Registers – an overview
Austrian Federal Register
The Austrian Federal Register is a map of the country's registers and is an important part of the "Digital Office – legal affairs" project.
As well as providing a general overview of national registers, the visualisation also provides detailed information about the designators for the registers, the category of information they contain and a description of the main content of each. Users can also see the legal basis for each register, any interfaces with others and information about the body responsible for administering it.
Optimising the register landscape is one of the key aims of the ICT strategy of the Austrian public administration service. The Federal Register also has the potential to be used in many different ways for future projects.
Benefits of a register map
Overview of key registers and their connections and interfaces
Overview of the flow of individual, corporate and property-related data
Simpler administration and a reduced burden for citizens and the administrative agencies
Link to the Austrian Federal Register
The register map at a glance
The register map shows selected registers taken as entities from the register survey, along with individual organisations and platforms, which emerged as key nodes.
The following entities are depicted on the visualisation:
• Registers
• Selected organisations and platforms such as Statistik Austria, FinanzOnline and the Business Service Portal
The sector-specific personal identifiers (ssPIN) used in the registers were included as an additional feature on the visualisation, because they are of great importance in data sharing between registers and enable datasets to be attributed to sectors unambiguously.
Another additional feature that was included was the data flow that already occurs, categorised as follows:
• Registers for which automatic synchronisation occurs
• Registers from which data is taken regularly
• Registers into which data flows regularly
Each register was also assigned a distinct primary focus, categorised as follows:
• Personal data
• Business-related data
• Property-related data
The value of a register map
The register map offers huge potential for follow-on projects
The study of individual registers can range from finding information about the general areas of responsibility, legal principles, legal foundations and restrictions associated with that register to potential interfaces with other registers, and is therefore of considerable value.
Interesting facts about the register map project
General objectives of the project
To survey the registers within the public administration system and assess the register data for its characteristics and how up-to-date it is.
The register map is intended to give an overview of existing (federal) data and form a basis for further evaluation of possible applications in relation to the ID platform, E-ID and/or the Registers and Systems Network.
Optimising the register landscape is part of the Austrian public administration service’s ICT strategy. The aims of the project were to establish a sound infrastructure for up-to-date administrative procedures and to encourage the development of new and innovative government services. One of the basic prerequisites for this optimisation was to create an overview of all the existing official registers at national level, as a service for politicians and society in general.
Promoting innovative administrative services
Having an overview of the existing and potential interfaces between registers forms the basis for driving innovative administrative services, in particular for developing once-only and no-stop services. The options also become apparent for setting up new, lean services that build on existing data resources, such as implementing innovative digital services based on digital identities.
Procedure
During the project, interviews were carried out with selected experts in the use of registers (government departments and other organisations), in order to add some implicit knowledge and extra know-how about how registers are used and operated in the Austrian public administration system to the factual data we had already gathered.
We produced the basic principles for a visualisation that would demonstrate and depict the interconnections that had emerged from the register data we had collected. Visualising the data flows between the registers revealed the level of interconnectedness within the register landscape.
It showed that there is a strongly interconnected core of registers but also some which currently do not receive any data from other registers. Another feature that was identified as important was whether registers use sector-specific personal identifiers. The visualisation showed the extent of their distribution. The data each register contains was also assigned to a register data core.
Depicting the data flows between individual registers not only shows the level of interconnectedness but also the distribution of sector-specific personal identifiers (ssPIN).
