a lively Q&A session during which Member States raised several questions on key topics, like the difference between static and dynamic discovery, the possible role of dynamic discovery using SMP and SML in the OOTS, and the possibility for a country to use a single versus several Access Points within the Once-Only eDelivery network. It was also highlighted in the meeting that the OOTS community can rely on the eDelivery service offering and on the cooperation between the OOTS and eDelivery teams also in the new year. On 26 January 2023, a co-organised hands-on webinar will be held, showing the participants how they can start building their eDelivery network for the OOTS. During the webinar, the audience will attempt to establish several eDelivery Access Points and use them to share (sample) evidence.

The EHDS – a health-specific ecosystem comprised of rules, common standards and practices, infrastructures, governance and legal frameworks is a key pillar for the European Health Union and the first concrete step in secondary use of health data (for research and policy-making purposes). EHDS aims to empower individuals through better digital access to their personal health data, to support free movement by ensuring that health data follow people, to unleash the data economy by fostering a genuine single market for digital health services and products and to set up strict rules for the use of individual’s non-identifiable health data for research, innovation, policy-making and regulatory activities. eDelivery's contribution to enable the creation of the EHDS is already explained at length in our dedicated article, but shortly, according to the blueprint for the HealthData@EU infrastructure, the HealthData@EU nodes will use eDelivery AS4 Access Points to ensure interoperability for cross-border data sharing. The data space will also use the eDelivery PKI service to obtain the certificates that will underpin the trust and security of the HealthData@EU nodes. Information about the participants in the data space – data users and data holders – will be managed in a dynamic manner by publishing it in the (central) eDelivery SML Service rather than encoding it on all HealthData@EU nodes. In this context, the eDelivery team demonstrated to participants in the EHDS2 pilot how sending AS4 messages via eDelivery Access Points would look like and discussed the directions for future cooperation.

Last but not least, the eDelivery team participated in two events related to the electronic Freight Transport Information (eFTI) project  – a workshop on the implementation of the eFTI architecture on 2 December 2023, and the "Technical Fridays" event of the Digital Transport and Logistics Forum (DTLF) on 9 December 2023. eFTI is a set of data elements processed electronically for the purpose of exchanging regulatory information among economic operators (mainly companies involved in freight transport and logistics) and between operators and competent authorities. The implementation of eFTI is monitored by the Digital Transport and Logistics Forum (DTLF) – an expert group of the European Commission that brings together public and private stakeholders from various transport and logistics communities. DTLF supports the European Commission in promoting the digital transformation of the transport and logistics sector. In these events, the team presented eDelivery as a potential message exchange solution for the eFTI exchange environment.

While the use of eDelivery in the eFTI project, and if so its scope of deployment, are still ongoing, in the case of EHDS and OOTS the decision and modalities to deploy eDelivery in their respective architectures are already in place. The cooperation with the three partners will continue throughout the year and beyond.

The eDelivery Building Block

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.

Domibus is the sample software provided by the European Commission to implement an eDelivery AS4 Access Point for the interoperable, secure and reliable exchange of data. It is based on the eDelivery AS4 profile, an open technical specification for the secure, web-based, payload-agnostic exchange of data or documents.

DomiSMP is the sample software provided by the European Commission to implement an eDelivery Service Metadata Publisher for publishing and retrieving data necessary for an eDelivery party to dynamically configure its system for message exchange with counterparties using eDelivery. It is based on the eDelivery SMP profile, an open technical specification for publishing service metadata within a 4-corner network.

DomiSML is the sample software provided by the European Commission to implement an eDelivery Service Metadata Locator for an eDelivery party to discover the URLs of other counterparties using eDelivery Access Points and their corresponding metadata. It is based on the eDelivery BDXL profile, an open technical specification for locating Access Points within a network, and on the PEPPOL SML Specification, a technical specification defining a BDXL administration API. 

Stay tuned for the latest updates on the eDelivery services by checking the building block's twitter and web page. For more information, do not hesitate to register for personalised news or contact us via our portal or by e-mail: EC-EDELIVERY-SUPPORT@ec.europa.eu.

Image from Sincerely Media on Unsplash