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 – C hemical Sa fety I nformation
S ystem (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
 the requirements to be met by bilateral communication
 operational principle of bilateral communication and
 services provided by CSIS under 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.
Operation of bilateral communication is illustrated by the following figure.
Communication surface
Information system
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).
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.