Applications DVDV and SAFE

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The German Administrative Services Directory (DVDV) is the interdisciplinary and inter-administrative infrastructure component for the secure and reliable addressing of automated services and business process applications for communication between and with public administration authorities in Germany. Thus, e-government transactions can be carried out on the basis of service-oriented architectures in a secure and legally binding manner.

The DVDV is provided in a cooperative operator model by the federal, state and local governments and is being further developed as an application in the IT Planning Council under the joint responsibility of the federal government. It is open to all electronic public administration services that are processed automatically in the form of machine-2-machine communication. Communication is XML-based and is secured via the secure transport standard OSCI.

DVDV 1 started back in January 2007, with the first service to be implemented at the time being cross-state data transmission in accordance with the Framework Law on Registration (Melderechtsrahmengesetz)

In the meantime, a total of around 130 services and business process applications have been connected, such as official systems for civil status, registration, aliens, passport and ID card systems, etc. ITZBund operates the central Federal-Master-Instance of DVDV, implementation and maintenance is jointly done by Governikus and Dataport.

Further information on the DVDV can be found on the project page at the ITZBund.

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Successful transfer of the DVDV 2.0 project to productive operation

The DVDV 2.0 control project was launched in order to comply with all technical developments, changes in the legal framework (especially e-government laws and the IT Network Act), but also European developments (large-scale pilots such as SPOCS and PEPPOL) and to expand the existing infrastructure in a sustainable and future-proof manner. After an analysis and conception phase, DVDV 2.0 was redeveloped and rolled out under the consortium leadership of Governikus together with Dataport.

In a three-stage transition model, the federal and a total of 14 state servers with all connected services and business process applications were migrated from DVDV 1 to DVDV 2.0 using the existing server substitution arrangements and successfully replaced DVDV 1 in the period from the end of October to the end of November 2019.

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DVDV 2.0

The main performance features of DVDV 2.0 are, in addition to bringing the technology up to date, the orientation towards open standards, user-friendliness and performance, above all in the areas of user group expansion, identity promotion (both nationally, such as SAFE, as well as connectivity to EU systems). Our experiences from the maintenance of the justice system SAFE, as well as our participation in the large scale pilots SPOCS and PEPPOL were extremely valuable in the conception and implementation of DVDV 2.0.

The main changes compared to DVDV 1 briefly summarized:

  • New development based on current technologies and conceptual innovations
  • Inclusion of additional communication protocols
  • Introduction of a web-based information client
  • Improvement of user-friendliness for the maintaining authorities
  • Conversion of the maintenance client to a web-based application
  • Test systems for the development of business process applications
  • Extension of the user groups to include participants from outside the administration
  • Replacement of LDAP
  • Preparing the system to support e-government processes and to connect to central European service directories, e.g. by making the data model extensible
  • Preparation of identity management for trust domains, e.g. for the SAFE judicial domain.
  • Access/connection via the Internet and additionally via the connection network according to § 3 IT-NetzG

SAFE

The SAFE (Secure Access to Federated e-Justice / e-Government) application is an eID and addressing service under the leadership of the state of Baden-WĂĽrttemberg, for which the Conference of Ministers of Justice is technically responsible. The SAFE concept has been implemented several times and has proven itself in practice many times over.

A maintenance consortium led by led by Governikus has been commissioned to ensure continuous further development.

For more information on SAFE, visit the federal and state justice portal.