Chile Shortens Identity Card Issuance Time by 12 Days

Challenges
The Civil Registry and Identification Service--the Chilean government agency charged with registering citizens, issuing identity cards and tracking each individual’s marital status, birth date, and the number of children in each household--wanted to comply with international security guidelines that recommend automating confirmation of the validity of identity cards and passports. In addition, the registry wanted to speed up issuing identification documents, a labor-intensive process that took an average of 15 working days.

The agency, established in 1884, sought an IT infrastructure that facilitated a fingerprint identification system for automatic identity verification. The solution had to be highly available to the agency's 570 employees who are directly engaged in identification system work at its 584 offices.

Solution
With help from Oracle Certified Advantage Partner Sonda S.A., a Chilean-based systems integrator, Chile's Civil Registry and Identification Service developed a biometric database on Oracle Database with Real Application Clusters, configured onto four HP Tru64 Alpha servers.

The agency’s biometric solution may eliminate the need for an identity card that is mandated by law for all Chilean citizens and foreign residents. The solution simply requires placing a forefinger on an image scanner, which automatically verifies identity based on biometric data in the Oracle Database. Based on the fingerprint, biometric records including the person's identity data, signature, and photograph are retrieved within 1.6 seconds. Given the success of the solution, the Civil Registry and Identification Service plans to extend it to other institutions in Chile by services contracts. Pilot projects are underway for police departments and banks.

Oracle Database contains all data related to identity: photographs, fingerprints, and the signatures of every Chilean citizen and foreign residents. The database's automatic verification and authorized workflow eliminated the need to send documents through five different offices located in different parts of the country--a procedure that could delay issuance up to 15 business days. This solution helped to extend the network that processes Chilean passports to an additional 20 offices.

The Civil Registry and Identification Service stores signatures and photos as images in Oracle Database through the use of interMedia. Treating images just like other relational data makes it easy to manage, develop, and deploy media-rich applications. The database's fine-grained security ensures that only authorized personnel have access to this highly sensitive data. Using interMedia also makes it possible to store images along with the associated relational citizen data so the data stays synchronized. The images can be backed up and restored using the same tools and procedures as the relational data. With interMedia, the registry also can easily develop and deploy media-intensive Web applications that scale.

The 5.8 terabyte Oracle Database easily handles 300,000 transactions each day. "Oracle Real Application Clusters protects the system from hardware failures, ensuring access to a system that must be available to process our heavy load of transactional requests and huge date volume," said Luis Fuentes Cerda, deputy director of studies and development of the Civil Registry and Identification Service.

Benefits • Retrieves biometric information and images within 1.6 seconds, enabling processing up to 10,000 document requests and 300,000 transactions daily • Provides a high availability environment with four node clustering that prevents application interruption due to hardware failure • Restricts access to data with fine-grained security privileges     Copyright © 2004 Oracle Corporation. All Rights Reserved.