The General Directorate for State Modernisation (DGME) of the French Ministry of Budget shared more than 27 assets in draft version with the SEMIC.EU community. The asset agent Mrs. Sylvie Colas is interviewed by the SEMIC.EU team.
SEMIC.EU Mrs. Colas, you helped to develop advanced core components like 'FR_Status, FR_Dimension, FR_Delivery and FR_Contract'. How do you think will these assets ease businesses' and citizens' lives?
Sylvie Colas In terms of exchanges between governments or between government and business, these assets help to manage and to present the information in a consistent manner between information systems, regardless of technology application or platform.
This can support the offer of 'teleservices' to the citizens with shorter delays and a better quality which will consequently improve the image of a seamless administration.
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SEMIC.EU Did you experience any unforeseen obstacles applying UN/CEFACT models to the French requirements? In other words ? what are the lessons learnt from the adaptations?
Colas The existence of the UN/CEFACT Core Component Library is very important for reusing the components for the exchanges within the administration.
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The main lessons learnt for working in semantics are that the components first need to be translated. Secondly, in order to understand the meaning of a component, we need to study and understand its definition and not only the translation of its name. After this exercise, we can find its name in French. Sometimes this study has to be carried on in requesting further assessment from an expert of the domain of the asset (for example for the asset 'Dangerous goods').
SEMIC.EU What were the main reasons for the French authorities to use UN/CEFACT structures as a basis?
Colas The approach followed by the French administration for providing support to project owners and managers is to make available, within a standardised framework based on UN/CEFACT recommendations, a method for analysing business processes, defining data exchanges by assembly of semantic components (i.e. semantic building blocks that represent the general types of business data in use today) contained in a central library, generating the syntactical solution (e.g. XML schema) and updating the library. The development of a national registry of components hosting this library is starting.
As from 2005, the French administration got actively involved in this standardisation issue in the new eGovernment groups for standardisation of the exchanges of business data at CEN (EEG13) and at UN/CEFACT (TBG19) levels. These groups offer the opportunity to pool national results with other countries for projects related to standards for the exchange of business and government data (eArchiving, ePublic procurement, etc).
SEMIC.EU Please give us a brief description of the collaboration with UN/CEFACT (e.g. do you report your results)?
Colas At national level, the French administration established a workshop between ministries and governmental bodies to define semantic components for data exchanges within French administration (civil status, justice, agriculture, etc.) and between the administration and its partners. Most of these data exchanges are national and probably will never be the subject of any international standard. But in terms of interoperability, the workshop takes due attention to the compliance with UN/CEFACT specifications in particular the UN/CEFACT Core Component Library (CCL).
This workshop studies the CCL in relation with governmental data exchanges and builds a 'French' library of semantic components. This library contains the components of the CCL (both in English and translated into French) and components used in France and not yet in the CCL.
The national collaborative process (similar to standardisation) with involvement of the ministries in this workshop improves the 'adoption' of the French library (therefore the CCL) as the reference library for governmental data exchanges.
This experience in developing the components used for national data exchanges can serve the improvement or enrichment of the UN/CEFACT CCL. The workshop established a first set of change requests with the specified business needs to the existing components in the latest version of CCL in 2007. These change requests were therefore submitted by TBG19 to the group responsible for the CCL harmonisation. At the end of the harmonisation process, most of the change requests were approved with or without amendment in order to be included in the next version of the CCL./>/>
SEMIC.EU What are the procedures for the decision which topics and themes you are going to model?
Colas The first step was to identify and refine the most frequently used assets in the eGovernment exchanges and submit the corresponding change requests to the UN/CEFACT CCL.
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At the moment, our goal is to fill in our library; so we are translating all the core components and doing a first attempt of refining the translation. Then, we will study further details for each of the translated components taking into account the characteristics of the component's domain. We will also examine the associations of each component at this stage.
SEMIC.EU Mrs. Colas which assets are next to be published in the SEMIC.EU repository?
Colas The next translated and draft components are Facility, Factory, Feature, Financial account, Financial Card an Financial Institution.
SEMIC.EU Thank you Mrs. Colas