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Programmable Messaging for Electronic
Government - Building a Foundation
Elsa Estevez and Tomasz Janowski
Center for Electronic Governance
United Nations University - International Institute for Software Technology
P.O. Box 3058, Macau
Abstract.
Electronic Government offers citizens and businesses a single
interface to all public services, implemented through cross-agency processes
and applications. This paper presents a fragment of a software infrastruc-
ture that enables agencies to collaborate in the delivery of public services,
responsible for automated, process-driven exchange of messages between
applications. In addition to basic message exchange, the infrastructure sup-
ports high-level messaging through dynamically-enabled horizontal
(process independent) and vertical (process dependent) extensions. In par-
ticular, the paper presents a fragment of a semantic model to formalize the
process of specifying and implementing messaging extensions, and demon-
strates a prototype implementation of this model to underpin a reliable
delivery of government services.
Keywords:
Electronic Government, Asynchronous Messaging, Messag-
ing Middleware, Domain Specific Languages, Software Specification.
1
Introduction
Responding to public demands, many governments around the world are en-
gaged in organizational transformation enabled by Electronic Government. Tra-
ditionally, the main objective underpinning such efforts has been to publish
government information online and to make public services available through
agency websites. However, with many initiatives restricting themselves to follow
hierarchical government structures, it was realized that technology-enabled im-
provements which are focusing on individual agencies are of limited value [8]. As
a result, the emphasis is currently shifting towards enabling collaboration and
networking between agencies, focusing on the delivery of seamless services.
Seamless services allow citizens or businesses to specify a certain need towards
their government, in terms of a life event or a business episode, and obtain a
service to fulfill this need without knowing which agency or level of government
should be contacted. Usually, several agencies at different levels of the govern-
ment may be involved without a citizen being even aware of this. The delivery
of such services is based on collaborations between organizations from various
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