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As we said in the preface, the eG4M methodology has been applied to eGovernment projects in the Mediterranean area. In this chapter we focus on the data governance part of the methodology that has been applied in the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture, in parallel with running initiatives on the reorganization of databases managed in the different administrative organizational structures of the ministry. The documentation available has been partial and, consequently, the case study has been simplified w.r.t. the real context and in some cases, modified. The reader has to be conscious that the Tunisian agricultural domain has only inspired the case study that, as a consequence, has to be seen as a paradigmatic example of any initiative of integration of databases, in particular in the agricultural domain. In Sect. 13.1 we provide some insight on the organizational structure of the ministry considered. Section 13.2 describes the activities performed, the roles of the different players, and the organization of work. In Sect. 13.3 we introduce the databases considered in the case study and their conceptual description. Following the methodology discussed in Chap. 2, in Sect. 13.5 the repository of the database conceptual schemas is produced. The analysis of the repository for strategic planning of future possible initiatives discussed in Sect. 13.6 concludes the chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter focuses on several initiatives carried out in Europe and in Italy in the last years; such initiatives are analyzed under the socio-economic point of view, providing quantitative measures that are behind the decisions previously described in the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter presents some guidelines on how to specify a new administrative process (composite external service in the terminology of Chap. 10) in the eG4M methodology on the assumption of using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and related engineering approaches, techniques, and tools. In particular, the guidelines address the case in which an external service has been identified as target of the project (cf. Chap. 9) and the realization of such a service requires the coordination of different PAs, which have to offer (or already offer) inter-PA internal services (cf. Chap. 10) to be coordinated. Before moving to the effective realization of the project (out of the scope of this book), a final step of operational planning is needed to analyze and conceptually model the new services and the coordinating process, which serve as technical input for possible tenders aimed at effective realization. Section 11.1 presents the overall description of the guidelines, by introducing the steps to be realized in order to automate the process. Then Sect. 11.2 outlines the modeling tools, i.e., the techniques and the possible software tools that we suggest to use in order to support the managers and system/software engineers during the specification of the process at design-time. Section 11.3 gives some highlights on the important issue of managing legacy systems. Finally, Sect. 11.4 outlines, through a specific case study, how to specify an entire process. This chapter assumes the reference architecture and the eGovernment cooperative support system as presented in Chap. 10, as they are the target deployment environment for the artifacts produced by the guidelines presented here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter presents a possible reference technological architecture for eGovernment projects, based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm and related technologies and approaches. Such a reference architecture leverages the Italian experience called SPCoop (in Italian Sistema Pubblico di Cooperazione, possible English translation as ˵nationwide cooperative system″), which was designed recently and subsequently developed and used in ongoing Italian projects. It is a refinement of the reference architecture introduced in Chap. 9 and introduces technological details and software elements for modern eGovernment infrastructures. In particular, Sect. 10.1 provides some organizational and strategic guidelines that the governments and other political bodies should consider when setting up a reference architecture for eGovernment. Section 10.2 introduces basic concepts and definitions which are useful in the following of the chapter. Section 10.3 provides an overview of the reference architecture, whereas Sects. 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7 provide technical insights on the different elements of the reference architecture. Finally Sect. 10.8 compares the presented architecture with similar initiatives currently undertaken in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceiving ICT projects is a highly creative activity, for which experience of previous projects is needed, together with an in-depth knowledge of available ICTs. However at a macro-level most relevant choices can be conducted and/or understood also by PA managers devoid of a specific skills in ICTs. This characteristic of operational planning is of great relevance in eGovernment decisions, especially when, as frequently occurs, operational planning and design activities are in part outsourced to an external company; also in this case, it is crucial that in the presence of alternatives the final decisions are made by public managers aware of the consequences for the different issues considered in the eG4M-layered model introduced in Chap. 3. In this chapter first we describe in Sect. 9.1 a reference architecture for eGovernment projects; this will be refined from a technological point of view in Chap. 10. Then in Sect. 9.2 we introduce a methodology for the choice of project solutions, based on such reference architecture. Specific phases of the methodology are detailed in Sects. 