Anyone interested in obtaining a technical understanding of smart cards needs to become familiar with ISO 7816. ISO 7816 currently has nine parts. Some have been completed, some have been ammended and others are just in draft stage. It also prescribe the physical location of a IC card's magnetic stripe and embossing area. In practical terms, that means the card is not compatible with ISO 7816.
Proprietary protocol is used in German health care cards.
Within this basic kernel, for example, are commands to read, write and update records. An AID has two parts. The second part is a variable length field of up to 11 bytes that RIDs can use to identify specific applications. Describes encoding rules for data needed in many applications e.g. name and photograph of owner, his preference of languages etc. The beginnings of a definition of a multi-application card.