Equipping the Enterprise Interoperability Problem Solver

The maturity of the enterprise interoperability field does not match the importance attached to it by many, both in the public as well as the private community. A host of models, paradigms, designs, standards, methods, and instruments seems to be available, but many of them are only used in rather small circles. Also, they constitute a poorly structured field, divided along disciplinary boundaries and filled with competition and incompatibilities, which is therefore difficult to set foot in by enterprise interoperability problem owners. This chapter proposes a scope and structure of an enterprise interoperability profession by taking the enterprise interface as the pivotal concept. It then defines four perspectives on such interfaces: design, transaction, implementation, and suprastructure. These four perspectives each house a range of issues, which can be tackled by the enterprise interoperability professional by using models and instruments. This chapter identifies and classifies such models and instruments and sketches how a collection of these can be implemented and used.

Measuring the Benefit of Interoperability

Governments started e-government strategies to renew the public sector and eliminate existing bureaucracy and therefore reduce costs. Interoperability appears as the mean for accomplishing the interlinking of information systems, applications and ways of working not only within governments but also in their interaction with the administration, enterprises and public sector. The main source of administration costs is the traditional use of paper as the linkage element between public agencies. Integrated electronic processes between public agencies can be the solution to reduce these costs and create a more efficient public sector. This paper proposes an approach for measuring the benefit of incorporating interoperability in e-government. This approach is based on the identification and analysis of certain processes (business process modelling) and on the activity based costing method. In particular, this approach concerns the measuring of benefit of applying interoperability in e-government services.

Semantic Services for Business Documents Reconciliation

This chapter intends to report about the ongoing activities in the COIN European project concerning semantic reconciliation of business documents for supporting interoperability of software applications in e-government and e-business scenarios. The approach is based on a reference ontology against which business documents are mapped through semantic annotation and building of reconciliation rules. The work starts from the semantic reconciliation suite developed in the ATHENA1 European project and intends to improve the suite by providing an automatic support to the definition of mappings. In order to do that, three automatic services have been developed: (1) semantic annotation of business documents; (2) definition of transformation rules; (3) rules optimization and fusion. A running example concerning the exchange of a legal verification document in a scenario of cross border cooperation between European chambers of commerce will guide through the description of the services.

The Challenges of Implementing e-Government Interoperability in Thailand

In November 2006, Thai Government announced Thailand electronic government interoperability framework (TH e-GIF) as a collection of technical standards, methodologies, guidelines and policies to enable electronic data exchange across government agencies. The first challenging project was to implement the semantic interoperability for exchanging official electronic letters across 29 government agencies using 15 heterogeneous software systems developed by different vendors. To achieve the project goal, a holistic approach was designed in which many policy-makers and practitioners had to involve in collaborative activities. This chapter explores the approach in details. It includes the process of data harmonization, modeling and standardizations using a number of UN/CEFACT specifications, UMM, CCTS and XML NDR, and other international standards. From this project the first national XML schema standard was produced. This chapter also introduces a methodology of extending the interoperability to legacy systems based on web services technology. Finally, it describes risk managements with the key success factors for the electronic interoperability development in Thailand.

Towards a Scientific Foundation for Interoperability

As a term used to denote the ability of defence systems to collaborate, interoperability has emerged as one of the most important capacities of information systems, during the last 30 years. Being important at organizational, process and semantic levels, interoperability soon became a key characteristic of information systems and services, both in the private and public sector. As a crucial prerequisite for automated process execution leading to “one-stop” electronic services and promising dramatic increase in productivity for enterprises of any size, interoperability has been systematically sought after, since the dawn of the 21st century: standardization frameworks, guidelines at enterprise level, data schemas and techniques to tackle the problem of non-communicating systems or organisations started to appear. In parallel, most international software, hardware and service vendors created their own strategies for achieving the goal of open, collaborative, loosely coupled systems and components. This chapter goes beyond the presentation of the main milestones in this fascinating quest for collaboration between people, systems and information: it attempts to describe how this new interdisciplinary research area can transform into a vibrant scientific domain, by applying the necessary method and tools. To achieve that, the chapter presents the ingredients of this new domain, proposes its needed formal and systematic tools, explores its relation with neighbouring scientific domains and finally prescribes the next steps for achieving the thrilling goal of laying the foundations of a new science.

