Source: Project Team of the CEN/ISSS eGovernment Focus Group

Title:

Status: Interim Report (Draft Version B )

Chairman: Peter Brown (Pensive)

Secretariat: Gertjan van den Akker (NEN)

Editors: Marc Wilhelm Küster (University of Applied Sciences Worms), Makx Dekkers (Indepentent), Graham Moore (Networked Planet)

Contents

  1. Executive Summary and Recommendations
  2. Introduction
    1. eGovernment
    2. Organizational Background
    3. Scope of the Report
    4. Guiding Principles
  3. Key Definitions
  4. Ontology for Standards and Standardization Initiatives
    1. Resource Sharing in eGovernment
    2. Not another project
    3. Added Value through Visibility and Transparency
    4. Labelling Resources
    5. Creation of the Ontology
      1. Background
      2. Classification of Standards
        1. Semantic standards
        2. Technical standards
        3. Process standards
      3. Description of standards
      4. Description of Standards Initiatives
      5. Standards Ontology
        1. Standard
        2. Public Authority
        3. Standards Initiative
      6. Discussion, conclusions
    6. Major Players in eGovernment Standardization
    7. Methodology
    8. Services
    9. Multilinguality and Multiculturalism
    10. Key Conclusions
  5. Potential of Standards
      1. Objective
      2. Possible perspectives
      3. Services perspective
      4. Standards perspective
    2. Areas of Maximal Impact
  6. Challenges in Current eGovernment Standardization
    1. Gap Analysis
    2. Maintenance of Standards
    3. Policy Issues
  7. European eGovernment Resource Network (eGRN)
    1. The Search Interface
  8. Summary
  9. Annexes
    1. Formal Ontology Specification
    2. Rendering of the Topic Map on Standards
    3. Work of the eGovernment Focus Group
      1. Terms of Reference
        1. Vision and mission
        2. Background
        3. Scope
        4. Objectives
        5. Membership
        6. Working methods
    4. Acknowledgements
    5. References and Bibliography

1. Executive Summary and Recommendations

Note: A significantly enhanced version ("version b") with a preliminary executive summary will be prepared in time for Lisbon and presented at the Open Meeting on September 21st. In particular, version b will contain:

2. Introduction

2.1. eGovernment

Electronic Government or eGovernment deals with “the use of information and communication technology [ICT] to support and improve public policies and government operations, engage citizens, and provide comprehensive and timely government services”, to use the widely accepted definition in the mission statement of the European eGovernment Society [eGovSoc], or “the use of ICT in public administrations combined with organizational change and new skills, in order to improve public services and democratic processes, and strengthen support to public policies”, to quote the European Commission.

The term eGovernment itself is of comparatively recent origin and even the oldest dedicated eGovernment events only date from the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, the practice behind it is much older and goes back to the first, mainframe-centred wave of data processing in the public sector in the 1960s and 1970s that frequently continues to shape existing IT infrastructures.

eGovernment is widely considered to comprise a variety of specializations. Their exact natures, however, are less definitive and include, depending on the viewpoint, areas such as access to public sector information, administrative computer science, eDemocracy, eParticipation and eJustice. The concrete specificities of these areas and indeed their delineations differ widely from country to country and even from region to region, reflecting the respective legal and cultural traditions.

2.2. Organizational Background

More detailed background about the institutional background, the project's mission, with a progress report in an annex.

Highlight the role of the Austrian government and especially their support of bilateral talks in preperation of the Focus Group work.

CEN is one of the three European Standardization Bodies (with ETSI for telecommunications and CENELEC for electrical engineering). Within the purview of its “Information Society Standardization System” lie CEN's ICT sector activities.

At the request of numerous public authorities and other entities, CEN/ISSS has created a Focus Group to map the various activities in the field of eGovernment standardization and to discuss a roadmap for the future.

An initial project, funded by Sun Microsystems has already pursued one project idea linked to the Focus Group work, which was the use of topic maps. Under this initial project, an Initial ontology for describing government services and the use of relevant standards was developed and expressed as a topic map. The integration of the ontology into a Topic Map system was then demonstrated to this meeting.

The Focus Group has now been charged to work on a eGovernment standards report to be delivered in January 2008. The report will determine the role that standards should play in eGovernment, produce an overview of standards and specification available and based on this overview, prepare proposals and/or recommendations to CEN and other standardization bodies, the European Commission and its agencies, national administrations and industry and other market players concerning standardization issues in the field of eGovernment. This work is partially funded by the European Commission and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) through CEN.

