Building the Network State

Abstract

The administration portal for Switzerland, www.ch.ch, is based on a powerful meta-database of available resources and services of the public administration and allocates a unique name, the Uniform Resource Name (URN), to every resource. The URN:Technology, adapted to the requirements of www.ch.ch, has become an open standard and a building block of the Swiss e-government platform. This chapter shows why portals in widespread, long-established federal structures with decentralized responsibility for the resources and interlinking can benefit from the URN:Technology, enabling the implementation of the vision of a network state. In this chapter, a blueprint of the network state in Switzerland based on URN:Technology will be presented.