Empowerment through Electronic Mandates - Best Practice Austria

For dealing with electronic identities—especially in the area of eGovernment—several approaches have been developed and successfully deployed already. However, most of them lack of an adequate vehicle to express exhaustively all kinds of representation and authorization types with which we are faced in every day’s life. This is even more unsatisfying as, for instance, the European Union undertakes tremendous efforts to enforce the support of e-services for businesses and service providers, e.g. through the EU Service Directive. Especially businesses and service providers have an urgent need for being able to express all the various kinds of representations by electronic means. This paper firstly addresses the issue of representation from a general perspective in order to analyze the requirements. Finally, it introduces a concrete approach to solution—the concept of electronic mandates—which is successfully used by the Austrian e-Government initiative. This concept provides an exhaustive and all-embracing vehicle for building any kind of representation by electronic means.