Archived News from the projects 2008/2009

In relation to the end of the project activities results and perspectives of the Health Optimum model will be officially presented during an international workshop. Additionally, the final event will be the occasion to point out telemedicine's achievements and challenges in today's healthcare strategy.

Procure final events, Brussels, Belgium

As the project reaches its final stages, Procure is organising a set of three events on 16 and 17 March 2009 in Brussels. A presentation will be given to SMEs in the morning of 16 March, while the afternoon session will demonstrate the service to European regions. The Procure final conference - with a complete overview of core topics for a modern, border-less public procurement service - is scheduled to take place on 17 March at the premises of the Committee of the Regions in Brussels. Procure proved the benefits of e-procurement to public administrations and SMEs in five regions.

More at: http://www.epractice.eu/en/workshops/procure and http://www.eten-procure.com/en/news/
Please watch the 3d animation on Procure at www.eten-procure.com

R-Bay project at the European Congress of Radiology, Vienna

R-Bay aims at establishing an online marketplace within the field of radiology. The R-Bay platform uses a streaming technology that allows high-quality images to be transmitted almost irrespective of bandwidth. R-Bay was presented at the European Congress of Radiology in Vienna (6-10 March) in EXPO B. More about the project can be read in a recently published article on HealthTech Wire here.

The Paysafecard Project Success Story

Paysafecard, a highly successful online payment system in Austria and Germany, stands out for its ease of use and fraud-free security features. paysafecard enables online purchasing without the need to divulge any personal data, whilst using a prepaid PIN code to validate transactions. Now this payment service shall be implemented throughout Europe”.

This was the quote that marked the start of the eTEN supported development at paysafecard in 2006. Three years later, paysafecard has met all targets and looks back on a very successful collaboration.

After building the brand in its core markets Germany and Austria for several years, in 2006 paysafecard’s executive management team felt it was time to take on the challenge of expanding in Europe. As part of the expansion, it set up several subsidiaries across the continent. Michael Müller, CEO of paysafecard, says the most important of those is the London-based Prepaid Services Company Ltd. The subsidiary is authorized and regulated as an Electronic Money Issuer by the Financial Services Authority, the U.K’s regulator of the financial services industry. Its e-money license enables Prepaid Services Company to issue paysafecard in most European countries and the company is passporting the license to all 27 countries in the EU.

Thanks to the support of eTEN, paysafecard managed to set its footprint in 14 new markets and added a further 155,000 Point Of Sale outlets, making the total to 210,000 outlets in all 16 countries. As a direct result of this expansion, paysafecard provided the perfect solution for consumers who prefer to use cash when shopping online across Europe.

The eTEN project helped paysafecard to develop the evaluation criteria that have to be considered before a market entry. “Despite a common market and EU harmonization, taxes, consumer protection and anti-money laundering regulations are based on local laws and have to be analyzed locally, especially in countries where the e-money market is not yet developed,” explains Michael Müller.

EU-Latitude pilots successfully completed

The EU-Latitude project successfully completed pilot testing of advanced services offered to EU tourist authorities by cooperation between EU publishers. The goal was to increase the flow of tourists interested in local culture and events into European territories. A network of distinguished publishers including Gallimard, France, El Pais / Prisacom, Spain and Touring Editore / Touring Club Italiano, Italy, collaborated in an 18 month trial led by specialist consultants empirica, Bonn. The region of Piedmont and tourist authorities in Spain, France, Italy and Bulgaria directed the development of the new services by software providers Sedona, Paris. Services, incorporating user and edited contributions (Web 3.0), are now publicly accessible and can be viewed at www.discover-eu.com.

NETC@RDS for eEHIC at the Ministerial eHealth Conference

The NETC@RDS project was presented at the Ministerial Conference “eHealth for Individuals, Society and Economy" (18 – 20 February 2009, Prague). The presentation took place on 19 February and focused on the State of the Art of ICT for cross border healthcare: patient identification, authentification, privacy and security. More on the conference at http://www.ehealth2009.cz

NETC@RDS is deploying an online service for the electronic European Health Insurance Card (eEHIC). The current project phase will enable health care access for European citizens who provide evidence www.netcards.eu

European services standard for cross-border healthcare provision agreed

Two eTEN projects developing IT-based services for cross-border healthcare provision, TEN4Health and NetC@rds, have agreed on a common European web service specification supporting standardised messaging to link hospitals and other health care providers with health insurance organisations and with national healthcare IT infrastructure. The development of the services and this agreement are seen as a major step towards full interoperability in web-services provision throughout European health care. The new services help ensure that any European citizen requiring healthcare in another European country can be served easily, that health care providers can reliably determine that a patient is covered by health insurance and rapidly receive reimbursement.

