Romeo Pruno

Research: EGOV05, E-government is both a Vision and a Construction Site

For italian reader only: In questo post scrivo le mie impressioni ed analisi riguardo ali aspetti più importanti trattati durante l'ultima conferenza a Copenhagen, oltre a scusarmi della lingua utilizzata volevo sottolineare la mancata presenza alla conferenza dei gruppi di ricerca di alcune delle più grandi software house (es: Microsoft, Adobe) i commenti sono aperti!

EGOV05

E-government is both a Vision and a Construction Site

A border diary

Abstract

The Electronic Government is a fast-moving field. Sometimes the citizen, aren’t being able to perceive its real potential. Information about E-Gov isn’t share in a pyramidal architecture but only between academy networks and not accessible for citizen and Information workers, those are on the extremity of this process. Sometimes, the major software house doesn’t like participate at these conferences and produce software within an appropriate approach. This article provides both an exchange on the state of affairs concerning e-government developments and approach

Introduction

This article focuses on the following part:

• Visions, and frameworks
• Architectures and interoperability
• Process and Knowledge structuring
• E-participation

Architecture and interoperability

The principal architecture used for e-government solutions is SOA (Service oriented Architecture), its allows four essential futures: 1) maintaining the independence and equality among participant institutions, 2) no modification of the information system of participant assemblies, 3) interoperability between different environment, 4) an efficient security mechanism. Very important is the security component, is a main factor for a successful performance system. In the field of e-government the use of an efficient security model presents advantages such as: the different responsibilities are clearly distinguished, a transparency approach of Web Services modules respect to the security model, an authenticate session for each user for all legislative documents. The interoperability among public sector applications is made by using integration of new and existing application architecture to support different levels and functions of e-government services vertically and horizontally. A popular approach for dealing with these integration and interoperability issues is the establishment of Enterprise Architecture (EA) programs in many public administrations (PAs). Finally, the interoperability must be defined broader as the ability of information system and the business process they support, to exchange data and enable sharing of information.

Process and knowledge structuring

The realization of e-Government projects made it possible the development of a large number of IT solutions for the workflow management. A suitable analysis of the adopted solutions shows the lack of proper and adequate workflow management models. In particular, interoperability and standard compilation interfaces of document models have to be properly taken into account in order to not to constraint a Public Administration (PA) to necessarily use close systems. Many workflow solutions allows to overcome the problem of “data tracking” through the procedures of workflow management and to manage a knowledge repository system that can be queried by both internal and external actors of the system also through the web (e.g. web services). This is possible also by using an Intelligent Document and a support platform for its. In this case, the main futures of an intelligent document are:

·        Multi Composed, an Intelligent Document has to contain information both on its state and on the application domain in which its formation and/or distribution origins. The processes or the users has to mutually compete to its creation;  

·        Multi Version, the data truck has to be guaranteed from the persistence of the various versions of the file. Every office of the public administration and/or external public administrations will have only to compile the part of the document that are within their competences; 

·        Multi Dependence, it consists in the creation of the electronic document from a collection of other documents, through a modular architecture that is specialized according to the application domain, in which it is produced; 

·        Multi Data type, more types of data have the possibility to cohabit inside the structure of the Intelligent Document, if otherwise specified in the file schema; 

·        Multi Platform, the formation and use of the Intelligent Document they have to assure the interoperability at the application level;

A support platform for its has to include the following futures:

·        Point-To-Point Architecture, through this architecture the public administration participants reside on a same level of interaction, with the advantage of having no dependences on any system.

·        Orchestration, the interoperability by more public administrations in the compilation of an Intelligent Document it’s quite frequent;

·        Interoperability, through the sharing of a common ontology for the classification of structures of common models, every public administration has both the possibility to specialize the existing ontology inside its application domain and to share information and/or the same ontology with the others public administrations. The interoperability is also implemented from an application point of view as a data interchange using XML, that allows data access independently from the time and in a mutual way.

E-participation

The principal question about this argument is: In what way has ICT been used as a democratic tool for citizen participation? A complete answer is represents by a list of five principal criteria:

·        Inclusion, a democratic process must include all adults that belong to the society and who subject to the decisions made by society;

·        Effective participation, before making a decision all citizens must have “adequate and equal opportunities” for making their views and preferences know;

·        Voting equality at the decisive stage, all citizens must be given the opportunity to express their choices at the decisive stage and every choice must be counted as equal in weight. It means that the process stresses political equality between the citizens

·        Enlightened understanding, every citizen must have adequate and equal opportunities for investigating alternatives to the choice on the agenda and the consequences;

·        Control of agenda, the citizens as a group must be sovereign. It means that people in society have the exclusive opportunity to the decide how the agenda is composed;