2.3. Scope of the Report

Outline the scope of this report. The scope of the report includes the priority areas of eGovernment Action Plan, namely eID, eProcurement, and Archiving

By the project team's terms of reference (cf. annex), the report of the eGovernment Focus Group should aim to address the role of standards both in:

2.4. Guiding Principles

While eGovernment is wider, many of the current eGovernment activities and discussions centre on the provision of governmental services through the Internet and specifically through the Web (this is quite analogous to eBusiness). The focus is thus on interfaces between public bodies and other entities, be those other entities citizens (Government to Citizen, G2C), companies (Government to Business, G2B) or other public bodies (Government to Government / G2G) or, indeed, other stakeholders (departments, individuals etc.) within the very same public body. Information on the inner workings of governmental ICT systems is only rarely required (or even available) for this.

The focus on interfaces between stakeholders that together strive to achieve certain goals is one of the key characteristics of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) as defined in the SOA Reference Model [SOAReferenceModel]. It revolves around the concept of a service as a “mechanism by which needs [of a potential service consumer] and capabilities [of a service provider] are brought together”. Note that neither a service consumer --- “[a]n entity which seeks to satisfy a particular need through the use capabilities offered by means of a service” (p. 29) --- and a service provider --- “[a]n entity (person or organization) that offers the use of capabilities by means of a service” (p. 29) --- are necessarily machines nor that the data returned by a service must always be machine processable, even though for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) in a narrower sense that may often be the more interesting case.

Service providers and service consumers are linked through visibility which helps to join the service's capabilities and the consumer's particular needs in order to interact for a desired real world effect.

Key tenets of Service Oriented Architectures are guiding principles for this report. This is not to be understood in the sense of promoting SOAs over alternative approaches or of assuming that existing architectures in the public sector necessarily conform to SOA principles, but that SOA concepts offer valuable and widely shared definitions for the description of existing eGovernment resources and their potential interplay across service boundaries.

3. Key Definitions

The report inherits a few key definitions from [SOAReferenceModel]. For the convenience of the reader, they are here reproduced and marked with [SOAReferenceModel]

Note: In the context of this report, a service provider is always either a public authority or an entity acting on behalf of a public authority

4. Ontology for Standards and Standardization Initiatives

4.1. Resource Sharing in eGovernment

Resource sharing aims towards a reuse of existing resources or collaborative work towards creating new ones. A key prerequisite for resource sharing is of an organizational and cultural nature, namely to foster a general “reflex for collaboration”, an understanding that resource sharing is of mutual benefit.

Resource sharing, we maintain,

Resource sharing in turn needs

However, even given a general reflex for collaboration the ability to share resources directly depends on their respective visibilities, very much in the sense of [SOAReferenceModel]. Hence, the main objective for the eGovernment Resource Network (eGRN) is to enable better visibility for and better use of existing eGovernment resources and solutions.

4.2. Not another project

The traditional way towards visibility would be a centralized repository which hosts the services or at least their proxies. In this, it will stand alongside many other existing and valuable resources. There are already plenty of resources out there that are difficult enough to find even today.

However, "yet another project"® will bring more disadvantages than benefit, adding to the already high dispersion and complexity in the field.

4.3. Added Value through Visibility and Transparency

A much better solution than yet another project is to link up existing resources by labeling and identifying them. This requires again not a drastically new technical solution, but primarily the reflex for cooperation that drives the eGRN.

Figure 1: The eGRN is a virtual network (Source: Peter Brown, Pensive)

Of course, the even this design of the eGRN is not the silver bullet and does not solve all the problems itself by. However, it does make them:

and it provides high-level oversight over the current situation.

Maybe most importantly, since it is not in opposition with existing projects, but rather joining them up it can build on the results from existing (national or sub-national) eGovernment projects as well as those of EU funded undertakings, as long as it provides a common model for the description of resources and a common collaboration methodology.

4.4. Labelling Resources

Figure 2: Labelling resources (Source: Peter Brown, Pensive)

The eGRN ontology together with Topic Maps are primarily a means to label resources so that they become visible in a virtual resource network in which labeled resources are bound together by a common eGovernment Information Model and a common eGovernment Collaboration Model. Instead of being centrally held, they are “just” jointly accessibly through a common service bus using standard Internet technologies.

4.5. Creation of the Ontology

The ontology for standards and standardization initiatives together with the service ontology developed in the first, SUN sponsored phase of the project team's work structures the internal and external representations of our results.

