In a simplified view, the administrations in Europe as a whole can be seen as a forest. Each tree is one specific administration of one member state. Each leaf is one particular service provided by this administration. e-Administration today mostly consists of providing services via IT tools and reducing the paper support via a user-friendly interface to the service. This is what we call "e-Administration in the small". The real challenge is to enable smooth collaboration between the trees, i.e. between administrations of the same or of different member states. This is "e-Administration in the large" and reflects our understanding of collaborative eGovernment systems. R4eGov aims at providing the basic conceptual and technical framework for the first e-Administration in the large for Europe. Today, exchanges between administrations of one country (such as, for example, between French Etat civil and Casier judiciaire) are being put in place with often little consideration for the need of mutual trust. Exchanges between states are possible but of little practical use. It is urgent to address these issues. Thus, the main three objectives of the R4eGov project are:
- To gather and elicit the requirements for e-Administration in the large, on basis of which a concrete interoperation of web service enabled legacy public sector applications will be achieved using collaborative workflows.
- To provide the tools and methods for an e-Administration in the large from a technical and politicosociological perspective.
- To provide the required security and privacy for an e-Administration in the large, defining the appropriate methods and tools for control, security and privacy at the collaborative workflow and application layer.
Currently eGovernment interoperability in the EU follows an ad hoc approach and systems are only made interoperable when there is a shared purpose and some general legal guidelines. The next step to be that of individual EU eGovernment agency collaboration where general doctrines (e.g. the EU constitution) are in place, administrations share purpose and goals in a common value system, but countries will want to remain locally responsible and in control of their systems. While combined and unified eGovernment systems will certainly further evolve and emerge (such as the already existing Eurojust and Europol), we believe the majority of systems to require the methodologies, systems and tools for achieving the maturity level of collaborative organisations. R4eGov aims to be the basis for a major evolution needed for eGovernment interoperability, while preserving the autonomy of existing institutions and diversity of basic principles.
Partner
- North East Development Agency
- Deutsches Forschungszentrum für künstliche Intelligenz GmbH
- Infocamere - Societa Consortile di Informatica delle Camere di Commercio
- Karobas
- Metadat IT-Beratungs und Entwicklungs GmbH
- SAP AG - SAP Labs France
- Thales Security Systems SAS
- Unisys Belgium SA
- Web Force - Accellence
- Institut Eurecom
- University of Leeds - Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence
- Max-Planck Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften E.V.
- Hamburger Informatik Technologie Center E.V.
- Universität Koblenz-Landau
- Der Bundesgerichtshof
- Bundeskanzleramt der Republik Österreich
- Europol
- Eurojust
- Service Public Fédéral Technologie de l'information et de la communication
- Greffe du tribunal de commerce de Paris
