The Mediterranean Hub aims to respond to the strategic importance that the EU gives to Mediterranean economies and the challenges these regions have to cope with today, in particular the increasing digital and cultural breach.
The HUB offers tools for better integration and sustainable development in the region.
The HUB encourages the bilateral and regional partnership dimension and will strengthen relationships between Mediterranean citizens in order to create a Mediterranean identity (I’m Mediterranean) based on specific regional attributes (language, nationality, age, professional activity, etc).
The HUB also provides tools for collaboration that address regional governance requirements to enhance communications or interactions between Mediterranean economies and reduce the gap between expectations and current available ICT services.
The HUB offers tools for a collective approach to decision-making addressing urban management challenges, particularly acute in the less developed regions.
Main Issues
Most citizen services cannot exist without some form of identification of both the citizen and the public employee or government entity authorised to provide these type of services.
Digital citizen services are gaining increasing momentum as governments at local, regional and national level seek means to offer better suited, more comprehensive services to their communities and deliver them faster while reducing costs.
The HUB offers a full solution with its Citizen Service Platform, to help local o regional governments achieve their goals in this space based on its identity-centric offering a series of citizen services to cover sectors such as:
- higher-education
- health
- e-commerce
- e-government
- environment
- natural disaster-coordination
- and so on
Benefits
The HUB is based on a unique PKI-based Trust platform, centralized identity management, secure access control to personal data (which are a major asset for deployment of e-government platforms), an identity portability capability (allowing verification and validation), personalization of information according to citizen profiles and the very innovative financing through advertising.
The HUB offers capabilities such as single sign on, online transaction and push systems, user authentication and attributes validation, track users, simplified online form filling and benefit from an existing user base.
This innovative HUB will combine multiple physical and electronic security systems utilizing PKI solutions within a “zero risk” secure environment.
The HUB has a vast array of services that include transactional based revenue models for regional Governments, wireless Internet access solutions to maximize user reach to the HUB, geo-localization permitting adapted content to be sent to the citizen and trusted on-line communities for secure information exchanges according to his specific citizen profiles and needs.
Conclusion
The Hub is a state-of-the-art technology and business infrastructure operated from a new Generation World Trade Centre (WTC) in Malaga, using the facilities of the Technology Park of Andalucía (PTA) and its unique geopolitical location.
Citizens still have understandable doubts on communicating and transmitting sensitive personal data through the web. Identity theft, phishing and social hacking all represent real threats but can be easily thwarted by the creation of trusted Identities and Certificate based Cryptographic infrastructures. The Mediterranean HUB is able to cost effectively secure and create comprehensive citizen’s architectures that keep the user experience easy while adding a string security layer.
OISTE, the WTC Geneva, and WISeKey supported the City of Malaga objective to become the new technology and business HUB for Europe, with the aim of optimizing economic, social and cultural relations between Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia.
This initiative has received a substantial boost by the regional and local governments in order to establish a Mediterranean Community.
Geneva, 18 August 2008