The TEN4Health service package assures access of citizens to healthcare in participating Member States' hospitals, based on a secure web service and its integration into developing European eHealth infrastructure networks. NETC@RDS is deploying an online service for the electronic European Health Insurance Card (eEHIC). The current project phase will enable health care access for European citizens who provide evidence of entitlement in any of the service sites across the 15 European countries.

More on www.ten4health.eu and http://www.netcards.eu/

During the cluster meeting of FP6, FP7 and eTEN projects related to “Personal Health Systems (PHS)”– held in Brussels on 4-5 December 2008, the HEALTH OPTIMUM Initial Deployment phase has been presented. The event followed up on a previous one held in Luzern, Switzerland, on 2 February 2006, on “Intelligent eHealth Systems for Personalised Medical Care”, but aimed at having a broader technological and application coverage.

This meeting included projects from the domains of ICT for Health, Micro-nano Systems, ICT for Ageing and eTEN. This allowed a view on possibilities arising from new technologies, on ICT platforms for broader solutions applicable to elderly, like the integration of health and social care systems, as well as on experiences from pilots. The domain of PHS presents a major activity in the context of telemedicine and ICT for Health applications, under the ICT theme of the European Commission's Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7). Projects in this area are clustered in two main groups:

• Solutions for Personalised Monitoring of health status based on wearable or portable ICT systems.

• Point-of-Care diagnostics focusing on systems for multi-analyte screening applications at primary care level.

In this context, the HEALTH OPTIMUM project represented a best practice of the methodology to deploy telemedicine services. It started from a Market Validation phase, funded by eTEN (Call 2003), in which sustainability of the services had been shown. Now it is running its Initial Deployment phase (eTEN Call 2006), aiming at rolling out tested services. Project end is foreseen for May 2009.

To mark the end of the eTEN project phase of GuideStar Europe, a series of events are planned to take place in Berlin, Budapest, Dublin and London. The series will be concluded at the From Local to Global: the value of CSO (civil society organisations) information in Europe workshop to be held in London prior to the GuideStar International global conference, which will also address the issue (2-3 December 2008). The workshop, which will take place on 1 December 2008 will provide a synthesis of the work in the different countries, present results of the first phase and draw strategy for developing a GuideStar for all Europe. The GuideStar Europe project has assessed the feasibility of implementing GuideStar systems for four European countries as well as a pilot European portal site.

The InLoT project (In the Lab of Tomorrow) was presented at the European City of Science Event (14-16 November 2008), hosted at the Grand Palais, in France. The European City of Science is considered as one of the most important science events in 2008 and it was organized in the framework of the French Presidency. The title of the InLoT presentation was "L’Ecole de la physique – Exploar and InLoT: rendre visible l’invisible". The aim was to present the InLoT system, its functionalities and benefits both for students and for teachers.

InLoT investigated the informal science education as an opportunity to transcend from traditional classroom based teaching, to a “feel and interact” user experience, allowing for learning “anytime, anywhere”.

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Caselex has entered into an agreement with the leading legal publisher APIS in order to distribute Caselex to legal professionals in Bulgaria. Being a source of comparative case law, Caselex will represent a valuable source to inspiration and solutions that may help legal professionals in Bulgaria to efficiently and effectively deal with the knowledge requirements posed by the EU law in respect of legal compliance and litigation work.

Caselex is the first premium information service providing access to the most important national and European case law linked to EU law. An easy to use online service holding exclusive case digests in English allows legal professionals to easily use foreign cases relevant to their work or study.

