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GUIDE is a European Union (EU) funded research project conducting research and technological development
with the aim of creating a technological, institutional, policy and socio-economic architecture for secure and
interoperable e-government electronic identity services and transactions for Europe. The project's approach is
inter-disciplinary and involves technological, policy, and procedural research and development in institutional
contexts across all the member states of the EU. The vision of GUIDE is to enable Europe to become the global
leader of eGovernment services through the creation of an open architecture for identity authentication and
management based on durable transnational cooperation and consensus on a pan-European basis.
The central organising concept of GUIDE is 'identity' which is understood in a holistic way that encompasses its
moral philosophical foundations, legal, technological and government process issues that help shape it and
allow its authentication and management in eGovernment. Identity is defined as all information associated with
an individual or organisation; it is not just a token or digital certificate. Identity management involves maintaining
an individual entity's complete information set, spanning multiple contexts and transactions and establishing the
relationship among various identities with the goal of improving data protection, consistency, accuracy and
security in an efficient manner.
Authentication and identity management in themselves are not services to the citizen. Instead GUIDE functions
as a catalyst and foundation for numerous other eGovernment services to be developed on the basis of
authentication. GUIDE by its very nature, can be applied to different service domains such as administration to
administration (A2A), administration to business (A2B), and administration to citizens (A2C).
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