Objectives

The overall objective of the eMayor clustering event is to bring together the knowledge and experience gained from other 6FP projects, to explore potential synergies, and to identify interest from the European research community in the technological aspects of secure e-government services. More specifically, we address a number of problems, questions, and research issues about secure e-government services for SMGOs, including the following ones:

Organizational Goals and Problems

• A well accepted definition of SMGOs
• Identification of e-government goals and security needs of SMGOs
• Promising secure e-services for SMGOs and criteria for the selection of them
• Problems that the SMGOs face which slow the adoption of secure e-services? Can we find and categorize more problems? Can we propose some measures?
• The employment of PKI by the SMGOs requires the cross-certification of these entities. This is still an open problem. Is there any progress in the solution of this problem? What are the next steps?
• Unified business models for e-government smart card PKI based implementations addressing complex problems as liability and insurance.
• Government process reengineering of the entire information system platform and back-office processes:
• Transformation of the relationships between public administrations, citizens, enterprises and SMEs.
• Development of a new culture for governance in public services, including new mindsets and sets of values, new behaviors, and increasing self-service by citizens.

Legal Issues/Policies/Standards

• Security policies and application policies (for the e-government applications) need to address the specific characteristics of SMGOs. How can these policies be formulated in a standard, easily adopted manner?
• Current directives emphasize the security ignoring the privacy aspect. What can be done to solve this problem in SMGOs environment?
• Implementations for e-government have additional policy requirements not addressed in commercial applications. Such requirements need to be defined and addressed for e-government.

Technical Problems

• Interoperability is considered as a major barrier in developing/adopting/using e-government services. Web services is a promising technology which contributes towards the solution of this barrier.
• However in eMayor we realized that there are still open problems (e.g. sharing of directories). We need to compile a list of open problems so we can address them in the future.
• PKI in combination with Web services will solve the security and interoperability problems. But this combination brings open technical problems (secure mobile access to Web services i.e. use of XML Digital Signature)
• Automated cross certification and automated comparison of security policies.
• Automation and transparency in the PKI functionality in order to provide pre-packaged, user friendly secure e-government services to the citizens.

Proposed Research Issues in Administrative Knowledge Processes

• The development of knowledge representation techniques and methodologies for a multimedia content repository, development of user interface design and management tools meeting the requirements of the information architecture methodology.
• Design and implementation of efficient algorithms for management of large distributed multimedia content repositories.
• Development of analysis and design methodology for large, knowledge based content repository systems.
• Political acceptance

These questions and problems are relevant for other projects as well and deserve a discussion in a broader context. The meeting gives the opportunity to discuss these questions in a broader context, to present answers from the viewpoint and experience of different projects, to get a more comprehensive view of the problems, to get a common understanding, to indicate directions for standards, etc.