Following the widespread success of the open-source software and ecosystem solution X-Road®, the Mexican state of Quintana Roo kicked off “Xacbé”, a new project which will be built on top of the software-based solution.
With over one thousand organisations and enterprises in Estonia using X-Road and, according to e-estonia, about 99% of state services made available online, X-Road can be considered a success. Gravitating around the concept of interoperability, the solution allows public and private digital ecosystems to work together, to the ultimate benefit of the citizens. It includes a large range of digital services, ensuring security in the transfer of data through authentication, encryption and digital signatures tools.
After being implemented in several other countries (e.g. Germany, Iceland, Japan, Faroe Islands, Vietnam, El Salvador, Colombia and Argentina), X-Road landed in Mexico as well, at the end of 2020. Specifically, the Quintana Roo state decided to kick off the “Xacbé” project as a public-private partnership with the Estonian company Roksnet, in order to follow the expertise and best practices built upon previous experiences in the aforementioned countries.
”I am glad to see X-Road gaining ground all over the world and the user community expanding along with it. There are already several X-Road environments in South America which provide interesting opportunities for cross-border data exchange too”, says Petteri Kivimäki, the CTO of the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS), the organisation in charge of the development and maintenance of X-Road.
As a first milestone, the project aims to harmonise all the systems used by the police. However, the state’s commitment goes beyond it, striving to digitalise most of its services by expanding the project to the whole public administration in the near future.
On X-Road
X-Road was originally developed by the Estonian State Information Systems Department (at the Ministry of Economy and Communications) and the first version was launched in 2001. In Finland, the Suomi.fi Data Exchange Layer service, which is based on the X-Road, was published in November 2015. Estonia and Finland have been developing the X-Road core together since then. In 2018, the X-Road core development was handed over to the NIIS, a jointly managed special purpose organisation established by Estonia and Finland in 2017.