The draft CWA (CEN Workshop Agreement) below is now available for public comments.
Comments should be sent by 27 July 2009 to Adrian Müller and Olivier Teigen:
olivier.teitgen@afnor.org
adrian@mueller-consulting.biz
Introduction
Nowadays private and public organisations are increasingly more relying on electronic means of communications for carrying out their daily transactions for eBusiness and eGovernment purposes.
In electronic communications, to gain the trust and confidence of transacting parties, a required element is certainty regarding the organisations involved. Knowing exactly which the acting organi-sation actually is, has become a matter of paramount importance for all transacting parties. This issue is known as ?Cyber-Identity?. The matter is often reduced to secure authentication, but goes far beyond this limited subject. Reliable business information stored in trustworthy registries (official commercial registries as well as privately owned and operated directories) accessible online are another part of the picture which is often neglected.
Furthermore, regulations to fight against cyber criminality will enforce traceability of transactions, e.g. ?know your customer? principle or anti-money laundering regulations. These examples show that the topic of the Workshop is also a cornerstone of the IT Governance. Unique identification of business entities by recognised bodies and the verification of such identifi-cations in trustworthy registers are a prerequisite for interoperability in open user groups. E.g. stan-dards for electronic business exchange may mandate the use of unique identifiers in certain fields but do not specify how they can be decoded and resolved without a bilateral agreement.
Therefore, the purpose of this CWA is to discuss these issues and provide standardisation bodies with proper recommendations to achieve this goal. Several business registries currently in place address the issue of business Cyber-Identity albeit in a non-uniform manner. A significant amount of resources remains untapped, due to incompatible and non-interoperable business registries that mainly operate in isolation within non interoperable application domains. The targets of this CWA are also in line with the EC Communication i2010 of the European Commission which indicates interoperability as a main challenge for creating a single information space and identity management as one area for action.
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