Muriel Foulonneau et al.
service directive in particular, electronic procedures are more important than ever. The project has therefore set up an infrastructure including the transfer of documents in a metadata container, the Omnifarous Container for eDocuments( OCD)( Medimorec et al., 2012) and the validation of documents( e. g., that the document being transferred is a Portuguese birth certificate and that it is accepted as a proof of nationality in the context of a particular Luxembourgish procedure). Cross‐border service pilots have been implemented to show the added value of the SPOCS infrastructure.
The SPOCS infrastructure enables the interoperability between administrative procedures across Europe. However, one of the most important challenges was the establishment of relations between documents in order to optimize the performance of e‐ procedures. Semantic technologies have been proposed as a solution to address the representation, management and processing of data and resources. Over the last years, the European Commission has encouraged the implementation of a semantic layer to support the interoperability between administrative systems and the reuse of resources across government bodies. The SEMIC project( Semantic Interoperability Community) 4 for instance has supported the development of Core vocabularies in order to describe Persons, Locations, and Businesses in eGovernment applications with the support in particular of the European Commission ISA programme( Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations) 5. Core vocabularies can help administrations use similar models and describe resources in a similar way. In the scope of the SPOCS project, the objective was to implemente a set of pilots to illustrate the added value of implementing a semantic interoperability layer and developing common models and vocabularies. Two problems have been identified 1). How to establish equivalence between documents.. 2) how to represent rules for the validation information( administrative and citizen information) over the process. Our approach was to propose a set of ontologies and services in order to fix.... We investigate the design of ontologies to support the eDocument delivery process, as well as mechanisms to record equivalences between documents the validation of a document, based on document description or based on the data it contains, finally the importance of using semantic data sources and the challenges encountered.
The paper first presents the problems addressed in the SPOCS pilots( section 2), then the work carried out on ontologies( section 3), finally the experimentations for recording document equivalences in semantic datasets( section 4), for automatically validating documents( section 5) and applications( section 6), and for using semantic data sources in the course of the validation process( section 7).
2. The problem of building procedures to support cross‐border services
The problem of cross border services can be formulated as follows: Let X, Y be European countries, let S be a service provider of X that wants to deliver a service in Y. S must submit an application to the competent authority of country Y. The application procedure requires that he records information such as the name of the applicant and that he provides documents potentially issued in different countries, by different competent authorities( e. g., a birth certificate from Portugal to be submitted in the context of an application to the Luxembourgish competent authority). This is a key task to accomplish the application process. However, the acceptability of documents issued in various countries is not always explicitly stated in local procedures. Indeed, the legislation often refers to the name of a document as produced by national competent authorities. Mechanisms are therefore needed to ensure the validity of both the information and the documents provided and the completeness of the application, even though the authorization of delivering the service is in the end decided at the level of the local competent authority.
The form and content of official documents differ across Member States. The legal preconditions for services typically require specific kinds of documents to be presented, such as identity cards. The data models underlying documents and the information contained in particular document types are not harmonized across Member States. The attributes of names( e. g., first name, last name, full name) are heterogeneous, since for instance they do not all provide a way to express academic titles. Moreover, the context of the transaction can be important when defining rules for excluding or including certain kinds of documents. For example, a driving licence may be used as identification for transportation services but is not sufficient for border‐control services. 4
https:// joinup. ec. europa. eu / community / semic / description 5 http:// ec. europa. eu / isa /
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