gCitizen: Using Grids for Creating an Integrated View of the Citizen in an eGovernment Framework

From the point of view of the administration, a citizen is the aggregation of the pieces of information belonging to each of the administrative organizations that compose it. By now this data management has been carried out storing and managing documents in paper. Recently, the governments have invested effort to use the ICT as a substitute of the paper in their procedures. This kind of initiatives has been traditionally denominated as eGovernment, and makes possible a lot of information to be online. This paper reviews the technological tendencies in the public administration, and proposes the usage of grid technology as an information integration method to provide an homogeneous vision of the information about the citizens. It has been used the Globus toolkit 4 WSRF technology to design gCitizen, a grid middleware for the transparent management of the information about citizens, which takes advantages of the features provided by the toolkit, and introduces new services to improve it