Inter Project Collaboration on Semantics
Call to Action
It proposed that a strategic group comprising a number of representatives from each project are formed during 2022, to develop the progress made during the workshop further and propose recommendations to the European Commission.
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Initial DE4A/GLASS Workshop
EEMA Fosters Cross-Project Collaboration for EU Funded Initiatives
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Through its work on many European Commission funded projects, EEMA has a privileged position from which it can identify commonalities across ongoing initiatives. In doing so it delivers meaningful change that enables stakeholders to align on how they address specific challenges and opportunities for the greater overall ambitions of the European Union.
On 22nd September, EEMA hosted a virtual workshop entitled ‘Semantics – Alternative Project Methodologies: Citizen-Centric Evidence Transfers’. The two-hour online session was hosted by the Chair of EEMA, Jon Shamah, and brought together consortium partners from the Digital Europe for All (DE4A) and GLASS projects. “These two important projects highlight the importance of semantics, as the number of EU projects that will require interoperability grows,” observes Shamah.
DE4A supports the Single Digital Gateway Regulation across Europe, helping to make the digital single market a reality. It aims to facilitate the migration towards European Digital Public Services co-delivered across borders, across sectors and with different participants, reinforcing trust in public institutions, and realising positive impacts of citizen centricity on efficiency and a reduction in administrative burden and costs. Meanwhile, GLASS aims to create a new paradigm for the sharing and transfer of personal information, placing the citizen in control, by using e-wallets. It is developing a distributed framework for sharing common services of public administrations across the EU for citizens, businesses and governments.
Jon Shamah was joined by Ana Rosa Guzman, from DE4A who opened the interactive discussion by highlighting the semantic interoperability challenges involved in sharing information across national borders. These include different types of evidence, language barriers, many competent authorities and demarcations, as well as different rules and components, and distributed documents.
Sharing their approach to the same challenge of sharing and transferring documents, were George Domalis and Aris Gioutlaki from GLASS. The project assumes that every country will share the same type of data, however, it will be presented differently. Therefore, the challenge is to find a way to standardise the format of these evidences (such as a password or ID card), so that they can be understood by everyone. To this end participants were introduced to a piece of middleware developed by the GLASS project the ‘AI Data Schema Transformer’ which aims to resolve the issue.
The workshop provided an opportunity for both GLASS and DE4A participants to learn about respective objectives and developments and in doing so, forge closers ties and alignments that it is hoped with realising greater efficiencies and better outcomes for each project, the European Commission and ultimately for EU citizens that chose to live, study and work in different Member States.
It proposed that a strategic group comprising a number of representatives from each project are formed, to develop the progress made during the workshop further and propose recommendations to the European Commission.
A recording of the ‘Semantics – Alternative Project Methodologies: Citizen-Centric Evidence Transfers’ workshop will be available on request.
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OID Conference - Copenhagen
The aim of the Open Identity Summit 2022 (https://oid2022.compute.dtu.dk/prog.html) in Lyngby, Denmark, and hosted by the Danish Technical University, was to link practical experiences and requirements with academic innovations. Focus areas were Research and Applications in the area of Identity Management, Trust Services, Open Source, Internet of Things, Distributed Ledgers, Privacy and Cloud Computing.
Open standards and interfaces as well as open source technologies play a central role in the current identity management landscape as well as in emerging future scenarios in the area of electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions. Reliable identity management is an essential building block for many applications and services such as innovative payment services, digital manufacturing, and other innovative applications in the area of e-health, e-government, distributed ledgers, cloud computing, data management for artificial intelligence, and the internet of things.
While there are already plenty of successful applications in which those techniques are applied to safeguard authenticity, integrity and confidentiality, there are still many closely related areas which demand further research. These include technical solutions that provide higher levels of transparency, intervenability and accountability.
GLASS and DE4A were jointly presented to explain their parallel approaches to the essential goal of understanding the credentials (evidences) being utilised and consumed in cross border actions which include multi-lingual and multi-context attributes. Vocabularies, syntax, ontologies were compared between the projects.
