The role of citizen cards in e-Government

Citizen Cards serve as a central item in e-Government for the identification of the acting persons. Establishing the model of a Public-Private-Partnership, the Citizen Card will not be uniform, produced and issued by a public authority in Austria, but consist of diverse chip cards, issued by public or private organisations. These cards can be used for e-Commerce as well as in legally binding electronic communication with the administration. In this paper we discuss the basic requirements all these cards must meet, and present a typical e-Government session (a citizen applies to any authority using a signed XML form and web transport, and in return receives the official and legally binding decision of the public authority.)