Problem
Definition
During the last decade,
numerous efforts have taken place for developing eGovernment applications and information
systems. An important portion of such systems aim at supporting, and better organizing
the electronic public service provision (e-services). All these systems create
and make available to their constituents public services. These services are
documented by developers in an impromptu and ad hoc way. This results in the
lack of a common understanding or even definition of the “public service”
concept. Each system uses its own representation and as a result they produce
fragmented pieces of information with limited added value outside it own
“world” as it becomes difficult to link together, reuse and combine
services/information provided by one system with those provided by others.
Due to this situation,
it is very hard to aggregate information from various sources or combine
existing services to provide a new level of service. Moreover, it is not
possible to create machine-readable public service descriptions that could
enable functionalities like automated service discovery and composition.
Millions of web pages exist with public sector information but need a human
reader to understand, process, abstract and use all this wealth that is
available over the web.
Target
Population
The target population as
potential beneficiaries of our effort includes all the stakeholders involved in
the service provision process, i.e., the citizens and the businesses who consume
public services and the governmental officials and industrial partners who define,
develop and provide these services.
Description
The above presented
problem can be addressed by developing and agreeing on a common public service
model as a technology independent generic representation of the public
administration service. This public service model describes the basic concepts
of a public service in a similar way that e.g. FOAF identifies and describes
the basic concepts of a person’s profile or/and the SIOC ontology describes the
basic concepts of on-line communities. A model like this could become an
internal and core component of national/federal eGovernment interoperability
strategies to ensure broad adoption and conformance. Such a model aims at:
- Creating a minimum common language for describing public services,
contributes towards the homogenization of public services descriptions and
facilitates the sharing and reuse of these descriptions. Governmental
portals will have services described in a common way, thus enabling
interoperability and cross-portal querying. The model facilitates the
discovery of public services which are available online supporting complex
queries and advanced search options.
- Making the service provision process identifiable, understandable
and comparable to both constituents and service owners streamlining in
this way process improvement and reengineering. The model is expected to help
identify problems and bottlenecks in the process, e.g. by visualizing
common attributes of services and making feasible simple and structured
visualizations of complex services.
- Services and information annotated with concepts from the public
service model could become machine-understandable. Queries like “give me
all public services available for blind people” or “give me all services
that are affected by a change in law x” could become possible in such
environment.
Target
Software
Existing CASE tools
could be extended by adding the concepts of the model among the standard modeling
components. This would support the efficient modeling of public services and
would enhance the development of eGovernment information systems and
applications.
The model could be
formally described as an XML/RDF document or an ontology, so that it can be
used for semantically annotating electronic public services. This annotation
would be useful in different technology advancement stage, i.e. it could be
used for annotating html descriptions of services (e.g. using RDFa or GRDDL) or
could be taken one step further and combined with formal Semantic Web Service
frameworks (e.g. SA-WSDL). There are already existing prototypes of the model
being used with RDFa/SA-REST and WSMO based annotations in order to enrich
semantic service descriptions with domain specific semantics.
In addition it could
also be implemented in eForms software as well as content management, query and
analytical software.
Identified
problems or limitations
The primary problem is
to persuade system architects and/or central eGovernment units about the need and
benefits of following a structured, standardized way of modelling public
services and the benefits of following such practices. Thus, the most important
issue is adoption and community building around the model. Experience has shown
that heavy service models are difficult to be adopted by both the industry and
governments (e.g. OWL-S, WSMO). The idea is to exploit the bottom-up approach
for uptake followed by many successful web specs/standards (e.g. FOAF, SIOC,
see next section too).
Another issue that has
to be verified is to ensure that the model is generic enough so as to capture
different types of public services possibly in different administrative
environments and at the same time detailed enough to provide useful semantics for
the annotated public services. The model should be extensible to allow domain
specific specializations/extensions. The minimum common core will ensure a
minimum level of interoperability while the domain specific extensions will
allow the model to cover more detailed semantics depending on the
particularities of each use case. From the deployment point of view, the
approach seems to fit well with RDFa, Microformats and SA-REST based
annotations.
Related
Initiatives
There are many relevant
initiatives. Some indicative follow:
From eGovernment:
- The UK Common
Government Information Model is a high-level information model for all
activities undertaken by the public sector. It is part of the more general
- The Business
Reference Model of the Federal Enterprise Architecture in the
- The Governmental
Markup Language (GovML) proposes a metadata element set for governmental
resources and a template for describing life events and public services.
It is a research stimulated initiative with application in several
projects and currently used in a Cypriot project for public service
documentation.
- The recent
CEN/ISSS eGov-Share group draft “Reference Ontology and Metadata Schema”[1].
- Interestingly,
governments (at least in EU) already discuss and include in their
eGovernment interoperability strategies similar approaches.
From service
literature/science:
- The OASIS SOA
service model
- All Semantic
Web Service literature is based on the assumption of creating and
formalizing a common service model (e.g. OWL-S, WSMO, SA-WSDL, SA-REST).
From common vocabularies
- FOAF, SKOS and
SIOC could be also perceived as relevant initiatives. These are community
efforts (bottom-up) to create vocabularies for modeling particular domains
in a generic way. Simplicity and extensibility are two core ideas behind
the success of such initiatives: a) specifying a core, and simple
vocabulary gives better chances for adoption while b) leaving the specs
open to further extensions/specializations allows reusability and
tailoring to specific needs in particular, countries, domains, and use
cases.
- More generally,
developing vocabularies and markup languages for specific domains has
recently become a very active area. [2]
[3]
Priorization
The mission of the eGov
IG is “…to explore how to improve access to government through better use of
the Web and achieve better government transparency using open Web standards at
any government level (local, state, national and multi-national)”. The proposed
use cases have been organized into three categories:
- Provide: public services on the web, either transactional or
information services
- Engage: with citizens and businesses, on government terms or on the
citizens terms
- Enable: public sector information re-use work
The proposed model can
provide the means for describing Public Sector information using a common
vocabulary, thus contributing both to the “provide” and “enable” category. The
effort is also consistent with the workgroup activity entitled “Seamless
Integration of Data”. This implies that a standarided way of modeling public sector
data is expected to decrease the interoperability burden among eGovernment
systems, enabling seamless integration. The proposed model can be used with
existing technologies e.g. RDF, RDFa, Microformats for annotating public
information.
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