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 Presentation
Semantic End-User Requirements
for Cross-Border Service Delivery
Pan-European e-Government Services (PEGSs) will enable citizens, businesses
and civil servants 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:
- 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.
- 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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