A special event has been organised by the NETC@RDS for eEHIC ID eTEN project on 6-7 November in Le Mans, France. Several high level political figures attended the event; amongst them was the representative of the French EU Presidency Mr. Dominique Le Mener, Vice-President of the Conseil Général de la Sarthe, who also delivered a welcome speech as well as the EU MEP Stéphane Le Foll. The French Minister for Health, Mrs Roselyne Bachelot, gave a video-broadcasted presentation from London, while Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media, addressed the event through a letter. The dedication to the achievement of NETC@RDS was further strengthened by the speech delivered by the Directeur Général of SESAM-VITALE, Mr Jacques De Varax, coordinator of the project and responsible for delivering the French health insurance eCard. NETC@RDS is deploying an online service for the electronic European Health Insurance Card (eEHIC). The current project phase will enable health care access for European citizens who provide evidence of entitlement in any of the service sites across the 15 European countries.

The FASTeTEN project held its mid-term workshop in Paris on 15 October 2008. The event was attended by eGovernment professionals from countries as diverse as Belgium, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Estonia, France, Hungary, Italy and the United Kingdom. The secure infrastructure workshop was an ePractice branded event and covered the topics of electronic documents archiving, secure electronic document exchange as well as storage of electronic data.

FASTeTEN is testing the French-developed FAST bundle of services for secure document exchange in different European contexts, conducting pilots in educational services in Sheffield, UK and in eProcurement in Valencia, Spain.

On 9-10 October 2008 the 4th Conference on eServices in European Civil Registration, organised by the RISERid consortium, took place in Berlin, Germany. The conference brought together more than 150 stakeholders in civil registration from 22 countries. The keynote speakers included State Secretary Mr. Dr. Hans Bernhard Beus, Federal Government Commissioner for Information Technology (Ministry of the Interior, Germany), Mr. Dr. Thilo Weichert, Independent Centre for Privacy Protection Schleswig-Holstein (ULD, Germany) and Mr. Antti Peltomäki, Deputy Director-General of the Directorate-General for the Information Society and Media (European Commission). Speeches and presentations on pertinent issues such as civil registration and electronic, cross-border services in this field as well as data protection can be downloaded from the project's website.

The Large Scale Pilot Project STORK as well as the recently started ECRN project - both co-funded by the European Commission under the ICT Policy Support Programme - have also given a presentation.

RISER offers a central online service that enables companies to request and verify address information throughout Europe in a simple, secure and cost-effective way. Through a central web portal, address verification can be performed from official population registers inquiring into Austria, Estonia, Ireland, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland.

About a year after the project finished, former partners of the eTEN MEMO project are reporting on their achievements in commercialising the services validated during the Market Validation phase.

With the help of business angels, Cybele Production SA (MEMO project partner), will now start commercialising its cultural trip routes and semi-automatic translation services. Together with Media Welcome, another former project partner, they will propose European cities with historical heritage the creation of the Euriage platform for combining tourist data.

GOLF, a variation of the MEMO project proves the concept validated and work done during the eTEN project phase. It shows the possibility to apply the same model to various themes, including cultural heritage tourism and sport activities, such as golf, horse back riding, but also spas or wine routes. Launching such a combination of services would allow European cities and regions to create a coherent tourism offer, realising economies of scale and cost rationalisation. At the same time, such combined services offered over the Internet give potential tourists the possibility to compare facilities, prices and a proposed range of services on a thematic basis.

The eTEN programme was instrumental in the testing and validation of the concept, technology, management experience and a creation of a European network, reaching far beyond the consortium partners. The former project partners continue to endorse the business model and look for further investment opportunities to ensure the long-term sustainability of the service.

The NavigAbile project held a symposium on "Applications of IT for people with learning and communication disabilities" on 15 September 2008 in Athens with distinguished speakers from across Europe. The workshop highlighted that communication and learning must be considered as a pleasant and entertaining activity. Greece, Spain, Sweden and Italy presented case studies and different initiatives which all share the same idea: Communication and learning is fun! Speakers and experts discussed their wide experience in the field of mental disabilities.

Agenda & Invitation

The eTEN Tenuta support action project helped to improve the accessibility and usability of eTEN e-service projects by providing guidance on how to design solutions that are not only accessible to the widest possible user base including people with disabilities and older people, but also easy to use for everyone. The renewed Tenuta web site remains an active repository of tips on how to improve usability and accessibility, many useful links, relevant FAQs and a number of interesting case studies from the Tenuta project.

