The main objective of TOOP is to explore and demonstrate the once-only principle through three sustainable pilots by using a federated architecture on a cross-border, collaborative, and pan-European scale. They are carried out in order to identify drivers and barriers as well as to provide the basis for future implementations and wider use. The pilots will be implemented in the following areas:
1. Cross-border e-Services for Business Mobility
2. Updating Connected Company Data
3. Online Ship and Crew Certificates
TOOP consortium has the ambition to demonstrate the project’s contributions in a real-world setting, focusing on cross-border exchanges of company and registry data. The main criteria for pilot selection were cross-border relevance, the expected potential to reduce administrative burden, and the feasibility of implementation. All pilots will:
- connect different data providers and consumers to the TOOP federated IT architecture respecting the existing national infrastructures and interfaces of the existing systems;
- address real life transactions with the involved data consumers and providers;
- design services for business and governmental stakeholders within the pilots and ensure the quality of those services.
TOOP is especially ambitious regarding the number of states and areas concerned in the pilots: it aims to connect 38 information systems as data consumers (receiving data) and 32 systems as data providers (sending data to data consumers) in any-to-any transactions. From a methodological point of view, the IT architecture will not be developed from scratch. In the past years, efforts have already been made in the development of generic building blocks for European cross-border public services. The European Commission has set up the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) to facilitate the development, implementation and adoption of such building blocks, or Digital Service Infrastructures (DSI). In addition, the EU-funded e-SENS project has consolidated a large set of building blocks that were developed in previous Large Scale Pilots. Finally, the EC ISA Programme has also made an effort to define a European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA) with building blocks for the interconnection and interoperability of cross-border government systems. As expected direct impacts, the TOOP pilots foresee time savings and cost reductions for businesses and administrations by reducing the administrative burden. Besides, the generic approach TOOP develops is expected to bring along a reduction in the cost of future e-Government pilots or the setting up of services. Moreover, other national administrations will be able to join the pilots and develop cross-border applications for certain services, thus ensuring demand for CEF DSIs and building blocks.