DE4A Issuing Authority Locator (IAL)

Issuing Authority Locator (IAL) component helps the DC to find out the issuing authority that can provide the required evidence within a particular country.

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 must be provided by other country.
2. DC knows which canonical criterion or canonical evidence corresponds to the evidence to get through the technical system
3. Every issuing authority registered per canonical evidence has a service to provide such an evidence
4. Each canonical evidence is only provided by one competent authority within a certain territorial or administrative scope (e.g, in Spain, evidence of a person has some university degree is in the registries of the corresponding university and the Ministry, but only this last one is the competence authority to prove such a fact)

There are three possible options and their respective flows:

1. Canonical Evidence (Main flow): when DC sends a request to DP, first DC will enquire from IDK about the issuing authority for a specific canonical evidence based on the respective country. IDK will provide two possible outcomes. The first is that IDK gives the national issuing authority for the canonical evidence. The second possible result is that IDK returns an error message because there is no issuing authority for such canonical evidence in such country.

1. Canonical Procedural Criterion (Alternate Flow to Flow A): In this option, DC send out a request to DP, DC will ask from IDK about the issuing authority for a given canonical criterion. Following are the possible  results from the IDK for DC:

R1 (Success): list of canonical evidences that can be used to verify the given canonical criterion within such country, along with their particularities if any and the user selects the desired canonical and finally DC can adopt option Flow A (Main Flow) or Flow C (in case of multiple issuing authorities).

R2 (Error): there is no canonical evidence associated to the given canonical criterion within the country e-A2. DC does not choose any canonical evidence, and DC does not able to choose any canonical evidence.

1. Various Options in a competence distribution Scenario: This flow is similar to Flow A with the difference of listing multiple issuing authorities. When DC sends a request to DP for an evidence, first DC will enquire regarding the issuing  authority for a canonical evidence that can be provided by various competent authorities in the given country. Following are the possible results of IDK through IAL to a respective DC request:
2. Success: list of subnational authorities that can issue the canonical evidence within the country that can be done in several steps or the user is prompted to select the item of the returned list until the chosen item is the competent authority.
3. Error: There is no subnational authorities that can issue the canonical evidence within the country at a certain administrative level or the user has cancelled the search

In case of success and listing of the subnational authorities to be selected, NUTS taxonomy (ref) can be used but it needs to be considered that it does not correspond with the levels of public administrations in every MS.

The approaches to ease 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 requirements and with evidences. For the criteria-based approach, IAL can use the Evidence Broker service (ref), which is based on procedural requirements, which can be seen as criteria to be met and satisfied directly by “yes/no” evidences such as “is an adult”, or as information requirements to be satisfied by evidences in the form of a document or data. The Evidence Broker includes a data model that extends the CCCEV(ref) and combines it with DCAT(ref) and Core Agent (ref) vocabularies. This service returns a list of types of evidence that can be used to fulfil the requirement, where each type of evidence is expressed as a DCAT dataset (ref). The data structures of these DCAT datasets are defined by agreed canonical data models. The UML diagram of the Evidence Broker data model is presented in Annex V (ref). The evidence-based approach (def) puts away procedural requirements concerns from the components of the technical system. It is only focused on evidence types and their canonical forms that are instantiated in the lawfully issued evidences. Both approaches need agreements on common data models (def) to represent evidences from a country-agnostic perspective. In the context of DE4A, we proposed ontologies that can be used to define evidences based on each pilot requirements that are aligned with existing standard vocabularies and data models. These proposed common data models are created from the domain-specific ontologies (ref).

IAL covers both the evidence and criteria-based approaches for the mapping between domestic and cross-border evidences, as described in the deliverable D2.4 (ref) of the Project Start Architecture [ref]. In the context of DE4A, we will reuse the core component of TOOP (ref), the Evidence Broker (ref), to find out the issuing authority that can provide the required evidence within a particular country and extend this according to the requirements of DE4A pilot use cases.