The business unit Publiekzaken within the company PinkRoccade Local Government creates and exploits SAAS applications for the department Burgerzaken (Civil Affairs) from Dutch municipalities. At present 175 of the 342 Dutch municipalities use this software. The unit has some 100 employees.
Typical use cases of the Civil Affairs applications are the traditional registrations for births, deaths, change of address and request for new identity papers.
In recent years also more innovated applications are developed such as the self-services for identification & pre-registration of immigrants. A prominent user of the latter application is the municipality of Amsterdam that uses this application for registering foreign students that would like to enlisted in their universities in the recent months.
At present municipalities are faced with many documents. Documents used by different local or national departments and third parties that would like to inform the municipality of certain facts.
In practices the sheer amount of work involved in scanning and processing these document puts a burden of the municipality. Another issue is the profound knowledge required of all the types of documents by the regular civil servant is to examine the validity of the documents and to extract certain attributes (like date and place of birth).
The purpose of this project is to create an “Document Recognition” application which helps municipalities with the processing of the documents.