DE4A Issuing Authority Locator (IAL)

Issuing Authority Locator (IAL) component helps the Data Consumer (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 type corresponds to the evidence to get through the technical system
3. Every issuing authority registered per canonical evidence type has a service to provide such an evidence
4. Each canonical evidence type is only provided by one competent authority within a certain territorial or administrative scope; if authorities from different administrative level can provide the same canonical evidence type, the authority within the higher level should be registered. For instance, if evidence of a person has some university degree is in the registries of the corresponding university and the Ministry, only this last one is the competence authority to be registered as such evidence type provider in the country

There are several possible options with their respective flows:

1. Canonical Evidence (Flow A, Main Flow): when DC sends a request to Data Provider (DP), first DC will enquire from IDK about the issuing authority for a specific canonical evidence type based on the respective country. IDK will provide two possible outcomes.
   • Success: the national issuing authority that provides the canonical evidence type in such country, along with the provision metadata.
   • Error Not Found: there is no issuing authority for such canonical evidence type in such country.
2. Canonical Evidence in a competence distribution Scenario (Flow B, subcase of Flow A): This flow is similar to Flow A with the difference of there are multiple sub-national issuing authorities for a canonical evidence type. Following are the possible  results from the IDK for DC:
   • Success: list of subnational authorities that can issue the canonical evidence type within the country, each one with the corresponding provision metadata. All the listed subnational authorities corresponds to a same administrative level, i.e., list of universities, regions from a NUTS level or municipality from LAU.Then the user is prompted to select the item of the returned list.
   • Error Not Found: There is no subnational authorities that can issue the canonical evidence within the country
   • Error Cancel: the user has cancelled the selection of an item from the given list
3. Canonical Procedural Criterion (Flow C, Alternate Main Flow): In this option, first DC will ask from IDK about the issuing authority for a given canonical criterion. Following are the possible  results from the IDK for DC:
   • Success: list of canonical evidence types that can be used to verify the given canonical criterion within such country, along with their particularities if any. Then either the DC by a rule or the user selects the desired evidence type and finally DC can adopt option Flow A or Flow B.
   • Error: there is no canonical evidence types associated to the given canonical criterion within the country
   • Error Cancel: No canonical evidence type has been selected from the given list.

The provision metadata is a set of attributes that defines each possible evidence provision registered in the IAL that has an associated ESL entry. These attributes are: identifier of canonical evidence type, identifier of the DP, administrative territorial level and unit of the DP, and type of provision (IP or USI). The provision metadata is enough to locate in the ESL the corresponding data service and its connection details.

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 criteria and with evidences type. Procedure criteria can be seen as procedural requirements either as conditions to satisfy directly by “yes/no” evidence types such as “is an adult”, or as information to be obtained. For the criteria-based approach, IAL can be extended to included canonical procedural criteria and the mapping to canonical evidence types within each country. The evidence-based approach puts away procedural criteria concerns from the components of the technical system; it is only focused on a list of evidence types and their canonical forms that are instantiated in the lawfully issued evidences. Both approaches need agreements on the canonical forms of the evidence types from a country-agnostic perspective. In the context of DE4A, we proposed to define the canonical forms from domain-specific ontologies based on each pilot requirements in alignment with existing standard vocabularies and data models. Issuing authorities are responsible for providing domestic evidence in the corresponding canonical form.

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 extend the IAL with canonical procedural criteria according to the requirements of DE4A pilot use cases.