TAS³ | Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services
TAS³ (Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services) is an 18-partner international project funded by the European Union under the Framework 7 programme (FP7). Partners are a mixture of universities, research units and SMEs.
Putting the individual in control of his or her personal data is at the heart of the project, which is developing services for managing information generated over a lifetime and stored at distributed locations, using a four-layer approach: authentication, authorisation, security and trust. We are demonstrating the architecture in three sets of pilots running in two domains: employability and healthcare in the UK and the Netherlands. The Centre is responsible for running the UK employability pilot, which will run in three phases, focusing first on feasibility of the prototype and integration of the technical components, then on advanced functionality aligned to real systems, and finally a large-scale pilot demonstrating full functionality of the system.
For our first pilots we are working in partnership with Placementmaker, a Nottinghamshire SME responsible for running student placement programmes for the University’s International Office, to demonstrate how the processes for placement student recruitment and matching can be supported by TAS³-enabled services. In addition we are contributing to the overall requirements gathering for the project and mapping of the business processes involved.
Centre staff are also involved in technical work for the project, developing techniques for policy aggregation for ePortfolio data, using the idea of ‘sticky policies’ which can be designed and enforced by the user. We are also building the component which will handle auditing within the system.
The Centre is also responsible for co-ordinating training for internal and external partners across the project, using a blended approach combining episodes of face-to-face contact and use of an LMS to support collation, delivery and re-use of learning objects.