Deutschland-Stack: Sovereign administration with over 50 open standards

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Anyone who wants to use administrative services digitally in Germany quickly encounters a fundamental problem: 16 federal states, hundreds of municipalities, and the federal government each operate their own IT systems, which often cannot communicate with each other. Different formats, proprietary interfaces, established isolated solutions – the technical fragmentation of German administration is one of the main reasons why the digitalization of the state has been stagnating for years.

The IT Planning Council – the central political steering body for the digital administration of the federal and state governments – has now made an attempt to fundamentally address this problem. With B-2026/03-IT, the IT Planning Council has adopted a binding standard framework for the Deutschland-Stack. Federal, state, and local governments are to use the Stack solutions for new and further developments according to the portfolio.

The paper, presented by the Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization, divides the entire IT architecture of the administration into seven layers – from the virtualized infrastructure at the very bottom to artificial intelligence at the very top. For each layer, it names concrete standards that are to be considered sovereign: i.e., open, manufacturer-independent, and interoperable. At the same time, it explicitly lists in each layer where further definition is still needed – meaning standards are missing here.

As a result, the document is unusually concrete in its breadth and level of detail for the otherwise rather cautious standardization policy of German administration. It ranges from file formats like ODF to cloud standards like OpenStack and Sovereign Cloud Stack, and even AI agent protocols that are sometimes only a few months old.

Data and Documents: ODF Instead of MS Office

The core of the Stack is formed by the semantic technologies layer, which regulates the handling of data and documents. Here you will find most of the standards and some remarkable decisions.

For document formats, the IT Planning Council relies on the Open Document Format (ODF), the open ISO standard for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. ODF is natively supported by LibreOffice, for example, and has been considered the most important lever against dependence on Microsoft Office for years. The fact that ODF is in the Stack is no surprise: The IT Planning Council had already decided in March 2025 that open formats like ODF should be increasingly used in administration and become the standard for document exchange by 2027.

The choice of PDF/UA instead of PDF/A is striking. PDF/UA is the ISO standard 14289 for accessible PDFs. The fact that the Stack mentions this format fits the regulatory environment: The BFSG implements the European Accessibility Act and is generally applicable from June 28, 2025. Accessibility therefore takes precedence over pure archiving capability.

For data exchange, the Stack relies on proven web standards: JSON, XML, and CSV as formats, supplemented by SQL and the open database interfaces ODBC and JDBC for manufacturer-independent database access. For the semantic networking of data, the W3C standards RDF, OWL, SPARQL, SKOS, and DCAT are used – the classic toolkit of the Semantic Web, which forms the basis for the Open Data Portal GovData, among other things. The OAI-PMH protocol complements the catalog for metadata exchange between archives and repositories.

What is noticeable, however: there are no definitions yet for more modern forms of data storage – vector databases, graph databases, document- and object-oriented systems. Likewise, standards for data modeling, integration, analysis, and visualization, as well as for harmonized domain data spaces, are missing. The latter, in particular, would be crucial for standardizing data exchange – for example, of personal data – between specialized applications of different authorities.