TAS3
The TAS³ IP project (Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services) aims to have a European-wide impact on services based upon personal information, that is to say information which is (co-)owned by the individual, being the ‘data owner’ who has either full rights or rights shared with the ‘data controller’, typically an educational, corporate, governmental, or service organisation.
TAS³ will provide a next generation trust & security architecture that is ready to meet the requirements of complex and highly versatile business processes, that enables the dynamic user-centric management of policies, and that ensures end-to-end secure transmission of personal information and user-controlled attributes between heterogeneous, context dependent and continuously changing systems. This includes a trust and data protection infrastructure for managing & assessing the risks associated with identity authentication (level of assurance) and the trustworthiness of actors.
TAS³ will design an open ontology of context-independent terms and concepts, and it must innovate on several levels. TAS³ proposes an open and interoperable service-oriented architecture that, as a NESSI Project, will contribute to NESSI’s NEXOF architecture. The project will extend a world leading open source BPMS/SOA in allowing adaptive processes while being able to maintain the needed trust and security.
Additionally, explicit architectural documentation that can be formally committed to by system parts and services is added in the form of a community-managed ontologies, which at all times allows for unambiguous, but flexible, meaning agreement. This ontology effectively brings together the NESSI recommendations on security, trust, and semantics. TAS³ will maintain a consistent and integrated semantic approach while describing the features of the trust architecture. This description both functions as machine- readable documentation of the architecture, and as the primary formal vehicle to exchange explicit semantic agreements (commitments) between partners and, eventually, systems. The integrated, co-evolved ontology will assure that relevant parts of the system commit to the same interpretation of possibly ambiguous elements in order to allow for meaning alignment, certification and early conflict discovery. This ontology by itself may contribute considerably to people and organisations trusting each other.
In the employability sector, the personal information will refer to the competencies, awards, interests and goals of the players, and to the current and previous activities of workers, learners, and employers, etc. The fast emerging employability market will be greatly facilitated if this personal information can be made readily available – with the user’s well-informed consent – for the related processes of job migration and employment. The process view on lifelong employability of people perfectly fits in the decision number 1672/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of the 24th of October 2006 establishing a Community Programme for Employment and Social Solidarity.
When instantiated in the healthcare sector, the TAS3 architecture will provide the healthcare service providers with a unique tool to offer better services to their customer base that can use the patient’s own health parameters such as (weight, body temperature, glucose level for diabetes patients, etc.), or that are injected into the system by the laboratories; and enable the patient to request and securely access his/her own electronic medical records as required by EC Recommandation n° R (97) 5 relative à la Protection des Données Médicales. Comité des Ministres aux États Membres. 1997, which is something that few if any EMR systems can provide today.
The TAS3 Consortium consists of 17 partners from 10 different countries in a well-balanced consortium consisting of 8 universities, 2 global companies (and several more in the pilot programmes), 4 expert SMEs, 1 governmental research institute and 2 non-profit organisations. For most participants TAS³ is the natural continuation of previous research and IST Framework projects on trust and security, lifelong learning & competence development, and identity management systems, semantic technologies and adaptable business processes on the one hand and their standardisation efforts in the field of BPMS/SOA and HR-XML and other Human Factor standards involvement on the other.