Interoperability

eGovernment addresses the institutional structures inherent in society and government and avenues for their technological support.

Fraunhofer FOKUS has been gaining knowledge in this field since 1995. Its goal is to promote application oriented research into modernising the public sector. Public administration departments should become more efficient in the future and this will occur by breaking down bureaucratic barriers, reorganising business processes and opening up the possibility of cross-organisational media mismatch free data exchanges. Interoperability is the deciding factor in making cooperative eGovernment possible between businesses and public authorities from the municipal level right through to the European level.

Individual administrative processes are developed independently of existing processes as a rule and independent organisations’ internal structures can only adapt in a very limited manner. Centralised technical work processes are therefore distributed between various existing applications and systems in most cases.

However, cooperation between various systems, technologies and products, a mutual understanding of data contents and careful consideration of changes to organisational structures and services are essential to the establishment of ground breaking administrative procedures.

Thus a singular interface technology that all systems can use and which allows cooperation between organisations and makes its own organisational unit that can operate across borders is necessary for the flexible integration of administrative procedures and business processes.

Using standards-based IuK technologies and guaranteeing technical, semantic and organisational interoperability

Information exchange which is free of data mismatches and thus inter-organisation and inter-technology friendly is only possible if standards based IuK technologies are used and if technical, semantic and organisational interoperability is guaranteed for all systems.

Fraunhofer FOKUS possesses the technical infrastructure and know-how to test interoperability, particularly between open source and closed source products and based on national and international vendor neutral and open standards with a view to technical, organisational and semantic aspects.

Together with partners from industry and the public sector, we develop technologies for mobile, distributed communications infrastructures as well as building blocks for integrating technologies, services and terminals. Vendors and IT providers are given optimal support if compatibility problems are identified and proprietary solutions are relocated or standards based solutions are required.

Interoperability tests are the main focus of the Fraunhofer FOKUS eGovernment Laboratory: amongst other things we demonstrate the way that process oriented administration functions based on service oriented architectures.