TAS³ Vision

It has been observed that the systems that are currently in use or under development focus only on a small subset of the global picture. Trust & authorization policies for instance, are mostly specific to their application and to the context in which they live. This results in systems that do not naturally support cross-context solutions and that are intrinsically non- interoperable. This makes the deployment of cross-context services very complex and fragile which does not exactly increase the trustworthiness of the resulting system.
The analysis of the needs and proposed solutions for each of these isolated contexts shows that each solution provider actually tries to solve the same problem, and that they roughly follow the same learning curve, making similar but slightly different design decisions, etc., which mainly originates from an insufficiently open and flexible core architecture.

 

TAS³ takes care of exactly this problem, and proposes an architecture which is not context- specific, but indeed shares the following visions:

The Business Vision

Traditionally processes that involved ‘the human factor’ have been late at the gate of being automated or even adequately being supported by ICT systems. ERP systems did automate logistics and finance decades ago and Customer Relationship Management systems formed the second ERP wave. Processes that involved the essence of individual persons however, be it employability processes or healthcare processes are increasingly based on a win-win principle of individual self- management (the individual being the ‘closest source’ to his own data) and an inherently inter- organizational service provisioning. This is especially needed for environments where the timely delivery and/or the meaningful interoperability of data are of essence: finding a new job fast, eHealth emergencies, etc… The ‘conditio sine qua non’ for such networks to thrive is that all parties involved feel secure and consider the network to be trusted. TAS³ is to lay the trust & security foundation for a services economy based on personal identifiable data. This includes the design and use of a trust architecture through which on the one both the individual can self- manage his/her distributed personal information, while at the same time the usage of this data can facilitate new or enhanced user-center business processes.

 

The Technical Vision

The TAS³ Integrated Project provides a transparent framework in which process based services can securely process and depend on personal information, regardless from the context in which this information was collected. This requires, of course, that the context of the business process is compatible with the data protection policies and that the requester has the proper authorizations to process this information, but if the service provider meets all these conditions, he becomes part of a trusted service network that guarantees that a service requester is only able to use services from a service provider that have never before been possible.