9.3, 9.4, and 9.5. The running example is used in these sections to explain specific steps and activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter we discuss the step of the methodology which supports the definition of priority services and their quality value targets. As for the overall methodology, the general idea is that the choice should be driven by a clear understanding of [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality is a first-class citizen in eG4M. Users of services do not want to lose time in their interactions with administrations, they do not want to suffer to provide information which is already present in public administration databases and they do not want to be bothered by inefficiencies and errors in administrative processes. Figures say that the time period a company has to wait in Italy to be registered in the official public registry and start to operate is ten times the time needed in Great Britain and France. Yet, time is money, and such inefficiencies deeply influence business development. The same for citizens, who greatly appreciate fast, efficient, proactive and transparent administrations. All the previous aspects are captured by the concept of quality. In eG4M the quality assessment phase aims to identify and measure the most relevant qualities of the different eG4M layers defined in Figure 5.1. Among them, the most important ones are service qualities. Considering only service qualities in the planning activity hides issues that may deeply influence the nature of new projects, since services are produced by processes, that are performed in administrations, whose functions are defined by laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive literature has already been dedicated to the economic benefits of eGovernment and a wide consensus exists over what the key benefits are. A report commissioned by the Dutch presidency of the European Public Administration Network (EPAN), entitled Does eGovernment pay off? [41], identifies seven types of interconnected benefits: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategic planning of initiatives in eGovernment may effectively be performed only when adequate knowledge is available on all the facets introduced in previous chapters. Such knowledge is usually fragmented and dispersed among PA offices and sometimes among PA officers, who seldom document the information related to laws, organization, and other issues. Thus, frequently at the beginning of an eGovernment project a recognition is needed whose goal is to reconstruct the state of the social and information system considered in the project. This is the state reconstruction activity considered in this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategic planning is the most relevant phase of the eGovernment information system life cycle for achieving a clear understanding of the alignment between the political vision, the context of intervention, and the actual ICT goals, architectures, and infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eG4M framework differs from traditional technology-driven approaches to eGovernment, considering both how ICTs affect organizations and how the social context and the organizations influence the use of technologies. Indeed, the conceptual framework underlying the methodology is based mainly on neo-institutionalism [80, 231] and social constructivist approaches to the study of the evolution of technology [30, 171]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data and information are the fundamental resources managed by public administrations to provide services to users. So, the reader should not be surprised that at the beginning of the book we focus on the part of the eG4M methodology that deals with data. To give an example, in the Italian Central Public Administration more than 500 large-sized databases are managed, while in each one of the 21 regions more than 1000 large-sized databases are used. Each one of the above databases has been designed independently from the other by different teams and is updated by different sources and data flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years research on eGovernment has grown rapidly at both the quantitative and qualitative levels [104]. Besides this rapid development both practitioners and scholars have considered the results of solutions and initiatives deployed in the last 10 years in the different countries involved in eGovernment programs, showing that these latter initiatives focused mainly on front-office processes, while actual project efforts aim to re-design and manage back-office processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MANETs (Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks) are an example of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) mobile networks in which security attacks, as black-hole ones, may cause serious dangers to the whole system. The watchdog is a well-known sensor usually adopted for detecting black-holes in such networks, but typical watchdogs are characterized by a relatively high number of false positive and negative cases, which can affect the effectiveness and efficiency to deal with intrusions.This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting black-hole attacks and selfish nodes in mobile P2P networks by using a watchdog sensor and a bayesian filtering. We demonstrate the validity of the approach through testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In complex emergency/disaster scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations collaborate in order to achieve a common goal. The use of smart mobile devices and applications in these scenarios can improve this collaboration dynamically; and poses interesting challenges, such as user΄ mental attention, small screen size, unavailability of reliable network, reduced power, and battery consumption. So, to design and develop interactive applications to be used in mobile and pervasive scenarios requires novel methodologies which combine user-centred design approaches and software engineering approaches tailed for distributed architectures. In this paper, we outline the methodology, adopted successfully in the European WORKPAD project, and describe the work done from getting the requirements to developing the interface of the desired system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the currently ongoing effort for defining and developing a nationwide e-Government Enterprise architecture in order to guarantee a flexible approach for integrated application services, respecting local and central administrations΄ autonomy. An appropriate mixture of organizational initiatives, together ]> with the promulgation of appropriate laws, and the development of innovative technical rules, seems to be the success factor of the approach. From a more technical point of view, the definition (i) of semantically-rich service agreements, (ii) of a repository more complex than a simple UDDI registry, and (iii) of