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The use of Information and Communication Technologies in governmental process and services, often known as e-Government, has gained momentum over the last decade. The demands for the on-line delivery of each time more complex and citizen-centric services and also the need for enabling citizen participation in governmental processes and decisions have created a series of technological challenges. If, on one hand, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) appears as a natural and direct solution for problems like heterogeneity, on the other, issues like how to deal with the dynamism of the processes, the autonomy of the different entities involved and the privacy of data being exchanged still must be treated. We present in this article the first steps towards an effective solution to dynamically compose e-government services. These compositions are mediated through policies which provide different levels of autonomy and privacy in the involved interactions. Semantics are used to help building up the compositions, which are made effective through techniques like Orchestration, Choreography or a combination of both.

This paper presents the approach and some results of the COCONET Roadmap project (1ST-2001–37460). This project has as its objective to prepare a strategy and roadmap for RTD of high industrial impact in the area of context-aware collaborative environments for next generation business networks. The roadmap approach as presented here is based on scenarios for future work and business environments. Major challenges in future RTD are described and the approach is evaluated.