Enhancing Administrative Services Through Document Models

As the European Service Directive has already been enforced, a new challenge is to ensure a fully interoperable e-Government environment at the European level. The new dimension of the public administration process raises several issues that have to be addressed in order to successfully integrate systems from various administrative models. The current Single Point of Contact implementation assures that e-Government procedures can be completed at distance and by electronic means and that the information related to national requirements and procedures will be easily accessible for service providers and service recipients. In this context, a future goal will be to ensure the means in which different PSC will be able to interoperate. This is a complex task because each PSC has its own specific particularities and deals with various document types and formats. Creating common specifications for the documents types, formats and interchange containers is a mandatory stage in achieving the desired interoperability. In this paper we focus to the process of creating a unique document model for pan-European document interchanges. The document model will be used for the communication between PSCs. The communication between PSCs and national authorities will be done independently. The document model consists on both semantic and security metadata. This document model will be properly derived from e-Government ontology. Here we are presenting the initial assumptions and architectural issues that are elicited and will be used in order to create a fully functional model. We rely on the former experience gained in engineering a Romanian PSC proof of concept and we will extend our achievements to address the PSC interoperability goal.