Lithuanian national platform of electronic documents: Towards cross-border interoperability

Electronic documents are an integral part in the delivery of most information services in the online environment. Moreover, some e-Government, e-business, e-commerce, and other e-services are impossible without electronic documents having the same legal power as signed paper documents, in particular official electronic documents being in the accounts of public sector institutions. The research performed shows that official electronic documents are practically used only inside the individual countries, whereas their use on cross-border basis is being constrained or even blocked by an unsolved interoperability problem. In order to identify ways, which would ensure seamless exchange of official electronic documents, this paper investigates and describes the current use of e-documents across all EU countries. The obtained results allowed to classify the formats of electronic documents used in different Member States and define an approach to interoperability by introducing the concept of national platform of electronic documents.