Emerging Interoperability Directions in Electronic Government

Abstract

Being important at organizational, process and semantic levels, interoperability became a key characteristic of the new electronic government systems and services, over the last decade. As a crucial prerequisite for automated process execution leading to “one-stop” e-Government services, interoperability has been systematically prescribed, since the dawn of the 21st century: Standardization frameworks, that included guidelines ranging from simple statements to well defined international Web-Service standards started to appear at National and Cross-Country levels, powered by governments, the European Union or the United Nations. In parallel, most international software, hardware and service vendors created their own strategies for achieving the goal of open, collaborative, loosely coupled systems and components. The paper presents the main milestones in this quest that shaped electronic government during the last years, describing National Frameworks, key Pan- European projects, international standardization and main industrial and research achievements in the EU. Moreover, the paper describes the next steps needed to promote interoperability at technical, semantic, organizational, legal or policy level – leading to the transformation of administrative processes and the provision of low-cost, high-quality services to citizens and businesses.