The TEN4Health workshop on 9 September 2008 in Kiel, Germany, focused on concrete steps towards improving pan-European healthcare provision and on policy needs to accelerate European integration also in this field. Representatives of the European Commission and of the European Parliament have highlighted the TEN4Health project as an example for improving cross-border healthcare services in Europe.

The TEN4Health project contributes towards improved healthcare provision for mobile European Union citizens. Initiated by leading public health insurance providers, the TEN4Health service package assures access of citizens to healthcare in participating Member States' hospitals, based on a secure web service and its integration into developing European eHealth infrastructure networks. The hospitals are located in areas with heavy cross-border tourism, like the town of Villach in Austria or the Veneto region in Northern Italy.

Article in Hospital Post Europe

With the ever-ageing European population and shortage of resources the need for telemedicine, and its accompanied organisational change, has arose. Health Optimum provides services that can aid regions reach the goal of a quality healthcare and cost reduction whilst providing increased convenience to patients. These services consist of tele-counselling, virtual referral, tele-laboratory, tele-care and shared clinical records.

The Region of Southern Denmark has participated in such service implementation in several different medical specialities, one of these being thrombolysis treatment. As in the other Health Optimum solutions, healthcare professionals have expressed increased satisfaction and initial results show great benefits gained by patients. It is currently being thoroughly evaluated by the Danish National Board of Health and it is anticipated to spread throughout the region, and hopefully even nation-wide.

The Spanish region of Aragon has also benefited from Health Optimum's services for telemedicine. Through the project launched in Barbastro – due to its wide geographical extension, scarce population ageing at 28% and seclusion – a strategy has been put in place that shall reduce waiting lists during consultations while making them more efficient; which runs alongside a process design, training the medical professionals and evaluating the process.

The NavigAbile eTEN project consortium is organising a symposium on "Applications of IT for people with learning and communication disabilities" on 15 September 2008 at 09:30, in the TITANIA Hotel in Athens with distinguished speakers from across Europe. Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Sweden and Italy will be presenting case studies and different initiatives around communication and learning. To participate please contact learning-difficulties@e-isotis.org.

Caselex started rolling out national Supreme Court cases on the application of the EU's abundant base of environmental law, which is set to be more strongly enforced when the European Commission’s new environmental priorities enter into force.

Caselex is the first premium information service providing access to the most important national and European case law linked to EU law. An easy to use online service holding exclusive case digests in English allows legal professionals to easily use foreign cases relevant to their work or study.

Click  to read the full press release or  to download the flyer

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By 2020, 25% of the EU's population will be over 65. To respond to this growing demographic challenge, the European Union Council of Ministers approved, on 23 June 2008, a European Commission plan to make Europe a hub for developing digital technologies designed to help older people to continue living independently at home. In its press statement, the Commission referred to the MobilAlarm project as one of two exemplary research results in this field: "EU research and innovation in this area has already a successful track record in creating innovative ICT solutions for elderly people. [A good example is] MobilAlarm, a tracking service allowing older persons to initiate an alarm call and get support whenever and wherever they need or want to do so."

MobilAlarm was co-funded by the eTEN Programme in Call 2003. Details on the MobilAlarm service package can be found on their website

The Slovenian Ministry of Interior and a Slovenian IT solution provider joined the RISER consortium in July 2008, resulting in 12 partners from 7 EU Member States deploying the RISER Service; one of the first cross-border eGovernment services in European civil registration.

Slovenia has a central population register which keeps the basic data of the 2 million inhabitants. The population register is under the control of the Slovenian Ministry of Interior. In future, RISER will handle all cross-border inquiries for the Slovenian population register. With the new partners, RISER now increases its coverage to 9 European countries and 128 million inhabitants.

Co-funded by the eTEN-Programme, the RISER consortium enables address verification in official state registers. The RISER service is run by the RISER ID Services GmbH, in line with all European and national data protection requirements.

