Muriel Foulonneau et al.
It is necessary 1) to define a mechanism to transfer information and documents in the context of the crossborder service procedures, 2) to define a mapping mapping of document types, expressing which documents can be provided by a service provider, whichever the country that issued the document( e. g., a birth certificate from Portugal to be submitted in the context of an application to the Luxembourgish competent authority), and 3) to determine and represent rules to validate the documents based on both the mapping information and the information provided over the course of the procedure.
A container has been defined to support the transfer of documents in the scope of the cross‐border applications. The container is implemented either as a ZIP file or as a compound PDF. The Omnifarious Container for eDocuments( OCD) includes three layers:
• The Payload Layer, i. e. the document file, the Metadata Layer, and an Authentication Layer.
• The Metadata layer is itself divided into metadata of the OCD( such as the sender and the receiver of the container)
• The metadata that represent the document or payload, including in the best case an extraction of the value of information recorded inside the document( e. g., the birthdate for a birth certificate)( Medimorec et al., 2012).
The semantic layer aims to standardise the information that helps define the acceptability of a particular document in the context of a cross‐border procedure. It requires designing a data model to record document type equivalences as well as a set of ontologies, and mechanisms to record equivalences, to verify an application with users, and to implement a document type validation process.
This addresses the issue of transferring information and documents in the context of the cross‐border procedures. However, in order to interpret the content of the metadata layer, we had to investigate solutions to represent the representation of document mapping and the implementation of validation rules.
3. A set of ontologies
Ontologies are widely used for sharing and representing knowledge. They support formal description of concepts and their relations. They include associated inference mechanisms to derive information from explicit parts of a model. Semantic technologies include formal languages such as OWL 6 and a set of reasoning mechanisms based on description logics( Horrocks et al., 2003). We therefore experimented the use of semantic technologies to address the representation of document equivalences and associated rules.
A set of ontologies has been developed for supporting various pilots presenting the added value and operating mechanisms for the semantic layer. In particular, the SPOCS set of ontologies supports the collection of data on document equivalences and the procedure of validation of documents against the document equivalence ontology.
Indeed, validating cross‐border applications requires mapping document types by expressing which documents can be provided by a service provider to satisfy the legal and administrative requirements of a service description. This problematic can be attached to the one of semantic data integration domain( Ref je vais voir dans ma these). The latter aims to create a full mapping between heterogeneous data sources, in order to use them in transparent way.
Two main ontology are proposed: The Document and the Application ontologies.
3.1 The document ontology
The Document ontology is composed of a representation of concepts Documents and DocumentTypes with the associated concepts, such as the Organization that issues the DocumentType and the Procedure that requires the DocumentType. The birth certificate of Mr. X would be an instance of the Document class, with a document type BirthCertificate. 6
http:// www. w3. org / 2004 / OWL /
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