DE4A Issuing Authority Locator (IAL)

Issuing Authority Locator (IAL) component helps Data Consumers (DC) to find out the issuing authority within a particular country either to obtain a canonical evidence type or to subscribe a canonical event catalogue, and know the characteristics of the evidence provision or the subscription provision, respectively.

In order to identify the corresponding issuing authority by the DC, this component requires the following preconditions:

1. The user has said to the DC that the evidence or the event must be provided by other country.
2. DC knows which canonical evidence type or canonical event catalogue that corresponds to the evidence or event specified by the user. Domestic evidence and events are nationally matched with canonical evidence type and canonical event catalogues.
3. Every issuing authority registered in the IAL its evidence and subscription provisions, i.e., that there is a service to provide a canonical evidence type or a canonical event catalogue
4. Each canonical evidence type and event catalogue is only provided by one competent authority within an administrative territorial scope; if authorities at different administrative territorial level can provide the same canonical evidence type or event catalogue, the authority within the higher level should be registered. For instance, if evidence of a person has some university degree is in both registries of the corresponding university (at a educational level) and Ministry (at national level), only this last one is the competence authority to be registered in the IAL to participate in the cross-border exchange.

There are several possible options with their respective flows:

1. Provisions (Flow A, Main Flow): DC enquires at the IDK about the issuing authorities for one or a list of canonical evidence types and/or canonical event catalogues (at least one). IDK will provide two possible outcomes.
   • Success: list of provisions that complies with the enquire, grouped by canonical evidence type of event catalogue, country code and administrative territorial level.
   • Error Not Found: there is no issuing authority to provide the specified list.
2. Provisions at an administrative territorial unit (Flow B, subcase of Flow A): DC enquires at the IDK about the issuing authority at a administrative territorial unit for one or a list of canonical evidence types and/or canonical event catalogues. IDK will provide the same possible outcomes than Flow A.

The provision metadata is a set of attributes registered in the IAL: identifier of canonical evidence type or canonical event catalogue, identifier of the issuing authority, preferred label of the issuing authority, administrative territorial level and unit of the issuing authority, and Latin name of the territorial unit. The provision metadata is enough to to interact with the user to select one provision from a list and to locate the connection details of the corresponding data service in the ESL.

Criteria-based vs evidence-based approach

The approaches to facilitate the mapping between domestic and cross-border evidences are; criteria-based or evidence-based, or both, which can together fulfil the needs of both consuming competent authorities that work with procedural criteria and with evidence type.

Procedure criteria can be seen as procedural requirements either as conditions to satisfy directly by “yes/no” such as “is an adult”, or as information to be obtained, so some evidence type is required to prove such criteria. In the context of administrative procedures, criteria to asses may vary over the time, while evidence types rarely change. The evidence-based approach puts away procedural criteria concerns from the components of the technical system since it is only focused on a common list of evidence types and their canonical forms.

Canonical evidence types provide a common classification of evidence relevant for procedures, so data evaluators and data owners can map their domestic evidence types to canonical evidence types. Moreover, canonical evidence is sent along with the lawfully issued domestic evidence to allow a common understanding and processing of the information provided regardless the format and language of domestic evidences, while domestic evidence provides the legal compliance in case of audits are needed.

Both approaches need agreements on the canonical forms of the evidence types from a country-agnostic perspective to guarantee a common understanding of evidences and to ease their processing. Besides, canonical evidence types are required to comply with the GDPR requirements on analysing datasets that are subject of some data processing, such as the data transfer to cross-border public authorities because they are relevant for their procedures.

In the context of DE4A, the Evidence Broker could be used to extend the IAL with canonical procedural criteria that can be proved by canonical evidence types.