The concept of e-government service marketplace has been formalized using a model-driven approach which allows the development of a flexible, interoperable, and scalable environ- ment. Using a system modeling approach makes it possible to define the system at business domain level and then translate it in a software system meeting the requirements of system generality, extensibility, and interoperability. In a continuously changing and evolving world Table 3. Public administration types and subscription profiles
Subscription profiles
Profile 0 Profile 1 Profile 2 Profile 3 Types of PA
Type A X X X
Type B X X X
Type C X
Seamless, Ctzen-Orented Servce Delvery as public sector (and also evolving technologies), it is very important to design a flexible system which is easy to maintain and reconfigure in order to meet changing and evolving needs of administrations. Moreover in a heterogeneous world as public sector, it becomes fundamental to provide different levels of abstractions in system representation and view in order to make possible and facilitate the communication between different actors involved (engineers, administrators, managers, etc.). A model-driven design allows specifying the concept without taking care of any implementation constraints or technological details.
Model-driven approach refers to the use of models at different levels of abstraction in order to formally describe an information system. Separation and formalization, that is, modeling, are recognized as the best practices for system design and development. Model- ing techniques allow the same model specifying system functionalities to be realized on multiple platforms. They allow different applications to be integrated by explicitly relating their models, enabling integration and interoperability and supporting system evolution as technologies change rapidly.
Arrangements and middleware solution for integrating back-office systems with customer- oriented interface may give the impression that collaboration and cooperation between agencies can be achieved primarily at the technical level. In practice this is unlikely to be the case. In effect collaboration for seamless service delivery is more than technical issues and it is likely to involve implementation of integration models, service delivery policies and standards, service quality, presentation of information and material, and a decision- making process. For these reasons a middleware-oriented approach, which concentrates and takes care only of technological constraints and implementation details, is not enough and a more conceptual (technology-independent) approach is required. This is why the concept of e-government service marketplace is first of all a conceptual model for a shared infrastructure enabling seamless service delivery, which can be afterwards converted into a physical and operational architecture (which will only correspond to one of the possible implementation solutions). Interoperability, integration, and evolution are crucial issues e-government has to deal with. As stated before, the main e-government objectives are to better deliver services to citizens, improve interactions with citizens, and provide more ef- ficient government management. In order to achieve these goals a real collaboration between administrations and a fully integrated heterogeneous public administration information sys- tem is required (European Commission, 2003). Using modeling techniques to formalize an e-government system allows specifying system functionalities in a technology-independent way, thus enabling integration and interoperability and supporting system evolution. The e-government service marketplace has been formalized using a document based modeling approach (document engineering). Document engineering (Glushko, 2003) is evolving as a new scientific discipline for specifying, designing, and implementing systems belonging to very different business domains by using XML technology (World Wide Web Consortium, n.d.). The use of XML technology (Daum, 2003) allows the design and specification of a flexible, interoperable, and scalable system. It allows the description and formalization of the system in a technology-independent way, making it portable across different development environments, thus achieving maximum reusability and interoperability.
This allows us to provide a standard definition of the system which will be common for all implementation while guaranteeing a certain level of flexibility. According to the e-gov- ernment service marketplace model, only basic functionalities and behaviors are defined, making possible to add and adapt this “basic” system specification to the specific needs of a
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particular context. This would eventually allow different administrations, even of different countries, to customize the system according to their needs while remaining fully compliant, thus interoperable, with other systems. The definition of the concept of e-government service marketplace transcends country-specific requirements and identifies elements that can be transferred across different contexts. Moreover the modeling of the eGovSM in a technol- ogy-independent way facilitates system evolution over time as public sector administrative organization, functional divisions as well as legislative regulations evolve continuously.
eGovSM.Replication:.The.Concept.of...
E-Goverment.Service.Marketplace.Network.
The concept of “network of e-government service marketplace” refers to an ensemble of interconnected e-government service marketplace domains, within a country or distributed over several countries. These multiple domains are able to work in a cooperative manner thus providing seamless services to a wider range of citizens. Interconnecting different e- government service marketplace domains allows sharing and integrating the knowledge of each of them, while respecting their autonomy and operational independence. The concept of network of e-government service marketplace represents an interesting solution to respond to the need of providing seamless services at the European level (pan-European services) while at the same time allowing each country to decide about implementation details of the eGovSM concept (for instance, which information the federated identifier should contain, life-events classification, and implementation and possible subscription profiles).
Figure 7. The concept of e-government service marketplace network
Seamless, Ctzen-Orented Servce Delvery As Figure 7 shows, the network of eGovSMs will include all the known eGovSM domains.
Each eGovSM has not to know about all the other domains, it is sufficient that each domain is known for at least another one. When an eGovSM is set up, it has to subscribe to (at least) another one in order to become part of the network.
This way each e-government service domain can be considered as a virtual organization in the grid (Foster, Kesselman, & Tuecke, 2001) domain. A Virtual Organization is defined as a dynamic set of individuals or institutions defined around a set of resource-sharing rules and conditions which share resources in a coordinated, secure, and flexible manner (Joseph
& Fellenstein, 2004). Entities of an eGovSM domain (public administrations and private service providers) share information and services with the e-government service marketplace of that domain according to the sharing rules defined in such a domain (which can be differ- ent from domain to domain). The other domains have neither direct knowledge nor access to these resources and information. They only know about and can refer to the eGovSM of that domain. The concept of network of eGovSM seems to suitable represent an interagency cooperation at European level (see Figure 7), where each country has its own eGovSM platform which with the other service providers (governmental agencies and private busi- nesses) forms the eGovSM domain of such a country. EGovSMs of different countries are part of the whole network and thus collaborate in order to provide pan-European seamless services. Citizens, by interacting only with one of the eGovSM of the network (see Figure 7), can access all the services offered by the whole network. This concept scales at a national level as well. For instance, different regions of the same country can implement their own eGovSM system. In this case each eGovSM domain contains agencies at local and regional levels, has its own, specific sharing rules, and collaborates with the other regional-level eGovSM domains in order to provide seamless services at the national level.