Most of the standards work on smart cards has been done by two
organisations: ISO (International Standards Organisation) and, for
GSM mobile phones, ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards
Institute). A small amount has been done by CEN (European
Standardisation Organisation).The Information and Communications
Technologies Standards Board is the body set up by the European
Commission, within the European Community, to manage the work of
bothe CEN and ETSI.
The standard way in which both ISO and CEN do their work is to use
volunteer specialists from the organisations interested in
particular technologies. Standards are produced in draft form and
sent out to member countries for voting. Eventually a public draft
is produced, and again voted on by the member countries. Both ISO
and CEN also have mechanisms to take draft standards material from
commercial organisations, but only CEN seem interested in speeding
things up in this way. We used to see interested countries putting
government money into standards development, but most of them do not
do that any more, so the standards development work has slowed down
and is just not giiving the smart card industry the standards that
it needs. Because the EC has part funded numerous ICT type
development projects, CEN wishes to have all standards related
material from those projects to be submitted to them, and there is
some European law that suggests this ought to be done (e.g. Public
Procurement Directives 93/38 and 98/4). One example of this is the
citizens card project, DISTINCT, which is defining the format and
access methods for a user profile database to be held in a
multi-application card - ISO 7816 does not provide a full mechanism
to do this. (See www.distinct.org.uk or contact Phil Blythe
[EMAIL PROTECTED]) I think also that EMV could sensibly use
the CEN route in order to move to being ISO compliant.
Now, as for architecture of multi-app cards, the EC has offered grant
aid to projects in this area, but I do not know if anyone has been
able to get a project approved. It certainly is an area where
standards could help, but I think it more likely that the EC will use
projects like DISTINCT to influence the way access to user
information and user interfaces are standardised, rather than say how
the general internal architecture of multi-app cards is to be
organised. So it would be interesting to know more about the
philosophy of this Indian project. Is the information on the web?
Peter
------------------------------------------------
> Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 00:34:59 +0530
> From: Sree Hari Nagaralu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [OCF] Re: Basic Question - E-commerce terminals for debit/credit
> On Wed, Mar 24, 1999 at 05:01:57PM +0000, Peter W Tomlinson wrote:
> [.....snipped.....]
> >
> > Now that we are moving into a multi-application environment, I
> > propose that the basics of the transaction guarantee mechanism be
> > governed by public standards rather than by individual scheme
> > specifications. Since the EC is so keen on quality of service to the
> > public, and so keen on taking us forward into the information
> > society, so keen on enabling self-service for so many transactions,
> > and so keen on 'Design for All' (i.e. the special needs of some
> > people, common user interfaces for the ordinary person, and the
> > enthusiasm of techno gurus), it seems that the right place to
> > co-ordinate all this is within the EC, and within the EC the group to
> > do it is the ICT Standards Board (they sit above CEN and ETSI).
> [.....snipped.....]
>
> Hello Sir,
>
> We are now currently working on developing an architecture model for a
> multi-application smartcard. In the above snippet, it is mentioned that the
> right place to co-ordinate all the concerned activities is in EC. Could please
> tell us about what this EC does and what is the function of ICT Standards Board
> or please help us by giving pointers to these and some other relevant things.
>
> Thanking you,
>
> with regards,
> hari.
> --
> Sree Hari Nagaralu
> M.Tech. Student
> Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
> Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
> India.
>
>
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