Model-driven standardization of public authority data interchange

In the past decade, several electronic data exchange processes between public authorities have been established by the German public administration. In the context of various legacy systems and numerous suppliers of software for public authorities, it is crucial that these interfaces are open and precisely and uniformly defined, in order to foster free competition and interoperability. A community of such projects and specifications for various public administration domains has arisen from an early adopter project in the domain of data interchange between the 5,400 German municipal citizen registers. A central coordination office provides a framework for these projects that is put into operation by a unified model-driven method, supported by tools and components, involving UML profiles, model validation, and model-to-text transformations into several technical domains. We report how this model-driven approach has already proven to be effective in a number of projects, and how it could contribute to the development of standardized e-government specifications in various ways.