Download Bilateral communication between countries in the field of chemical safety Introduction

Bilateral communication between countries
in the field of chemical safety
Introduction
Hungary developed the legal setting regulating tasks pertinent to chemical safety in line with
the EU directives and with a view to the national characteristics. The majority of registration
and procession duties is facilitated by an information solution – Chemical Safety Information
System (CSIS).
CSIS operates as an information centre that
 collects and stores domestic and international data and documents on chemical safety …
 processes certain range of data and
 distributes data stored and processed to whom it may concern.
Although chemical safety requires close international contacts the specific legal environment
in certain countries does not allow managing the relevant responsibilities in a harmonized and
integrated manner in every respect. It follows that IT support for the chemical safety duties in
countries should be implemented via individual applications. Among individual applications
possibility for the data exchange may be ensured. Data exchange between two actors, i.e.
bilateral communication permits information on chemical safety to be disseminated on an
international scale and this way improves the global state of chemical safety.
The rest of this document outlines
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the requirements to be met by bilateral communication
operational principle of bilateral communication and
services provided by CSIS under bilateral communication.
Main requirements relating to bilateral communication
Compliance with standards
IT is developed independently in countries leading to totally heterogeneous information
systems. To this end implementation of bilateral communication should be performed on the
basis of tried and tested, widely used standards since it enables heterogeneous systems to be
joined to the communication system exempt from problems, without a hitch.
Flexibility
Range of data in the communication should be made flexibly changeable. This flexibility may
stretch to data content of the records belonging to the information system on chemical safety.
Isolation
National systems related to chemical safety do not have knowledge on each other’s internal
operation and do not use each other’s services.
Safety
The confidential nature of data requires a safe and protected bilateral communication channel.
Direction of communication
Bilateral communication can be initiated solely by the system sending the data; request for
data cannot be put forward through the bilateral communication system.
Language environment
In the course of the communication consideration should be given to the potential for a
different stock of printing types. It should be assured that content of data circles involved in
bilateral communication would not change because of the potential for difference in printing
type stocks.
Operational principle of bilateral communication
Operation of bilateral communication is illustrated by the following figure.
kommunikációs csatorna
Communication
channel
kommunikációssurface
felület
Communication
informatikaisystem
rendszer
Information
kapcsolat
Connection
Information system on chemimcal safety
National systems are independent, heterogeneous information applications that are not able to
use each other’s services directly.
Communication surface
Every country has an interface supporting bilateral communication that enables the electronic
data exchange between the individual systems.
It is very important that the communication surface be linked to the information application
related to chemical safety that functions as a nationwide information centre. This enables a
country to share as much domestic data as possible with other countries through bilateral
communication. (CSIS in Hungary fulfils this condition.)
The communication surface uses a standard procedure for exchanging data. The basis of this
procedure is XML (Extended Markup Language) which is a so called data definition
language. By applying XML any data structures may be defined in a simply way that can be
processed by any tool adequate for the XML interpretation. Owing to the wide ranged
applicability of XML several database management systems are suitable for processing such
data. (The majority of web browsers also fit for displaying a data structure defined in XML as
a web page.)
When implementing the communication surface it is advisable to use technologies employed
during the development of the information application provided that those are suitable for
applying the XML standard. This can be regarded as one significant benefit of the bilateral
communication system as it performs the implementation of the surfaces on a local (country)
level, makes use of the development technologies already known, but due to using standards
these heterogeneous communication surfaces turn to homogeneous from the point of view of
bilateral communication.
Communication channel
The channel used for bilateral communication is mainly the Internet. Safe and protected data
transfer can be ensured with standardized procedures (such as SSL, Secure Socket Layer).
CSIS in the implementation of bilateral communication
Due to the up-to-date architecture CSIS is suitable for taking part in bilateral communication.
A part of the data is received in XML data structure from the beginning. CSIS is capable of
making any kind of XML data structures on the basis of the records available and of
forwarding them safely to the information systems qualified for receiving data.