E-Estonia X-Road: Middleware Platform for a Digital Nation
Estonia pioneered the first, and still the most effective, Government as a Platform architecture: X-Road.
As the World Economic Forum defines a central component part of ‘Digital Public Infrastructure‘ is a National Data Sharing Platform.
A world leading pioneer of this capabilities is Estonia, where the backbone central to success as a digital nation is their ‘X-Road‘ system.
As this presentation describes, it is a central component feature that enabled their journey to become a world leading digital state.
The Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS) is a non-profit association founded jointly by Finland and Estonia, and is responsible for the development and management of the X-Road core.
This diagram highlights how it acts as a single information sharing platform for inter-connecting all government systems and some commercial ones where appropriate.
X-Road is an open source data exchange layer solution that enables organizations to exchange information over the Internet. X-Road is a centrally managed distributed data exchange layer between information systems that provides a standardized and secure way to produce and consume services, and is released under the MIT open source license and is available free of charge for any individual or organization.
X-Road ensures confidentiality, integrity and interoperability between data exchange parties. X-Road is used nationwide in the Estonian data exchange layer X-tee and in the Suomi.fi Data Exchange Layer service in Finland. However, X-Road is not just for public sector organisations – all kinds of organisations regardless of size or type can join the national environments and exchange data with other member organisations.
Two X-Road ecosystems can be joined together, federated. Members of the federated ecosystems can publish and consume services with each other as if they were members of the same ecosystem. Federation enables easy and secure cross-border data exchange between member states using X-Road.
Helpful implementation guides include:
- Introductory overviews: Youtube video, Overview presentation, EU overview presentation.
- Best Practices: E-Government in Estonia – Best practices, Overview of legislation and governance context, Nationwide E-Estonia mindset.
- Use cases: How it enables Personalized Healthcare.
- Technical implementation: Discussion of REST / JSON X implementation of X-Road, Academic paper on pseudonymization, Examples of e-government integrations, Training for developers of X-Road interfaces.
This video shares a talk given by Petteri Kivimäki from NIIS at the 2019 Platform Summit in Stockholm, and this video shares an interview with Estonian CIO Siim Sikkut describing how the platform approach is fundamental to this capability.
Featured Vendor: Cybernetica UXP
Expertise from building E-Estonia has been commercialized, led by vendors such as Cybernetica, who offer a repeatable X-Road solution capability, their ‘UXP’ – Unified eXchange Platform.
UXP brings together data from organisations, information systems, and databases. It provides crucial components for interoperability and data exchange in a secure and standardised way. UXP allows service providers to retain control over their systems and data, yet making them a member of an infinitely scalable and decentralised data exchange network.
The Government of Greenland set out to modernise public services by creating a secure data exchange platform – Pitu – a crucial step in its digital transformation. Cybernetica, as the prime contractor, deployed its UXP for them, enabling seamless and secure data sharing across key government systems.
