Project: A Grid/Web services platform for civil servants to access distributed information on training and employment.

Civil servants have similar needs all over Europe to access and filter information on training and employment in order to deliver the best possible services to their beneficiaries (unemployed individuals and/or members of disadvantaged groups such as immigrants, young and elderly without inadequate professional qualifications, one-parent families, etc). _x000D__x000D_ The current practice when a beneficiary visits a civil servant is that the civil servant gathers all the required information for the beneficiary (education, family status, previous work experience, etc), identifies his/her weaknesses and strengths, sets priorities and goals (encouragement, training, finding a job, etc) and schedules a personal action plan accompanied by several personal or team meetings to empower and support him/her to achieve these goals. _x000D__x000D_ During this support period the civil servant performs quite a frustrating search trying to identify the best possible training programs and/or job offers suitable for the beneficiary. To find this information the civil servant either searches repeatedly on web sites of offering organizations, in newspapers and other communication means, or contacts and is contacted regularly form the offering organization in a win-win tactic._x000D_ _x000D_ The project E-Service4U proposes the development of an integrated platform based on the Grid/Web Services architecture that will collect and offer up-to-date information on training and job offers from different web sources matched to the needs of each beneficiary. The system will help civil servants to connect beneficiaries’ needs to employment requests and training opportunities combining different web resources on an individual basis minimizing at the same time communication expenses, data replication and expiration. _x000D__x000D_ This communication will be taking place through Grid/Web services that will be installed in each Social Service Agency. Each Grid/Web service will partially access the Agency's database elaborating data about beneficiaries (anonymously) in order to be able to suggest the best possible training and job offers. Each Grid/web service will map its matching metadata scheme to each Agency’s database fields. Several other Grid/Web services will offer information on jobs and training programs directly form the offering organizations. E-Service4U, over the Grid will undertake all the interconnection between them. This way, the civil servants will have only to worry about their consulting services while information on vocational training and job offers will come directly from the system._x000D__x000D_ The Grid can be defined as a layer of secure networked services that allow users single sign-on access to a distributed collection of data resources. Each user to connect to a Grid/web service must have an issued certificate and data that is transferred through the Grid can be encrypted. The E-Service4U that will handle personal data that must be secured from unauthorized access will be built based on the Globus Toolkit, a fundamental enabling technology for the "Grid," offering security, information infrastructure, resource management, data management, communication, fault detection, and portability ._x000D__x000D_ Nowadays, there exist several applications that have being developed in the framework of EU funded programs or by private initiatives, to support civil servants to their work. The limitation in all these applications is that they are tailor build to each agency needs and the civil servants have to submit in these applications all the information about training institutions’ programs and job offers that they find in order to match it with their beneficiaries’ needs. The proposed solution is not coming to replace these applications but to interconnect them in a wider secure knowledge Grid offering added value services to all involved. _x000D__x000D_ On another perspective, E-Service4U will give to the offering organizations and public bodies interested, the mean to disseminate their training programs and communicate job offers rapidly and effectively targeting a large pool of relevant beneficiaries. The training programs are shaped generally having in mind specific target groups while job offers enclose some parameters that can be matched better to some beneficiaries’ groups more than other. E-Service4U will report valuable statistics on unemployment in different disadvantage groups, demographic data, lack of necessary skills and other useful on demand statistical figures in order to help them schedule their policies providing them and the later channels to disseminate them to the adequate civil servants in order to reach the beneficiaries that are made in favor of. _x000D__x000D_

Acronym	E-Service4U (Reference Number: 4277)
Duration	01/09/2008 - 31/08/2010
Project Topic	The project E-Service4U proposes the development of an integrated platform based on the Grid/Web Services architecture that will collect and offer up-to-date information on training and job offers from different web sources matched to the needs of beneficiaries.
Project Results (after finalisation)	The CO result is the development of a software as a service for organizations, in order to help them support citizens to find jobs and training programs that fit their personal needs. The innovation of the service is that combines securely knowledge from different databases to offer one stop services to collaborating organizations.
Network	Eurostars
Call	Eurostars Cut-Off 1

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
3	Alianta, projektno svetovanje, d.o.o.	Partner	Slovenia
3	Cria - Promocions	Partner	Spain
3	T. Alexandridis & Co (Omega Technology)	Coordinator	Greece