The Western Balkan countries could be among the world's first where citizens can use mobile devices to access electronic government services, reports Cordis, the European Union's information service on science, research and development.
Cordis this week posted a feature on SWEB, a R&D project by a consortium involving European research institutes, universities, municipalities and others. The group developed open source software delivering secure, mobile, cross-border transport of public administration documents.
The Java applications are meant to run securely on low-budget IT infrastructures. "We have developed the software required for securely exchanging public administration documents between different countries using mobile devices", Cordis quotes SWEB project coordinator Petra Hoepner, from the German Fraunhofer Fokus Institute in Berlin.
The SWEB project has built for instance a Residence Certification Service, allowing municipalities to exchange documents with their citizens. It also demonstrated an application for mobile invoicing that can handle VAT-payments in all EU-member states.
In the Western Balkans, offering these and other mobile services would allow governments 'to skip electronic government and enter directly into the provision of mobile government services', Hoepner says. The number of people having access to fixed telephone lines is less than half the number of those using mobile phones.
Apart from making it easier to exchange administrative documents, the mobile access would also help strengthen government organisations, the consortium says.
The R&D project ran for two years until March this year.
The software is published using the GPL open source licence.
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