For the purpose of this report the two key entities of the ontology are service and standard. They are shown here with their most important relations to other entities of the ontology. Those entities as well as additional data relating to them is captured during the harvesting period.

With the approval of the Focus Group the project team decided at the beginning of the project to use Topic Maps [ISO13250] and in particular its XML-based XTM exchange format to express the results.

Figure 3: Entity service with its key relationships to other entities

Figure 4: Entity standard with its key relationships to other entities

4.5.1. Background

This chapter of the report zooms in on the entity "Standard" in the eGovernment service ontology. It first proposes a classification of the types of standards that are relevant for eGovernment services and then considers all entities in the eGovernment service ontology to see what types of standards may have relevance for each of the entities. After that analysis, a classification of Standards Initiatives is proposed. The standards ontology refers to the result of an earlier CEN project that defined a draft ontology of entities related to eGovernment services. Please note that the examples against the entities are a first approximation and are by no means intended to give a full picture. Team, Steering Group and Focus Group members continue to be encouraged to add more examples if necessary.

This chapter is based on conclusions of PT meeting 2007-06-28

4.5.2. Classification of Standards

As a first approach, we will classify standards and standards initiatives in three categories:

  1. Semantic standards

  2. Technical standards

  3. Process standards

All three categories are subclasses of the class "standard" within the standards ontology. Thus they share the same attributes and associations.

4.5.2.1. Semantic standards

This type of standards and initiatives are concerned with the meaning of entities, for example enabling statements that a document is in PDF format and that the language it is written in is English.

Two sub-types of standards in this category can be identified:

  1. Description framework standards that define methodologies to describe entities, such as [Resource Description Framework], [Topic Maps], [11179 Metadata registries], general or specific metadata standards such as [Core], [http://www.editeur.org/ONIX%20International%20FAQ.htmlONIX], or [Learning Object Metadata]

  2. Classification scheme standards that provide pre-defined sets of values in the form of controlled vocabularies, theseauri, ontologies or code lists such as the Eurovoc or NACE terminologies and ISO code lists for the names of courties and languages

  3. Identifier scheme standards that provide mechanisms to identify people, organizations, documents and other types of objects, e.g. URI, ISBN, DOI identifier schemes

4.5.2.2. Technical standards

These standards are concerned with the more technical issues, such as data formats, protocols and system configurations, including

  1. Data encoding standards, such as [http://www.w3.org/XML/XML], [http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/HTML], [http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.htmlPDF], [http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-X.509-200508-IX.509]

  2. Data exchange standards, including protocols such as [http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP], [http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/SOAP]

  3. System standards, such as operating system (Unix, Windows) and database standards (SQL)

4.5.2.3. Process standards

These are the standards that govern the way process and policies are implemented. These standards cover a wide range of issues, e.g.:

Process standards may in turn rely on semantic and technical standards for their implementation.

4.5.3. Description of standards

Standards will be described using descriptive data elements from [WD 24706 (Information technology-Metadata for technical standards and specifications documents)].

Descriptive elements to be used:

Relations with other entities in the ontology are listed below.

4.5.4. Description of Standards Initiatives

Descriptive elements to be used

An earlier proposal to distinguish between SSOs and SDOs was dropped because in specific cases it will be hard to determine the boundary between the two. Relations with other entities in the ontology are listed below.

4.5.5. Standards Ontology

4.5.5.1. Standard

4.5.5.2. Public Authority

4.5.5.3. Standards Initiative

4.5.6. Discussion, conclusions

The entity STANDARDS INITIATIVE should be added to the Draft eGovernment Services Ontology with relationship to the entity STANDARD as described above.

= Harvesting of Standards and Standardization Bodies =

Note: The minimum number of standards that the project aims to find and classify is 200, that of services 100.

4.6. Major Players in eGovernment Standardization

Covers major players in eGovernment standardization, taken in a wide sense to include formal standardization bodies, consortia, government agencies, ... that create specifications in the field. Where applicable, also eBusiness standardization groups are mentioned (e. g. ebXML-related work).

The definitive list of major players in the field of eGovernment Standardization will be generated from the harvested data. The list will obviously comprise the known major standardization bodies in the field of eGovernment such as CEN and ETSI on a European level, and ISO, OASIS and W3C on the international level.

4.7. Methodology

Explain the methodology used for harvesting existing standards (work plan, step 3). The full set of standards will be generated from the topic map in an annex.

