A secure e-Government platform architecture for small to medium sized public organizations

Small to medium sized public organizations (SMPOs) share some of their e-Government requirements with their larger counterparts, such as the pending needs for interoperability, security and user friendliness. Additionally, they have some specific needs that are either unique in their context or more demanding due to their characteristics. These are cost and resources considerations, enhanced accessibility and greater scalability due to the larger number of citizens and businesses served and automated processing because of the restricted number of trained personnel. This paper first proposes an architecture for a secure e-Government platform based on Web Services, which addresses the above requirements. Secondly, a specific service is built upon the proposed platform, in which a municipality generates and securely delivers a digital birth certificate to a citizen or another municipality.