Seamless Security in 4th Regional Security Forum

The 4th Regional Electronic Security Forum was held on 6th and 7th November 2008, at Thessaloniki, Greece. Organised by INA Telecommunication Academy, the conference brought together experts and governmental officials from Greece and neighboring countries.


The main topic of the conference was electronic governance security. Prof. Gritzalis from Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) chaired the session on eGovernment Security, presenting the recent recommendations of the Security Committee of the Greek eGovernment Forum. Yannis Charalabidis presented a new idea on "Seamless Security" - the way to make digital public services secure and user-fiendly. Ray Nightingale from the Global Trust Centre gave new ways for achieving trust and security in eGovernance.

"Seamless Security" is emerging as a need, as more and more measures are affecting and generating significant costs for the final users. Through the eGOVSIM tool (a simulator for eGovernment Services from NTUA), important indicators on security burdens have been calculated and showcased. The model shows that, over the next 30 years, a typical, employed, ICT user - citizen will:

–Obtain 100 different sets of authentication credentials, mostly electronic

Sign 10,000 times, on different documents, currently mostly manually – gradually shifting to electronically

– Use his/her credentials not less than 100,000 times, mostly by inserting data into systems

–Rely on his/her own means for storing, accessing and reproducing documents (more than 1,000 of which will have to be stored, many of which in paper)

More on the presentation can be found here: http://www.inatelecom.org/

Greek Interoperability Centre wins the first prize in eGOV 2008


Members of the Greek Interoperabilty Centre were awarded the first prize in this year’s International Conference on Electronic Government (DEXA – eGOV), that was held on September 3-6, in Torino, Italy. The prize for the most compelling, critical research reflection 2008-2009 was awarded to the paper “Paving the way to eGovernment Transformation: Interoperability Registry Infrastructure Development”, by Aikaterini-Maria Sourouni, Fenareti Lampathaki, Spiros Mouzakitis, Yannis Charalabidis and Dimitris Askounis, which presented a novel approach for developing Governmental Service Registries.

New Book on Interoperability from IGI Global – Call for Chapters


IGI Global (formerly IDEA Group Inc.) announces the Call for Chapter proposals for the new book “Interoperability in Digital Public Services and Administration: Bridging E-Government and E-Business”, edited by Yannis Charalabidis from National Technical University of Athens. Brief chapter proposals are welcome by December 15, 2008. More information on this publication and the Call for Chapters can be found at http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=506

The Greek Interoperability Centre


The main goal of the Greek Interoperability Centre (GIC) is to establish a new research centre targeting eGovernment and eBusiness Interoperability Research, within the National Technical University of Athens, the leading technological research institute in Greece.

The Greek Interoperability Centre aims at becoming a premium research centre in the field of Interoperability in Greece, cooperating with academia and research, public administration, organisations and businesses across the Greek regions but also institutions from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean – thus forming a strong regional pole of research and technology.

The Greek Interoperability Centre will be structured through cooperation with leading research institutes from Germany, Italy, Norway, UK, US and China, inviting high-caliber international researchers and engaging more than 15 experts and new researchers in its team.

GIC is an FP7 Research Project, started March 2008, with a duration of 3 years.

MOMENTUM Project Coordinates European eParticipation Projects



MOMENTUM is a Specific Support Action project funded under the European Commission’s eParticipation programme (eParticipation 2007/1). The project is dedicated to the coordination, evaluation and support of all the running eParticipation Projects, under FP6 and FP7.

Partners of Momentum Project are:
- Athens Technology Center S.A. (Greece)
- National Technical University of Athens (Greece)
- International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy (UK)
- Universitaet Koblenz-Landau (Germany)
- Politech Institute (Belgium)
Duration: Jan 2008 – June 2010

FEED eParticipation Project Started !


Federated eParticipation Systems for Cross-
Societal Deliberation on Environmental and
Energy Issues

The main objective of FEED is to apply a new concept in e-Participation by allowing users to have seamless access to existing federated content that matches their needs for information supporting the several aspects of a public deliberation, when focusing Environmental and Energy issues. Through FEED, existing federated content and/or other knowledge material (some of it already under processing and by other current eParticipation projects), are contextually annotated or channeled according to the issue and deliberation process specifics, allowing this way the platform users to perceive, search for and retrieve it in the contest of a participative e-activity.