egora (e-Government Reference Architecture)

Project Description
egora is a C# framework which contains software components supporting common used modules for Austrian eGovernment applications.

egora (see also http://www.egora.at, in German) is the abbreviation of "e-Government reference architecture", an initative started by Microsoft Austria with partners a few years ago. Based on discussions within the Microsoft Austria Interoperability Council, first parts of this framework were published as open source and extended with new open source components. egora primarily contains modules for working with typical components and services offered by Austrian government organizations. Examples of these modules are:

• portal integration standards and services
• central register of citizens
• citizen card online signature services
• etc.

During the first meeting of the Microsoft Austria Interoperability Council, the members of our council, which are all local experts on Austrian and international standards and integration-requirements, we identified, that especially the portal-integration-standards and services created by the Austrian government are very much needed by the local market. Furthermore the Austrian government wants to extend these services towards small & medium business company-integration. Therefore, during this first council-meeting in February 2009 we decided, to create a working group dealing with these needs as a part of the Austrian Interoperability.

In this working group we decided, to publish egora as an open source project for general availability to all our partners, customers and to the developer eco-system in Austria. Furthermore, we decided to extend egora with additional open source components required specifically for these portal-integration-standards. Finally we created a detailled documentation for these components.

• Download the whitepaper we've created here
• Switch to the Source Code or Download section to access the source code

The documentation, the open source components for the portal-connection-standard as well as the extensions we've created during the lab for this portal-connection-standard as defined in the interoperability-lab are published within this workspace as open source. Feel free to contribute and extend these components!

Your Microsoft Austria Interoperability Council team

Members of the portal-connection-standars lab in alphabetical order:
Konstantin Dotchkoff (Microsoft), Günter Fischer (BRZ), Dietmar Gombotz (LFRZ), Rainer Hörbe (AGIZ), Thomas Kuhta (Rubicon), Werner Kugler (Rubicon), Peter Pfläging (AGIZ) Benedikt Redl (Microsoft), Peter Reichstädter (Federal Chancellor's Office), Mario Szpuszta (Microsoft), Dietmar Wehinger (ACE)