IC-cards (smart cards with microprocessor) have been utilized in various business and social systems in many countries. In present systems, data stored in memory of IC-cards are addressed by location and the length of data is fixed in many applications. Therefore, IC-cards are dependent on application software and can be used only for a single purpose.
The followings are requirements to IC-card systems which are desired to promote data stored in memory of IC-cards more open for a variety of applications and for IC-card systems to be spreaded out widely in the society.
(1) Requirements of card holders
An IC-card can be utilized for more than one applications and at different organizations.
(2) Requirements of application programmers
Data can be accessed by content rather than by location so that programmers do not need to design rigid storage maps.
(3) Requirements of service providers
The file size and the number of data items can be changed.
(4) Requirements of security managers
The access right to a data item in an IC-card can be assigned depending on occupations at an organization and also depending on organizations for an occupation.
A software which is called Content Access Manager (or CAM) was developed to satisfy above requirements. Data stored in memory of IC-cards can be accessed by content rather than by location with CAM. CAM is a C-language library software to provide high level functions to application programs based on the tag-length-value architecture. Application programs are linked to the library and run on MS-DOS or Windows machines of IC-card systems.
Mjor functions to be provided with CAM software are as follows:
(1) Logical addressing to data stored in IC-cards
(2) Temporary expansion of the file size
(3) Assignment of access rights to data items in a data file in addition to data files.
CAM Version 1.0 for the industry de facto standard in Japan (equivalent to the S-type specification of NTT Data Communications Systems Corporation) was released in June 1994. It has been utilized for the health care and local government services in projects of Ministry of Home Affairs and was recommended in the guideline of Ministry of Health and Welfare.
CAM Version 2.0 to support the ISO/IEC 7816-4 was released in February 1996 and has benn used at the experimental field of New Media Development Association inTakikawa in Hokkaido (A northern city of Japan) for shopping services and the health promotion.
G7-CAM to realize interoperability between health-card systems in an international level is under development as a part of a sub-project in the G7 Global Healthcare Applications Project and will be expected to complete by the end of year.
Function Specifications for Device Driver Common Interface (A Rich Text File in zip)