CEN CWA on unique identifiers: impact on eInvoicing community

The CEN Workshop Agreement on “Cyber-Identity – Unique Identification Systems For Organizations and Parts Thereof”, called CWA 16036:2009 was released in November 2009. It can be summarized as follows: Unique identifiers of organizations point to information related to the organization.

Unique identifiers are provided by registration authorities like official Commercial Registries, GS1, D&B or others which in turn are qualified by meta-identifiers. Applying and verifying such identified information opens up a new range of applications in areas like eInvoicing  and eCommerce in general, supply chain management, conformity assessment or using such logical identifiers as a reliable routing and addressing scheme.

This CWA 16036 has already had an impact on the eBusiness community. The Expert Group on eInvoicing mandated by the European Commission has released its final report. The report analyzes the situation of eInvoicing in Europe and makes recommendation for improvement.

The according guidance recommendations for development of a fully interoperable environment recommend the use of existing business identifiers for addressing and routing and those solutions shall be implemented based upon CWA 16036 (section 5.5.5 of the report).

The CWA 16036 can be downloaded from the CEN FTP-server at
ftp://cenftp1.cenorm.be/PUBLIC/CWAs/Cyber_Identity/CWA_CyberIdentity.pdf (83 pages).

A short summary of CWA 16036 can be downloaded at
http://www.cyber-identity.com/documents#CWA16036 (7 pages).

The Final Report of the Expert Group on eInvoicing can be downloaded at
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/sectors/ict/files/finalreport_en.pdf