PERIVALLON project representative from ETRA participates in the panel of experts on Evolving Interoperability Challenges at the MEDEA project event
On the 28-29 of September 2023, a PERIVALLON project representative from ETRA took part in the conference organised by the MEDEA project in Madrid, titled “EU Borders Security: Acting Ahead across Research, Practice, and Policy”. The conference organised different panel discussions, where ETRA represented PERIVALLON in the panel of experts on “Evolving Interoperability Challenges”, highlighting different challenges in the field that are being explored by the project.
Within the interoperability challenges under consideration, multiple dimensions should be tackled: technical, human, organisational and regulatory. In the project, a single information and intelligence platform, the PERIVALLON platform, is being developed and will allow national and cross border cooperation between Police Authorities, Border Guards as well as other National and Regional Authorities. Extending the reach to other stakeholders, the project is exploring how the information generated by the platform could become actionable and usable as digital evidence by prosecutors and judges. Furthermore, integration with legacy systems, such as Copernicus and EUROSTAT, is looked after to allow the authorities to easily exploit the information offered by EU services in a single space.
Achieving interoperability also involves sharing critical information according to the applicable legislation and standards. Standards of interoperability are typically protocols (at organisational, technical, semantic levels) that ensure data shared among different systems is equally usable for all parties involved. So, the role of standards is of paramount importance for adopting interoperability as these set common rules for every system to be able to communicate. In this way, public institutions have a reference framework and can include them, for example as part of technology procurement processes. However, there is a lack of commonly accepted and used technology standards for security. PERIVALLON will assess the relevant standardisation and regulatory landscape and produce a list of recommendations so as to contribute to the emergence of new standards.