Start from existing registries / taxonomies / lists of standards and service units elaborated at the national and / or European level.

The harvesting starts out with a list of nationally mandated standards and / or interoperability frameworks. It will describe the standards against the ontology including their relevant associations with other classes such as service, SDO/SSO or mandate.

Given that with the allocated resources it is impossible to comprehensively or even partially cover the national frameworks of all 27 EU member states, let alone the very large number of regionally or even locally mandated ones, the project team in cooperation with the Focus Group agreed upon the following national list of frameworks to start out with:

Where necessary, the harvesting will continue from these standards to cover other standards they in turn refer. In addition the harvesting builds on existing collections of standards in the field such as the Epsinet standard map, the remainders of the DIFFUSE project and and an overview over common and less common Web Services specifications [http://www.ws-universe.com/]

For the puropose of data entry a set of data entry masks has been created and is available via [http://psi.egovpt.org/]. The data that is thus generated can be exported in XTM-format.

Figure 5: Screenshot of the preliminary data entry mask for eGovernment standards

All harvested standards are assigned unique Published Subject Indicators (PSIs) in the format , e. g.

4.8. Services

Elaborate the relationship between services and standards and identify preliminary “service units”

Services offer services as required by any given mandate.

For services the work starts out with a preliminary list of national eGovernment portals:

The project will initially concentrate again on a selection of services from the same seven countries that are used for the harvesting of standards. It may cover services from other countries if the time permits.

4.9. Multilinguality and Multiculturalism

Explore the impact of Europe's multilinguality and multiculturalism on eGovernment standards, standardization and work practice.

The conclusions on the impact of Europe's multilinguality and multiculturalism on eGovernment standards, standardization and work practice will be presented after the harvesting of the data

4.10. Key Conclusions

Present key conclusions that can be drawn from the data collected.

The general conclusions can only be drawn on the basis of a thorough analysis of the harvested data.

5. Potential of Standards

== Criteria for the determination of the potential of the use of standards for the provision and management of services in eGovernment ==

5.0.1. Objective

The current section contains the approach towards measuring the usefulness of standards in order to be able to "determine the potential of the use of standards for (the provision and management of services in) eGovernment" as specified in the Technical Proposal that forms the basis of this work.

5.0.2. Possible perspectives

There are basically two ways that the sentence "determine the potential of the use of standards for (the provision and management of services in) eGovernment" can be read.

The project team will look at both perspectives.

5.0.3. Services perspective

Looking at the issue from the services perspective, a list will be drawn up of eGovernment services and related activities (e.g. the "government" of eGovernment) on a high level. Some work on this was done by Cap Gemini for the European Commission which will be used as a basis for this list.

It may be possible to identify some areas on this level that could be helped by standards (probably in the area of process standards, for example quality and security). However, it will be necessary to go to a deeper level, identifying "service units" where standards may be useful. An example: one of the higher-level services could be "Issue driver's licence". At some point in the provision of this service, a "service unit" identify_Person would be invoked. This "service unit" would be helped if there were a standard for identity management and a standard schema for describing persons. Especially if the service involved the transfer of a foreign licence of an immigrant, it would be useful if there was a standard for this used across national borders.

Now in this perspective, criteria for the usefulness of standards need to measure if the use of a standard would have a positive effect on three objectives that are mentioned in the Technical Proposal:

Secondary criteria that work best on the higher levels will look at whether standards contribute to increase in usability/accessibility, quality, performance or accountability, etc.

5.0.4. Standards perspective

Looking at the standards perspective, there are a number of areas where criteria are be defined that measure the usefulness of the standards themselves. These criteria look at the characteristics of the standards and standards process.

  1. 1. Wide adoption, across domains (e.g. public and private usage) and across national borders: this would help both interoperability and economies of scale. This aspect will be measured with three criteria:
  2. the standard is mentioned on Wikipedia (yes/no)
  3. number of hits in Google on reverse lookup of the official or main specification of the standard (numerical scale)
  4. number of hits in citeseer as a measure for research touching on this standard (numerical scale)
  5. Expected stability and professional maintenance: this would manage the longer-term risk of having to change systems if standards change. This aspect will be measured with one criterion:
  6. there is a stable maintenance process for the standard (yes/no)
  7. Openness of process and possibility to influence development: this would enable influence of the eGovernment sector to get specific requirements included in the standards. This aspect is measured by three criteria:
  8. Participation is free for everybody who wants to be involved (yes/no)
  9. Participation is limited to geographically determined representation (yes/no)
  10. Participation is limited to a closed user group (yes/no)

Rather than using these criteria to rank standards that are found in the harvesting activity in this project as "good" or "bad", or even worse, have a global ranking list, the project team will make a case that standards that do well on those criteria should be interesting candidates for eGovernment programmes to look at. A possible exception could be if a standard is identified for a particular service unit that is being used by many eGovernment programmes across Europe, in which case the project team may make a strong case for such a standard to be a recommendation.