complementary components for dealing with QoS and security, represent the core elements of the infrastructure. Finally the paper discusses the problem related to the monitoring of QoS at the level of the service execution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, process management systems can be used not only in classical business scenarios, but also in highly mobile and dynamic situations, e.g., in supporting operators during emergency management in order to coordinate their activities. In such challenging situations, processes should be adapted, in order to cope with anomalous situations, including connection anomalies and task faults. In this paper, we present a general approach, based on execution monitoring, which is (i) practical, by relying on well-established planning techniques, and (ii) does not require the definition of the adaptation strategy in the process itself (as most of the current approaches do). We prove the correctness and completeness of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the recent initiatives in the context of the Italian e-Leges program, which concerns the exploitation of IT technologies for the life-cycle management of laws and related documents, there is the design and implementation of a cooperative system supporting the processes underlying the drafting and the publication of laws. In this paper we describe the architecture of such a system, referred to as x-Leges, highlighting its peer-to-peer architecture. The x-Leges system guarantees (i) autonomy of all involved organizations, (ii) the reuse of information stored in legacy systems and (iii) efficient process support and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few years the e-Government discipline has attracted a growing attention both from practitioners and academics. Although the high number of action plan, projects and conferences spread all over Europe seems sanctioning the achievement of its maturity stage, several organizational and technological issues related with the modernization of service delivery are still far from a comprehensive solution and still require significant efforts. In this paper, the approach followed and the results so far achieved within the Eu-Publi.com research project, are presented. The discussion on the conceptual and design architectures of the Eu-Publi.com distributed, peer-to-peer system is enriched with results about the experimentation conducted on one of its core components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss an effective technique for automatic service composition and we present the prototype software that implements it. In particular, we characterize the behavior of a service in terms of a finite state machine. In this setting we discuss a technique based on satisfiability in a variant of Propositional Dynamic Logic that solves the automatic composition problem. Specifically, given a client specification of his desired service, i.e., the service he would like to interact with, and a set of available services, our technique synthesizes the orchestration schema of a composite service that uses only the available services and fully realizes the client specification. The developed system is an open-source software tool, called (e-service composer), that implements our composition technique starting from services, each of them described in terms of a WSDL specification and a behavioral description expressed in any language that can capture finite state machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether two web services are compatible depends not only on static properties like the correct typing of their message parameters, but also on their dynamic behaviour. Providing a simple description of the service behaviour based on process-algebraic or automata-based formalisms can help detecting many subtle incompatibilities in their interaction. Moreover, this compatibility checking can to a large extent be automated if we define the notion of compatibility in a sufficiently formal way. Based on a simple behavioural representation, we survey, propose and compare a number of formal definitions of the compatibility notion, and we illustrate them on simple examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In [3] we started studying an advanced form of service composition where available services were modeled as deterministic finite transition systems, describing the possible conversations they can have with clients, and where the client request was itself expressed as a (virtual) service making use of the same alphabet of actions. In [4] we extended our studies by considering the case in which the client request was loosen by allowing don't care nondeterminism in expressing the required target service. In the present paper we complete such a line of investigation, by considering the case in which the available services are only partially controllable and must be modeled as nondeterministic finite transition systems, possibly because of our lack of information on their exact behavior. Notably such services display a "devilish" form of nondeterminism, since we want to model the inability of the orchestrator to actually choose between different executions of the same action. We investigate how to automatically perform the synthesis of the composition under these circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Italy, the need for a better coordination of efforts and investments in the area of government information systems motivated the Italian Parliament in 1993 to create the Authority for Information Technology in the Public Administration. The initiatives undertaken by AIPA include: the definition, design and deployment of a Nationwide Public Administration Network to connect public administrations; and the definition and deployment of a Nationwide Cooperative Information System atop the network to facilitate increased organizational efficiency and effectiveness of administrative actions. In the last few years, some cooperative projects aiming at the development of specific cooperative systems in different areas have been experimenting with different technologies, architectures, and approaches to cooperation. This chapter describes and compares these projects, focusing on the organizational characters of their approaches to cooperation; and it proposes some guidelines for the future Nationwide Cooperative Information Systemof the Italian Public Administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]