Knowledge Interoperability of Parliaments’ and Government Agencies’ Information Systems

There is a growing awareness that the interoperability among Government Agencies’ information systems (IS) is of critical importance for the development of e-government and the improvement of government efficiency and effectiveness. However, most of the IS interoperability research and practice in government has been focused on the operational level, aiming mainly to enable the delivery of integrated electronic services involving several Government Agencies, or to support the co-operation among Government Agencies from the same or even different countries. This chapter is dealing with knowledge-level interoperability, aiming to support higher knowledge-intensive tasks of government, such as the formulation of legislation and public policy. In particular, it presents an ontology-based methodology for achieving knowledge interoperability of IS of Parliaments and Government Agencies, so that they can exchange public policy related knowledge produced in the various stages of the legislation process. It is based on the common use by Parliaments of the ontology of the ‘Issue-Based Information Systems’ (IBIS) framework for constructing representations of this knowledge. An application of the proposed methodology is presented, followed by an evaluation, which results in an enrichment of the above ontology that enables a better representation of the public policy related knowledge produced in the legislation process, providing a ‘higher quality’ of knowledge interoperability. Finally a generalization of this methodology is formulated, which can be used for achieving knowledge interoperability among IS of other types of Government Agencies.

National Interoperability Approach for Social Services Information Management in Finland

In this chapter, the authors introduce and discuss the approach for defining IT interoperability solutions on national level for social services in Finland. Goals and phases of the national initiative are presented, and various projects related to the transformation and unification of various aspects of supporting social services via interoperability solutions are illustrated. In addition, the path from general e-Government requirements through the definition of domain-specific information and documentation down to the development of technology solutions and dissemination plan is presented. The authors highlight several success factors and issues for the organization of multipartite collaboration, the specification of architectural and information management approach, the selection and definition of technology standards to support the domain-specific information needs and specifications and strategic alternatives for central information repositories.

Advancing Interoperability for Agile Cross-Organisational Collaboration

The level of adoption of advanced integration technologies, by private and public organizations, in support of their electronic collaborative business transactions is still relatively low, especially among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. Current solutions often lack a common understanding of the underlying business processes, document semantics and business rules that are imposed on them in different sectors and countries. Furthermore, software applications are not able to cope with the huge variety of differentiation in process and document semantics, stemming from the highly diverse requirements of the stakeholders. This study presents a comprehensive Model-Driven Architecture for enabling agile cross-organisational collaboration, in an international context, by integrating business and legal rules in private and collaborative processes, business documents and their resulting service orchestrations. The resulting framework, that was mostly developed and applied in the course of the EU-funded research project GENESIS, ranges from graphical process and data models and declarative rule structures to the technical specification of a hybrid software architecture for integrating rule with process and data models.

Design and Standardisation of Core Directories for e-Government

Core Directories are content infrastructure elements for interoperable use in service oriented architectures. They capsulate basic information to a generic structure offering easy access and transparency. The design and research activities focused on specification, a generic approach, globally unique identification of objects and development of an example application. Moreover, requirements and advantages of the concept were discussed and directed to information management issues. Key objective is the modernisation of the information technology used in and between administrations. The interdisciplinary approach is a challenge for the constitution of next generation e-Government networks. The chapter describes the strategic and operative standardisation activities, the concept of Core Directories and the example application service responsibility finder. Furthermore, an outlook for some research activities and projects on this topic is given.

Interoperability

The EU Services Directive (EU-SD), which was passed in December 2006, should simplify access to the services market in all Member States of the European Union and eliminate bureaucratic barriers for Service Providers. This chapter presents an overview of the major functional components and processes that are necessary to implement and run the EU-SD between all stakeholders such as Service Providers, newly introduced Points of Single Contact and Responsible Public Authorities, based on a general framework for federated enterprise SOA. Especially in Germany, consisting of federated and autonomous federal states, but equally between different Member States, interoperability between different components is one of the major challenges of the EU-SD. This chapter elaborates on the interoperability aspect of data/document exchange between the stakeholders, using a secure “call by reference” concept that is implemented by an Electronic Safe, together with appropriate concepts for identity and access management.