5.1. Areas of Maximal Impact

Map areas in which eGov standards are maximally useful, taking account of the priority areas eID, eProcurement, and Archiving, but extending beyond them.

To be done after the harvesting is complete

6. Challenges in Current eGovernment Standardization

6.1. Gap Analysis

Perform a gap analysis on the potential of standards and the current situation as witnessed by the key findings of the harvesting process. Map “service units” that have been identified in the harvesting process to standards.

To be done once the harvesting data is available

6.2. Maintenance of Standards

Analyze mechanisms available for managing such standards and specifications (governance, processes and infrastructure) and suggest specific improvements. Identify any obstacles to a coherent approach to eGovernment standardisation at the trans-national level, in terms of authority, governance and infrastructure.

To be done once the harvesting data is available

6.3. Policy Issues

Identify recurring or frequently encountered policy issues, with a view to providing common solutions, with particular regard to the gap between stated goals and actual delivery of solutions.

To be done once the harvesting data is available

7. European eGovernment Resource Network (eGRN)

7.1. The Search Interface

The current eGRN builds on the findings of the first, SUN-sponsored project phase, leading them to new applications especially regarding eGovernment standards.

The original topic map demonstrator gives an idea of how a search interface for the resource network might look like also in phase two.

Figure 6: Screen shot of the eGRN demonstrator under [http://demo.egrn.euhttp://demo.egrn.eu]

The original demonstrator was written with two clear use cases in mind:

Alongside it a knowledge service was written that integrated the search capabilities into a major word processing system.

While based on a very limited number of days, it showed that — given substantial further development and operational arrangements — it has the potential to be a useful tool to disclose and manage resources. In this project phase we shall enhance the demonstrator for the specific requirements of the two types of resources here, standards and services including their respective associations.

A finalization of the demonstrator, operational arrangements with well-defined processes of maintenance and responsibilities, and further refinement of the use cases are of scope of this project phase.

8. Summary

9. Annexes

9.1. Formal Ontology Specification

To be done

9.2. Rendering of the Topic Map on Standards

To be done once the harvesting is complete

9.3. Work of the eGovernment Focus Group

To be done before the open meeting

9.3.1. Terms of Reference

9.3.1.1. Vision and mission

The Focus Group is to determine the role that standards should play in eGovernment, in particular as an important means of achieving interoperability at all levels of public administration throughout the European Union, including at national, regional and local levels. The Group will identify what measures are required to achieve this goal and contribute to the debate on how to ensure a permanent framework concerning standards in relation to eGovernment at a pan-European level, in a way that is as harmonised as possible with ICT standards of general application.

The Focus Group is established to prepare proposals and/or recommendations to CEN and other standardization bodies, the European Commission and its agencies, national administrations and industry and other market players concerning standardization issues in the field of eGovernment.

9.3.1.2. Background

'eGovernment' is defined by the European Commission as "the use of ICT in public administrations combined with organisational change and new skills, in order to improve public services and democratic processes, and strengthen support to public policies". eGovernment is an enabler to realise a better and more efficient administration. The use of standards has been recognised as an important pre-requisite of the success of eGovernment. The use of standards is particularly important in areas such as interoperability, one-stop government, joined-up government, accessibility/usability for and by citizens, etc. As a result, most national administrations in Europe now have some authority in place, seeking to establish, maintain and, sometimes, enforce the use of ICTs in eGovernment.

However, some initiatives are backed by a legal framework, this is relatively rare. Furthermore, authorities are noticeably absent at the trans-national and pan-European levels, with one or two exceptions such as the European Commission's IDABC programme, despite the growing demand for the supply of trans-national eServices. IDABC deliverables to date will provide a valuable input and starting point for the Group's work.

Not all the issues are purely standards-related of course, there are legal or administrative matters, for example. It is not the task of the Focus Group to seek to address these as such, although it should identify such issues where they constitute barriers to effective standards adoption.

