The Data Exchange Platform of the International Commission on Civil Status (ICCS) is currently under production by its contractor Ubitech. The purpose of this platform is to facilitate the international, secure and electronic exchange of civil–status data and documents between civil registries of the different ICCS member states. UBITECH was commissioned by the ICCS to create among others a number of XML Schemas to exchange the civil status records. These Civil Status XML Schemas digitise the standardised ICCS non-digital forms (e.g. birth certificates, marriage). The ICCS intends to exchange the description metadata about these Document schemas with the ADMS-enabled federation on Joinup.

Interview with UBITECH

Dimitris Alexandrou

Dimitris Alexandrou is Co-Founder and Business Services Director at UBITECH Ltd. His research interests include semantic technologies, semantic rules, and knowledge management. More specifically, he contributes actively in the domain of self-adaptive healthcare business processes (clinical pathways) by utilizing semantic web technologies.

UBITECH is implementing the secure document interchange platform for civil status documents among ICCS Member States (International Commission for Civil Status). The Civil Status Documents Schemas will be available as Semantic Assets through ADMS prototype.

Joinup team: Which benefits do you expect from the federation?

Dimitris Alexandrou: Describing the ICCS’s XML Schemas as semantic interoperability assets the organization will gain advantages divided into two main axes:

Organization’s publicity, visibility and dissemination of its work:

• Allow countries to become familiar with the scope of ICCS and join it;
• strengthen the position/influence of ICCS to the civil status domain;

Allow countries to provide mappings from their legacy/national models to ICCS model, in order for:

• ICCS member-states to accomplish transparent interoperability between ICCS-defined and National Civil Status Documents;
• Third countries to be able to exchange Civil Status Documents, via bilateral or multilateral communication channels;

Joinup team: What are your experiences with mapping to ADMS?

Dimitris Alexandrou: In the scope of developing this platform we have developed a number of XML Schemas on the basis of non-digital forms that have been created by the ICCS. Examples of these are the XML schemas of birth certificates and marriage. Our assets will be the specific XML schemas.

Joinup team: How will you export the metadata?

Dimitris Alexandrou: For the export of the metadata we have three options. Firstly, we can export the metadata from our internal repository to XML and then use a XSLT sylesheet to transform the XML into ADMS XML descriptions. A second solution for us is to use ADMS as our internal metadata vocabulary so as to describe the Document schemas – we are currently still developing our repository. The third option is to describe our semantic assets in a spreadsheet that respects the ADMS structure and convert this into ADMS XML or RDF. The last solution is probably the quickest to implement.

For the first wave of the federation only assets in XML Schema format will be exchanged via e-mail. After the pilot, we would prefer the solution of metadata harvesting.

Joinup team: Do you have particular security requirements for metadata harvesting?

Dimitris Alexandrou: The security requirements for exchanging description metadata about the ICCS XML Schemas are of course less demanding than those for exchanging personal data. For the former, there are no confidentiality issues and data integrity is likely to be the most important requirement. The best solution would be to use digital certificates and employ a two-way SSL secure communication. If we don't want to get involved in this scheme and demand that any local system would use a digital certificate, then a simple one-way SSL, using ADMS digital certificate, along with basic username-password authentication for local repos would do the trick.

Nature of documentation: Other