Overview
The basis and foundation of the project were laid by the SIBIS "eEurope Benchmarking Framework" providing a guide to the topic research work. The main objective of this work package has been to provide the conceptual and methodological framework for the SIBIS project, and in particular for the development of statistical indicators on the information society in the nine topics covered by the project. This objective has been met by producing a report that contains:

• a broad set of definitions and concepts related to the Information Society, in order to ensure a common understanding of appropriate definitions across project partners as well as maximal useful compatibility with European statistical standards and definitions,
• a benchmarking framework defining the required properties of the indicators, and delineating the common structure for the topic research that was subsequently implemented in work package 2,
• an assessment of policy documents with relationship to the Information Society to determine the most important policy goals, approaches and measures, as well as to identify measurement and indicator concepts that were developed in the political sphere,
• an analysis of statistical documents as a first stock-taking of the current and emerging statistical measures to be taken account of in the topic research on each topic.

The e-Europe benchmarking framework was completed in June 2001 with an update dated October 2002.

Reports

Glossary
The Glossary contains basic information on definitions, data sources and methodologies. An understanding of the definitions used and the methodologies used are important to a proper analysis of the statistical indicators presented. It is divided into subsections corresponding to:

1. The New Economy, eEurope and the Information Society in general
2. Telecommunications and access
3. Internet for research
4. Security and trust
5. Education
6. Work, employment and skills
7. Social inclusion
8. eCommerce
9. eGovernment
10. Health
11. Transport
12. Statistics, indicator development, and other methodological issues
13. A Glossary of general ICT terms assembled from a variety of sources.

For simplicity, the information is organised into prototype tables, with columns corresponding to the term, a short verbal definition and, for terms corresponding to measurable quantities or indicators, an indication of likely data sources.