X-Road
A project called X-Road was launched by the Estonian government in late 1990’s to create a secure and standardized environment for interconnection or enabling data exchange between a multitude of different information systems. The X-Road system uses the concept of digital signatures and contains its own Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that guarantees confidentiality, integrity and traceability of the exchanged data.
In the beginning of the decade, Estonia was a forerunner in IT deployment: no legacy systems, government support, strong legal base, high internet penetration, widespread use of internet banking.
Problems:
- Governmental information systems did not take advantage of the internet and suffered from poor interconnectivity
- Establishing new connections between governmental databases and systems was time-consuming and expensive
- The security awareness among IT people in smaller organizations was low
The Department of State Information Systems decided to improve the situation and solve the interconnectivity problems. Governmental X-Road program was launched to develop a solution to the problem.
Cybernetica have experience from the first X-Road project in 2001.
The goal of the project was to
- Build core infrastructure
- Set up a central agency
- Build portals for officials and citizens
- Build adapter servers for five basic registries
The end result of the project was a working organization and infrastructure that had some useful services as well as users that actually took advantage of those services.
Additional Information: X-Road factsheet (.pdf)
X-Road technical overview (.pdf)
X-Road Whitepaper (.pdf)
eGovernment systems
