Estonia is seen as a remarkable success story in the context of e-government. Several studies that have mapped the major factors affecting the evolution of e-government in Estonia are mainly grounded in information systems theory; even if public-private partnerships are examined, their treatment remains too general. The current article argues for the importance of public procurement for innovation. Several risks were avoided due to the high competencies of local suppliers, a lack of legacy infrastructure, and a supportive environment for ‘ethical hackers’. The importance of the framework and the success factors is illustrated by a case study on e-voting.

Innovation: a factor explaining e-government success in Estonia

Research in the field of semantic Web services aims at automating the discovery, selection, composition and management of Web services based on semantic descriptions. However, the applicability of many solutions developed in this field is hampered by the costs associated with semantically annotating large repositories of Web services. To overcome this gap we propose a practical method for semantically annotating collections of XML Schemas and Web service interfaces. We have evaluated this method on a large repository of governmental Web services. The evaluation shows that relatively simple techniques are surprisingly cost-effective, saving hundreds of man-hours of semantic annotation effort. Moreover, the proposed method does not assume the availability of a preexisting ontology or controlled vocabulary. Instead, the space of annotations is dynamically built during the annotation process.

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Cost-Effective Semantic Annotation of XML Schemas and Web Service Interfaces

The developing of Estonian eGovernment components started approximately 15 years ago In this article, we discuss our experience how the main components of Estonian eGovernment like public key infrastructure, data exchange layer and governmental portal have developed and changed within this period Estonian ID-card is the best representative of our public key infrastructure technology The project X-Road realizes the idea of connecting all government information systems over the Internet The governmental portal is the largest eServices provider in Estonia All these systems are quite different from the first versions that appeared at the beginning of the century

New generations of Estonian eGovernment components

eGovernment services in Estonia are based on secure data transport backbone X-Road. Portals, elements of public key infrastructure (PKI) and a special service administration system RIHA supports developing and managing of the services. RIHA is the environment, which was initially developed for managing only the X-road data exchange services . Today RIHA will expand to managing all eGovernment services in public sector. The activities connected with eGovernment services will be described hereunder.

eGovernment Services: How to Develop Them, How to Manage Them?

Participation in the knowledge-based society presumes access to the internet and ICT-based services. As a result of the early liberalization of the telecommunications market and intense competition, Estonia has a well-developed communications network: all central and local government agencies, public libraries as well as educational and health institutions have an internet connection, as do 90% of Estonian enterprises. Approximately 90% of the Estonian population lives in areas with immediate availability of broadband internet. We discuss about Modernization of the e-Government in Estonia which includes: large penetration on broadband internet in Estonia, developing environments for implementation e-Government services and developing e-solutions for very different public sector activities like eNotary, eProcurement, e-Invoicing etc.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6008221/6017605/06017952.pdf

Modernization of the e-government in Estonia

eGovernment in Estonia got started by developing a functional architecture that includes secure data transport backbone X-Road, distributed software systems and different hardware components like portals, elements of public key infrastructure (PKI), governmental databases and information systems. This is the very basis of hundreds of services that have been created today. The recent success with eGoverment services and the common architecture of eGovernment will be described hereunder.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/10096/32329/01509730.pdf

N. Saard

Papers

eGovernment in Estonia: best practices