At national and even regional or local levels, there is no shortage of eGovernment initiatives or projects that either aim at determining 'standards' or encourage their use. In addition, a wide range of specifications, recommendations and guidelines are proposed by interested parties through formal standards organizations (for example, UN/CEFACT) or consortia, (for example W3C and OASIS). It should be a general rule that, as far as possible, standards used in eGovernment be the same as those used in the private sector. This will minimise problems for those entities that have dealings with both, even if there will inevitably be additional eGovernment requirements.

However, the wide range of existing initiatives at national, regional or even local level may result in a lack of knowledge of other administrations' work., and lack of understanding and knowledge of the standards actually available or envisaged. This may lead to duplication of effort, and missed opportunities to improve economies of scale. As the use of standards is sometimes implicit, it is unclear what is available or used at present.

At the pan-European level, the main problem areas are:

The European Commission's former IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations), now IDABC programme (Interoperable Delivery of pan-European E-Government Services to Public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens) has sought a more coherent approach, but does not embrace the full range of activities, since it concentrates on cross-border services. Numbers of public authorities at European and national levels have indicated that they require, and would indeed welcome, help in standardization efforts, some of which are fragmentary. Standardization in any case needs to help by providing coherent advice, and a platform for discussion of these issues and resolution of conflicting approaches.

CEN, standards consortia or other bodies, can build and maintain standards, specifications, rules and guidelines, according to well tried and tested internal processes, but they on the other hand do not have a general mandate to act without support from public authorities.

Furthermore, too little guidance exists at present for administrations to choose among the wide range of standards and specifications, or evaluate the relative authority, validity or sustainability of a particular choice, based on any hierarchy of norms. It should be noted that in the ICT domain, there are many proprietary standards, and often competing solutions, with resulting problems for inter-operability.

9.3.1.3. Scope

The first challenge of the Focus Group will be to consider the role of standards in:

Particular attention will be paid to the need to interface the standards issues with the policy requirements emerging from public administrations. The role of a group within the standards environment is to take these requirements and assess what the standards implications are. This role will be given added value particularly given the absence, at an EU level, of any overall authority corresponding to national administrations' CIO or eGovernment policy units.

The Focus Group will need to identify the extent of:

that currently exist, or that are desirable but absent, in the field of eGovernment in Europe.

9.3.1.4. Objectives

The objectives of the Focus Group will be to:

9.3.1.5. Membership

Membership of eGov shall be open to any interested party with the necessary interests and commitment.

Representatives of key stakeholders in eGovernment will be specifically invited to join. eGov should aim to be inclusive, representative and be able to attract a critical mass of eGovernment stakeholders in order to garner buy-in to its activities from a broad spectrum of interests. eGov will aim to create an impact by attracting the participation and commitment of important relevant actors.

Provided that the Grant request that has been submitted to DG ENTR (in the context of DG ENTR's support to standardization activities in support of eEurope) gets accepted, membership of the eGov Focus Group will be free of charge.

9.3.1.6. Working methods

The CEN/ISSS eGov Focus Group shall be formally responsible to the CEN/ISSS Forum, which shall endorse the Terms of Reference and any future amendments to them, and the final Report.

The Chair will be nominated by the Group and endorsed by the Forum.

Until such time that it is clear that the Grant request will be accepted/will not be accepted, the Focus Group secretariat will be provided by a CEN/ISSS Staff member. The Secretariat will co-ordinate the administrative duties involved in the organization of the FG including:

The Secretariat shall maintain web pages with appropriate links, an e-mail exploder and an FTP site. Where possible, meeting participation by audio, or web conferences should be enabled.

The Focus Group will also nominate a representative to act as single point of contact to IDABC and its expert groups.

The eGov Focus Group may manage resources in the form of Project Teams, appointed under CEN rules to prepare and edit documents.

9.4. Acknowledgements

This section will give the attributions of sections to their respective authors.

9.5. References and Bibliography

The final bibliography to be collected as a topic map and inserted in the eGRN and to be referenced from this report.

[eGovSoc] European eGovernment Society: 'Mission Statement of the European eGovernment Society'. Source: [http://www.uni-koblenz.de/FB4/Contrib/EGOVS/Mission]

[ISO13250] ISO/IEC: 'ISO/IEC 13250:2002: Topic Maps'. 2002-05-19.

[SOAReferenceModel] OASIS: 'Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture 1.0'. 2006-08-02.

egovpt_fg: Interim Report on the eGovernment Standards Roadmap (last edited 2007-09-19 10:06:30 by MarcKüster)