Seven Greek cities and municipalities are starting extensive pilots with The Local Government Application Framework (LGAF). This open source platform offers citizens and small and medium sized businesses access to e-government services.

From late July on extensive pilots will be run within seven Greek cities and municipalities, including Larisa, Kerkyra (Corfu) and Chios. The pilots were preceded by a test phase, which took place in the Northern Greek city of Larisa and ended in the middle of July.

LGAF allows Greek citizens and SMBs the possibility through Software-as-a-Service to pay taxes and fines, modify their public administration records and purchase permits and licenses. The system also offers information on public health, social care, the environment and sport and cultural activities. LGAF can inform users not only via e-mail messages, but also via sms.

Service Oriented Architecture
“The most innovative aspect of the project is the combined use of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA),” says project leader Petros Kavassalis, who works as an associate professor of the University at the Aegean. “Thanks to the use of a SOA the functionality of legacy applications is re-used, while users can access them via flexible and user-friendly composite applications.”

Kavassalis expects that local business will profit most from LGAF. In Greece enterprises have to pay every one or two month taxes to the municipality in which their business is located. “Therefore, LGAF has identified the population of certified accountants operating in the 50 larger Greek cities as one of the prime targets for marketing the project, with the population of municipal employees as a second critical target group.”

From 2013 on LGAF will be made available to all Greek municipalities at no cost. The Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (Kedke) will however charge for technical support. The organisation hopes the platform will become a reference for other interoperability projects.

IT consortium
The development of LGAF started in 2007, when Kedke gave an IT consortium the assignment to develop an open-source platform for electronic services. Key participants within the consortium are BPM-specialist the Atlantis Group at the Computer Technology Institute (CTI) and International Software Techniques (IST), systems integrator Singular Logic, ERP-specialists BetaCONCEPT and Hilon Informatics and systems integrator Singular Logic. The project is funded by the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) 2007 -2013.

More information:
Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (KEDE)
National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF)
Local Government Application Framework(LGAF)