Title:	TOWARDS EFFICIENT AND TRANSPARENT E-GOVERNMENT PROCESSES
Author(s):	Abdelbaset Rabaiah , Eddy Vandijck
ISBN:	978-972-8924-49-2
Editors:	Sandeep Krishnamurthy and Pedro Isaías
Year:	2007
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	E-Government, Process, Rule-based, SOA, Logic Programming
Type:	Short Paper
First Page:	236
Last Page:	240
Language:	English
Cover:
Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is gaining momentum as an architectural model for heterogeneous e-Government systems. With SOA, e-Government is perceived as a collection of Web services. A real-life event (e.g. a newborn) triggers a sequence of a number of services. This sequence is usually part of a process. A process has input requirements and produces a final output (e.g. a printed birth certificate). For a government there is a myriad of processes. Not all services are electronic though. This depends on the maturity of the e-Government endeavour. For all processes, the sequence of services must be fed somehow into the system. This enables the system to discern what services to invoke and what input requirements are needed for each process. Electronic services can be invoked instantly. Traditional ones are flagged to be carried out manually. Processes take the form of if-then scenarios. This paper proposes the use of a rulebased approach to implement processes. As we shall see, this approach eases the maintainability of the plethora of e- Government processes. It does not incur recoding of applications should there be a change to one or more processes. A process sequence is not uniform for the same type of event. Two citizens/customers having the same real-life event can go through different sequences of a process to get the same output. Our rule-based approach can inherently automatically inform the citizen what input requirement is missing and why. It can also inform the citizen why a process sequence is particularly so for his/her case. This raises transparency to a great extent. Our approach is intuitive and natural. It makes it easier for public servants themselves lacking traditional programming skills to update the rules. To validate our approach we have built a prototypical implementation to prove workability.
	Go Back