InfoCitizen Project

Introduction

The department of applied research in Ibermática S.A. is an industrial partner of the InfoCitizen project.

Funded by the European Commission as part of the Vth framework programmed, reference IST-2000-28759, the goal is to create the necessary infrastructure to link local administrations in a pan-European network. Services to the citizen will share information in real time, so as to avoid unnecessary delays while foreign certifications are obtained.

Marco Scenario

Marco is a German citizen who wishes to move to Tres Cantos (Madrid), from the Schmelz municipality. In the traditional process, Marco must:

go back to Schmelz to request his German residence certificate,
obtain a certified translation of the certificate,
and present it in Tres Cantos with the rest of the required documentation (identification, phone or gas contract...).
For Schmelz to update his information, Tres Cantos starts a long process sending the data to the Spanish National Statistics Office, from where data are propagated to his former residence; this process can take several months.

If both municipalities (Tres Cantos and Schmelz) belong to the InfoCitizen network, Marco doesn't require the residence certificate; instead, the Tres Cantos employee will introduce his former residence location, and the system will automatically locate his information. Furthermore, the registration process will finish in an update to the Schmelz database, so that he will be marked as "moved" there.

As part of the project proof of concept, Marco's wedding in Colleferro (Italia) and the joint adoption of a child in Thessaloniki (Greece) are also included; both processes are equally transparent to the citizen.

Interoperability Platform

Ibermática shares work in multiple work packages within the project; its biggest responsibility is the interoperability platform, the basic infrastructure that executes basic services and compounds them to form high level services in the system.

The in-house agent platform is the framework on which the interoperability platform has been built. The use of Java-programmable agents has shortened development time, as system failures, configuration issues and other inherent problems of distributed development are solved at this level.

Similarly, the information in the services repository (location, service and extraction data) is stored in the database using an automatic persistence layer, so that the database schema needs not be maintained independently.

Further Information

The following video shows a demo of the project in action, with actual software components.

The project main page has a lot of documentation, including the public results of the project.