France

The primary gap being addressed is the lack of standardized interfaces for Authentic Sources in the European Digital Identity (EUDI) ecosystem. Despite the legal requirement set out in eIDAS 2.0 (Article 45e) for Authentic Sources to provide such interfaces, there is currently no available specification that defines how these interfaces should be designed or implemented. This gap has been officially recognized in the CEN TC224 WG20 “European Digital Identity Wallets Standards Gap Analysis” and significantly impedes interoperability across Member States.

This fellowship contributes to the enhancement of the ITU-T X.1281 standard, the project supports the creation of secure, trusted, and interoperable mechanisms for verifying attributes from Authentic Sources. This is crucial for the deployment of the EUDI Wallet, a flagship initiative under the Digital Single Market strategy aiming to be available to all EU citizens and residents by 2026.
The key challenges are related to:
Interoperability: The lack of standardization leads to fragmented implementations across Member States, impeding seamless cross-border operations.
Security and Trust: Verifying sensitive personal attributes (like diplomas or driving licenses) requires secure, privacy-preserving, and auditable mechanisms that are hard to implement consistently without a shared standard.
Legal and Technical Fragmentation: Authentic Sources vary widely across jurisdictions in terms of legal frameworks, data models, and technical capacities. A harmonized standard must respect these national differences while ensuring a unified operational framework at the EU level.

The SAREF ontology suite suffers from inconsistencies across extensions, due to historically parallel development efforts. While recent STFs (641, 653) addressed these through new ontology patterns and a revised framework, important steps remain unfunded: publication of updated documentation, integration of conformance checks, and automation of ETSI specification generation.
With this fellowship, I directly support the ICT Rolling Plan's "Key Enablers – Data Interoperability" priority. This activity enhances semantic interoperability in IoT contexts, ensuring continuity in the evolution of a foundational European ontology standard (SAREF). It also aligns with EC expectations for faster standard evolution and broader stakeholder involvement, notably in sectors such as smart cities, energy, and digital twins.
The main challenge is sustainability: reducing the manual effort needed to maintain and extend SAREF. The current publication workflow lacks automation and centralization, leading to delays and fragmentation. The revision of the SAREF Pipeline software and the automation of specification generation are technically complex due to the lack of existing tools for parsing OWL ontologies into ETSI-compliant documents. This proposal addresses these challenges through targeted, expert-driven development efforts, based on proven tools and methods already piloted in past STFs.