URN:Technology – A Building Block of the Swiss e-Government Platform

Abstract

In the year 2003 the administration portal for Switzerland, the Virtual Desk www.ch.ch, went live. This portal is based on a powerful meta-database of all available resources and services of the federation, the cantons and the districts and allocates a unique name, the URN (Uniform Resource Name), to every resource. The URN:Technology, adapted to the requirements of www.ch.ch, became an open standard and a building block of the Swiss e-government platform. This article highlights the URN:Technology and shows how portals in powerful and established federal structures benefit from this innovation. URN:Technology represents nowadays a key factor in the success of building and operating large portals with split responsibility for the content and interlinking. The present meta-database of URN:Technology, already similar to UDDI, can be developed with the help of web services into a registry with UDDI conformity.