Arnold van Overeem is a Principal Consultant and Enterprise Architect within the Products Division of Capgemini Netherlands. He is a senior member of the international architecture community in Capgemini and a member of The Open Group UDEF Forum. Since joining Capgemini and predecessor companies in 1985 he has been working in finance, telecom, automotive, retail, high tech industry and public sector and is an expert on infrastructure architecture. He is involved in Capgemini's corporate architecture training program at the Capgemini International training centre in Les Fontaines (France).

Prior to joining Pact Networks (now Capgemini) in 1985, he worked for eleven years at a large Dutch bank (now ING-bank), at IBM and at the Leiden University.

Arnold received a Master of Science in Chemistry and Numerical Mathematics from Leiden University in 1974.

Presentation
Semantic Infrastructure Requirements for Cross-Border Service Delivery
Pan-European e-Government Services (PEGSs) will enable citizens and businesses from all Member States to access e-Government services in all Member States. In future these services will eliminate or reduce the current limitations on the free flow of people, goods, capital and services across all Member States of the European Union.

The road towards this goal has to overcome a number of hurdles of different complexity. An architecture has been developed that addresses these complexities and defines a range of solutions to overcome these hurdles. The extreme ends of this solution range can be characterised as follows:

1. Develop Communal Guidelines that define for each PEGS exactly how Member States would have to behave in order to achieve totally equal treatment of all citizens and businesses within the European Union. All efforts to achieve the full and unrestricted implementation of such Communal Guidelines, would be completely the responsibility of the Member State Governments.
2. Develop a kind of gateway that exactly defines how each PEGS could inter-work with other PEGSs within European Union without any change in its national context. All efforts to implement this gateway would be the sole responsibility of the European Commission.

Between these extremes a number of intermediate solutions have been defined. The architecture presented in this paper allows to mix and match all solutions according to different needs for different PEGSs, different political context to achieve Communal Guidelines, different inherent security requirements for different types of civil or business services or for administrative co-operation, different speeds of implementation for different and in future more Member States, and different maturity of ICT technology available in different Member States to implement these solutions.

The spectrum of solutions can be well described in terms of the European Interoperability Framework, developed by the IDA program in parallel to this architecture study. Existing initiatives by the European Commission like the (s-)Testa backbone network and the e-Link pilot fit well within this architecture, but as such only constitute building blocks, and are not solutions on its own.

It is anticipated that portal technology will unlock the potential of this European Inter-working Architecture to its users: citizens, as well as business representatives and civil servants, working for Member State Administrations. The real benefit however, comes from the application of the various integration scenarios of back offices of the participating Member State Administrations.

One of the issues elaborated in this architecture is semantic interoperability for which a pilot project, supported by the EU has just been started. This project will test the usability of UDEF as an enabling technology in cross-language semantic interoperability.

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