The Midterm Workshop of the Health Optimum Initial Deployment project took place between 25-27 June at the Convention Center of Barbastro, Spain. The forum introduced the European and, specifically, Spanish outlook on telemedicine and exhibited displays and new technologies that companies offer to telemedicine. Health Optimum presented a concrete example of the take-up of such technologies; through the experiences in its regional pilot sites in Aragon (Spain), Syddanmark (Denmark), Veneto (Italy), County Council of Uppsala (Sweden) and Timis (Romania). Other eTEN telemedicine projects - such as Eurogene and Better Breathing - will also be featured during the conference.

The event gathered about 350 individuals from 12 European countries; including Health Care professionals, managers, university lecturers, technologists, social agents and politicians involved in the areas of Health Care Management, Assistential Environment and Information and Communication Technologies. Representatives from 14  Spanish autonomous communities (from 17) attended the conference and several departments of the Aragón regional, provincial and local administration were also present. Furthermore, representatives from different departments of the Central Administration of the Spanish Government also attended the conference, such as from Health Care, Industry, Science, Innovation and Defence.

Six round tables were organized with 26 speakers and eleven demonstration services were exhibited. Industry had an important presence at the event; 10 stands from different companies were set up in the Exhibition Hall.

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Caselex started rolling out cases on freedom of movement law which serves at the heart of European Union (EU) law. In parallel it launched Latvian Supreme Court cases, bringing its total case coverage to nine areas of law and 23 countries.

Caselex has started its roll-out of Supreme Court cases within the fields of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) law and Media law. With this new release, Caselex has brought its coverage to seven areas of EU law and is on track for a complete coverage of EU’s commercial areas of law.

Caselex is the first premium information service providing access to the most important national and European case law linked to EU law. An easy to use online service holding exclusive case digests in English allows legal professionals to easily use foreign cases relevant to their work or study.

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The "In the Lab of Tomorrow" (InLOT) project is organising its mid-term conference, entitled "Innovative teaching in School Environments – wishful thinking or actual reality". The conference will take place in Tyrol on 14 of May 2008. More on the programme and useful information.

InLOT aims at investigating the feasibility of a successful and innovative service for science teaching and learning as a business case. The project looks upon informal science education as an opportunity to transcend from traditional classroom based teaching, to a “feel and interact” user experience, allowing for learning “anytime, anywhere”.

The HEALTH OPTIMUM project was presented by Regione Veneto (coordinator) at the eHealth Meeting of the Assembly of European Regions (AER) on 11 April 2008 in Vienna, Austria. The meeting was organised by the Social Affaires and Public Health Committee of the AER. Created in 1985, the Assembly of European Regions brings together 260 regions from 33 countries and 13 interregional organisations. Minutes of the meeting and the presentation are available on their website.

The HEALTH OPTIMUM telemedicine project promotes the implementation of telematic Trans-European networks. It is now in its Initial Deployment phase, where the existing services and new ones will be deployed in regions within five countries: Denmark, Italy, Romania, Spain and Sweden. Each region will be deploying the most suitable set of services according to their needs.

A delegation from the city of Handan in China has visited a number of the FASTeTEN project partners as part of a good practice exchange trip organised by the European Commission funded EU-China Information Society Project. The objective of the visit was to organise ways of sharing eGovernment good practice between the EU and China.

During the meetings with FASTeTEN partners, the visiting delegation was introduced to the FAST bundle of services for secure electronic document exchange in different European contexts.

FAST (Fournisseur d'Accès Sécurisés Transactionnels, or Fully Automated Secured Transactions) is a French developed system that was featured in the 2005 European eGovernment Awards catalogue of good practices. FAST has been successfully tested in France and has the potential to offer considerable benefits to other European public administrations, as well.

On April 16, 2008, the RoboBraille service was presented with the 2008 Well-Tech award for innovation and accessibility. More information about Well-Tech and the award is available at www3.provincia.mi.it/economia/eventi/well_tech.html

RoboBraille is an email-based service capable of translating documents into either synthetic speech or contracted Braille. Originally a Danish service, a pan-European consortium validated RoboBraille in Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom within a recently completed eTEN project.

Caselex has on 17 March received the European Information Association's "EIA Award for excellence in European information provision (electronic sources category)". Caselex’ prize represents an acknowledgement of its contribution to bring highly needed case law linked to EU law from all corners of Europe into a user-friendly service where traditional access barriers, such as multiple languages, have been eliminated.

