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levels and functional areas of government and between public and private sec-
tors. However, this implementation faces various legal, budgetary, cultural and
- the focus of this work - organizational and technical challenges. For instance,
enabling collaborative relations between agencies at different level of the govern-
ment, between public and private sectors, and between different administrations
is a serious organizational challenge. The resulting technical challenges include
[6]: providing one-stop access to public services, coordinating processes that de-
liver such services across agency boundaries, enforcing policies that govern how
such services are delivered, integrating different agency systems that partici-
pate in various process steps, ensuring that such systems can interoperate both
technically and semantically, and delivering services through multiple channels.
While existing Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) [2] could provide par-
tial solutions to many technical challenges, three issues make the application of
MOMs to Electronic Government less than ideal: reliability, extensibility and
genericity. First, in the absence of formal foundations that allow the underling
messaging services to be rigorously developed, the reliability of electronic public
services and the reputation of the providers of such services (governments) may
be affected. Second, MOMs typically offer a fixed set of services, such as logging
or validation of messages, while government applications face complex, evolving
communication needs. Third, generic messaging do not address the problems
peculiar to governments, such as accumulation of legacy systems, reliance on
regulations and policies to drive operational behaviour, high rate of changes to
such regulations and policies, and collaboration across agency boundaries.
The aim of this work is to build a foundation for programmable messaging, es-
pecially in the context of the delivery of seamless public services. A formal model
is developed to show how messaging services can be described at different levels
of abstraction, from specifications that capture observable effects of messag-
ing services, through design of communication structures to enable such effects,
to implementation of messaging behaviours along such structures. The under-
ling operational model is based on asynchronous exchange of messages between
registered members along dynamically created and subscribed communication
channels. On top of this core messaging, various extensions can be specified and
implemented, including extensions related to particular channels (horizontal)
and extensions related to particular processes (vertical). Just like channel-based
communication structures upon which they are build, the extensions can evolve
over time. The concept of programmable messaging for Electronic Government
was first introducted in [6] and the implementation was presented in [7].
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 contains a brief intro-
duction to Electronic Government. Section 3 presents an example of a typical
Electronic Government Service - issuing business licenses - and describes the
communication requirements raised by this service. Section 4 presents a formal
foundation for the messaging infrastructure to fulfill such requirements, com-
prising models to express messaging behaviours at various levels of abstraction.
Section 5 presents the application of the infrastructure to Electronic Government
practice and justifies how the infrastructure can fulfill the requirements for the
 
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