The latest X-Road Community Event was a huge success. With 150+ participants from 22 countries, it is evident that the interest and tangible actions for enabling digital societies are hot topics among the nations worldwide.
The event was organised by the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS) who are developing and managing an open source data exchange solution called X-Road. X-Road is the basis for data exchange in the public administration in Estonia and Finland, both of whom are founding members of the organisation. Lately, Iceland and the Faroe Islands have also joined as partners – and various countries and regions in Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia have run trials and adapted X-Road for their use. See the X-Road world map for details:
X-Road development
Currently, Gofore is the sole developer of the X-Road core for NIIS through a public procurement.
X-Road version 6 is deployed in Finland and Estonia, and Iceland will follow suit shortly. The Faroe Islands and some other countries are preparing to migrate their platform from version 5 to 6.
At the event plans for the development of the next version of the software, X-Road 7 Unicorn, were introduced and presented in various workshops by experts from Gofore, the Finnish Population Register Centre (VRK) and the Estonian State Information System Authority (RIA). NIIS CTO Petteri Kivimäki stated: “X-Road is not developed for us [NIIS] but for you [nations and organisations]”, so it is evident that close collaboration between the development of the core and existing and planned local installations is highly valued. The MIT-licensed open source software enables maximum utilisation and all users are welcomed to contribute and create pull requests for additional required features.
Planning to utilise X-Road?
If your country or organisation has various data sources and siloed services, taking X-Road into use will enable a fluent, fully secured and easily manageable solution to exchange data between sources. Such fluent data exchange enables endless possibilities for derivative machine-to-machine applications and easy cross-border data exchange between countries. Of course the ultimate target are smooth human-centric services for citizens, which often require additional trusted digital identity management system to be build alongside information systems connected by X-Road.
Gofore has experience and deep expertise in all layers of X-Road and digital identity design, development and deployment and we are looking to support their utilisation at an international scale.
If you want to hear more, please contact the author or download the leaflet below – it will provide more detail on why, what and how X-Road would help to achieve a digital society in your context.
Interested in reliable, secure and easy to use integrations for digital services? X-road provides this and more. Download our X-road leaflet to learn more about how this could be utilised in your business: X-road leaflet