On 7 April, eight highly esteemed law firms have joined Caselex to guide and review its national case law linked to EU law, bringing a boost to the case law coverage and its new alert service “Caselex Weekly”. More

09/04/2008 and 16/04/2008: See Caselex in action at seminars in Brussels

The Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) and Caselex organised two seminars in Brussels on 9 April and 16 April where Caselex’ co-founder Stig Marthinsen demonstrated how the online service can be used as a practical tool for legal professionals. Caselex is deploying the first premium information service to offer the most important national and European case law linked to the European Union's commercial areas of law, without need for multilingual and multinational legal skills. An easy to use service holding unique case digests allows legal professionals to easily use foreign cases relevant to their work or study.

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The HEALTH OPTIMUM telemedicine project promotes the implementation of telematic Trans-European networks. It is now in its Initial Deployment phase, where the existing services and new ones will be deployed in regions within five countries: Denmark, Italy, Romania, Spain and Sweden. Each region will be deploying the most suitable set of services according to their needs.

For example, in Regione Veneto, the selected two services are Neurosurgical Tele-counselling and Tele-laboratory. On the one hand Tele-counselling provides fast and formalized replies to neurosurgical consultancy requests for urgent cases from a peripheral hospital to the reference Neurosurgical Centre. On the other hand, Tele-laboratory, allows to perform blood exams onsite and to immediately show the results at the patient’s side, thanks to portable analysis equipment which can be checked remotely. The results are received a few seconds after can be later uploaded to the hospital server, where they will be validated by the laboratory staff through digital signature. The expected outcome of this phase is an operational system running to the benefit of patients and clinicians throughout the Region.

The deployment of the e-Health administration services improving healthcare access procedures for mobile citizens across the EU is growing and currently involves a wider trans-European network of service points in 15 EU/EEA States. NETC@RDS has recently extended the service sites to additional hospitals and emergency units in France, Germany (Baden-Württemberg), Italy (Veneto and Lombardia) and Slovakia. The launch of these new sites and the overall aim of the project have been raising the interest of politicians, at national and European level, for the consequences on welfare and citizens mobility domains. In this light, a positive exchange of views took place at AOK Baden-Württemberg premises between Mr. Christopher Hermann, Vice-Chairman of the AOK Baden-Württemberg Governing Board, Mr. Rainer Baudermann, Project Manager for the local implementation of the NETC@RDS operations and Ms. Evelyne Gebhardt (SPD), Member of the European Parliament. More information about the new service points and the visit of the MP at AOK Baden-Württemberg are available on the renewed NETC@RDS project web site.

The ePoll project presented its service functionalities to a number of Members of the European Parliament on 12 March in Strasbourg.

ePoll aims at implementing a remote polling system which simplifies the voting process through the use of innovation technologies and makes it accessible to all, including disabled people. The architecture addresses the fears citizens might have in eVoting. ePoll provides all the security required for an eVoting service, plus the possibility to recount the paper ballot, as each station offers printing facility to enable voters to check physically the vote cast. The project has been validated in France and Italy; while the current deployment phase will be involving a large number of (aiming between 3.5 and 7 million) citizens in France, Italy and in the UK.

The EuroWorksafe project will hold its final public workshop in Genoa (Italy) on 14 February 2008. Leading experts in the occupational health and cancer prevention domain and in health authorities will participate at the conference to debate the impact of information provision services on occupational cancer prevention. Project results will be presented as a case study which will be discussed and evaluated. Other relevant initiatives will be presented in a dedicated poster session. More information on the project web site www.euroworksafe.eu.

HANDS

Project of the Year 2007

 The HANDS project was elected as the eTEN Project of the year 2007 in an online public voting open at ePractice.eu between 21 December 2007 and 21 January 2008.  Having received almost one third of all votes reflects the consortium’s capabilities to communicate the project’s goals and achievements in a clear manner as well as the usability of their website.

HANDS is an on-line communication service designed to facilitate and ameliorate communication between citizens and Public Bodies, allowing citizens to use their everyday language, thereby obtaining a direct pre-structured and, at the same time, richer interaction.