The Austrian government's open source development website, eGovLabs, on Thursday 24 May will move their key open source software projects to the European Commission's Joinup platform. The move should make it easier for other public administrations in the EU to re-use the applications and to collaborate in development.
The applications moved to Joinup include for example Mocca (Modular Open Citizen Card Architecture), an electronic signature application to manage eID cards. The application is interoperable with the eID cards of Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland. Another software application is made by combining PDF-AS and PDF-AS-GUI, components for signing PDF using eIDs and for providing a graphical user interface. A third example is MOA-SP, used for verification of XML Advanced Electronic Signatures (Xades).
The Austrian open source forge's is a success. Last year for instance, the ten products were downloaded some then thousand times and the platform has more than two hundred active users. "These users will be asked to register with Joinup, and we hope they will all help to strengthen this software development platform", says Peter Teufl, an IT security researcher at the Graz University of Technology and involved in the migration of eGovLabs.
Users of eGovLabs will be blocked from making changes to data on the site sometime on Wednesday 23 May, to prepare the move to Joinup. Following the move, software and documentation can be found in the Software section of the Joinup platform.
In a statement, the Federal Chancellery, responsible for eGovLabs, explains that it is migrating its software development to Joinup "in order to share its most successful open source developments and to provide public administrations in Europe with better communication and collaboration tools to share experience with interoperability solutions for public administrations, to increase the number of users and to leverage synergies with the existing communities, while optimizing the use of public funding."
About Joinup
With its Joinup platform the European Commission ISA programme (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations) is helping Europe's public administrations setting up efficient and effective cross-border and cross-sector electronic collaborations. Joinup allows professionals to share interoperability solutions for public administrations and to find, choose, re-use and develop open-source software and semantic interoperability assets.
At the end of April this year, the Joinup software section contained 269 development projects. The platform also provides access to eleven software forges in EU Member States, adding another 4041 open source projects.
More information:
eGovLabs
Joinup's software repository