In recent years, the concept of cross-border public services and the underlying data exchange between public authorities has been an essential part of development in the EU. This is evidenced by the adoption of the Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR) as an important step to implement the digital revolution in Europe.

The goal of the Single Digital Gateway (SDG) is to provide access to information, to procedures and to assistance and problem-solving services, in order to enable citizens to move freely between the Member States, access public services as much as possible online (with the SDGR making this obligatory for a number of services), and rely on an underlying (automated) exchange of their data between public authorities so they do not have to provide the same information over and over again. However, issues related to the digitisation of services, easy access to information and procedures and new challenges brought by the SDGR still need to be addressed in order to enable enhanced mobility, innovation and growth on the EU single market.

The operation of the SDG is a meaningful step forward in helping cross-border users to solve many existing procedural problems and to receive the necessary assistance; however, this evolution should be facilitated by providing additional user guidance in an interactive, easy-to-follow and user-friendly way.

In order to address these challenges, ACROSS proposes a novel framework aiming to substantially complement the SDG and Your Europe portal by leveraging the advanced capabilities of Cloud, privacy-preserving, semantic interoperability, and mobile technologies, to build the next generation Public-Services ecosystem while maintaining the highest privacy level. ACROSS aims to enable user-centric design and the implementation of interoperable cross-border public digital services compliant with the current European regulations, also allowing the private sector to interconnect their services while ensuring the data sovereignty of the citizens.

ACROSS will be developed and tested in three countries at different points in their digital transformation journeys – Greece, Germany and Latvia –. These use cases will address and analyse the technological, organisational, administrative, semantic and legal aspects, providing evidence for delivering more efficient cross-border mobility services to the citizens.

Our role

In this project, Timelex leads the tasks relating to the legal and regulatory considerations and barriers when defining the ACROSS user journey and with regards to the legal requirements for data governance and data sovereignty in cross-border public service provision. Timelex is also in charge of the GDPR compliance of the project.