Towards the foundation for read-write governance of civilizations

Abstract

The research presented in this paper aims towards defining a novel - governance oriented, layer of nodes for interaction between governmental data and data consumers, which aims to satisfy the need for a flexible and participative infrastructure for governing a modern society based on the rule-of-law and existing democratic conventions. We describe herein the Secure SQL Server - a system composed of a data format for describing complex rules of access to data stored in relational databases and a middleware server that mediates read/write interaction between clients and the database management system based on mentioned rules. Rather than designing a brand new protocol for this citizen-to-government interaction, we make use of existing well-supported standards, namely SQL, XML, XAdES and HTTP to model a system that fully complies with legal requirements of modern governments and which allows both read and write access to governmental data based on complex rules applied at run-time.