SuperCollect Official Site

SuperCollect in the pilot of the E-CoRE project

In the E-CoRE project five governmental data collectors participated: Health Insurance, Tax Authority, Statistics, Chamber of Commerce and AJPES. The Ministry of Information Society of Slovenia played an important role in the organisation of the project. The SuperCollect software has been used in a pilot in which 22 companies and two software houses participated. The so-called M-Form (the results are used by Health Insurance, Tax, Pension Fund and Statistics) was implemented during the pilot phase of the project.

The following text is a part of the Introduction of the Evaluation of the ICT aspects of the E-CoRE pilot. The whole document is available as .pdf document. Evaluatie.

The main objective of the E-CoRE[1]) project is to reach effective and adequate co-operation between government institutions regarding the collection and exchange of business data in order to reduce administrative burden, which is a topic nowadays in many countries.

Administrative burden represents the costs of enterprises to comply with legally obliged provision of information. Public administration laws and regulations originate from all the different governmental institutions. So it is easy to understand that there are a lot of differences in the way the different governmental institutions are gathering data from enterprises. Some of these differences, e.g. referring to concepts and definitions, are unavoidable. However, there are differences that could be avoided if the different governmental institutions would co-operate. Modern ICT-facilities are available, but how to use them in a co-operative surrounding is something different. This becomes even more urgent with the accession of Slovenia to the EU, which in turn will result in a lot of new information requirements.

Additional to the increasing demands by governmental institutions for information from businesses (B2G) many of those institutions are developing their own electronic solutions to lower the burden caused by their data collection. Different formats are causing an increase of costs for all involved parties and a threat to the competitive position of Slovenian enterprises entering the EU internal market, especially of the SME’s. Besides, different data flows are decreasing the quality and transparency of the information collected.

New IT developments offer new possibilities in the field of data collection, but also require more standardization when electronic questionnaires are used instead of paper ones. Furthermore, in order to develop the secure transport of data and the implementation of the Law on Electronic Signature and Electronic Commerce (ZEPEP) a coordinated solution is required.

The desired situation would be a standardization of data interchange from B2G. The standard will have to cover the presentation of the data demand as well as the actual physical transport of the data itself. It must be based on modern open common IT standards (e.g. XML, Internet), linked to similar developments in the EU and applicable at least for all governmental institutions in Slovenia.

In the E-CoRE project SORS, HIIS, AJPES, TAX and CoC made the first steps, assisted by the Dutch E-CoRE consortium, into the direction of developing specifications for the transport layer, the syntax layer (describing the syntax aspects of the data demand) as well as the process layer (describing the electronic data collection processes).

The transport layer will be based on SOAP with attachments, probably more specifically by eb-XML. To make the transport of the data secure, PKI will be used. This means authorization of the sender versus receiver of the messages by digital signing, as well as securing the transport itself and the encryption of the content.

On the syntax level, XML and the structure of the questionnaires have been discussed. The first specifications concern the structure and content of the electronic questionnaires. Standards will be proposed for the questionnaire and questions itself but also for other metadata like classifications, that should be harmonized between the governmental institutions in Slovenia. Eventually, the metadata will be made available via the WWW to all partners in the e-B2G messaging process. The organisation and maintenance of the metadata will be discussed in the coming months.

Using the transport and syntax layer, the variants to use this technical infrastructure should be as flexible as possible. The E-CoRE project started to develop a general process model that gives the framework for all possible e-B2G processes to be supported by the governmental institutions in Slovenia. An inventory showed that the following variants should be supported:

Filling the electronic questionnaire on line
Filling the questionnaire off line
Filling the questionnaire off line with automated linking possibilities with available data in the automated information systems at the enterprises
Filling the questionnaire using automated links between the software of standard software providers and the questionnaires.

As setting standards for methods and technical specifications is not possible without verifying them, in the E-CoRE project a pilot phase has been introduced. In this pilot the current views on the methods to reduce the administrative burden using ICT have been verified. The software used included the functions of interest for the process of e-B2G messaging.

Some characteristics of the e-CoRE pilot are:

The M1-form will be used to be filled with “non real” data, to avoid privacy problems.
Four variants of e-B2G messaging will be used in the pilot:
- Link with software of Datalab and Perftech, in environment company
- HTML, in environment company
- Excel, on lap top (Excel file prepared)
- Off line form on lap top
The Slovene PKI standard will be used in all forms except HTML: SIGOV-CA: certificates for each of the companies: private key for digital signing and verification, public key for encryption.

Based on the results of the pilot the standards for e-B2G messaging have been evaluated and refined. Moreover, based on the results of the pilot, recommendations have been made for the organization of the e-B2G messaging in the future. In this respect, aspects like the appropriate level of detail for the specifications and the scope of the specifications are considered as well as the maintenance.

This document describes the results of the pilot, compared with the ICT aspects – on the process, syntax and transport layer – specified so far.

The architecture for E-B2G messaging as well the implementation of the architecture in the pilot is described. Moreover, the results of the pilot are evaluated against the architecture aimed for.

Finally recommendations are formulated for ongoing activities in the field of using electronic means to reduce the administrative burden on the enterprises.

Chapter 2 gives an overview of the Architecture for e-B2G messaging as developed in the E-CoRE project.

In chapter 3 the four variants, needed to get a complete set of possibilities for the respondents for electronic reporting, are described in terms of advantages and disadvantages of each of the variants. The advantages and disadvantages of the variants depend on the kind of questions and the kind of software used for administrative purposes at the respondent.

The pilot has been executed using standard software of SuperCollect. In chapter 4 the architecture of the SuperCollect system is described. Besides the Architecture of the system as a whole, each of the components used in the pilots are drawn up.

Chapter 5 deals with the technical preparations for the trial. It gives an overview of the planning as well as the main technical preparations carried out.

In chapter 6 the protocols applied in the pilot of each of the four variants are described.

In chapter 7 some technological aspects are drawn up and evaluated according to the results of the pilot.

Chapter 8 shows the XML structure of the M1 form as well as the XML structure of the answers (after filling the M1 form) as produced in the pilot.

In chapter 9 the results of the pilot have been evaluated against the specifications of the Architecture and the layers (transport layer, syntax layer and process layer). In this chapter a short comparison is given between the original ambition level and the realized one.

[1] ) Electronic Collection of Raw data from Enterprises