AJAX in Development of Web-Based Architecture for Implementation of E-Governance

This article analyzes the diffusion of a Web technology named AJAX in facilitating e-government architecture and enhancing its potential by enablement of modern Web features as democracy and collaboration. Flexibility needed for free flow of interactive collaboration, compatibility, and robustness is treated as vital in the chapter. Major enterprises that have created landmarks in terms of participation of individuals and enterprises, along with contemporary Web technologies, are also analyzed to consolidate priority of technologies befitting robust and sustainable Web architecture. Emphasis is on the point that a proper collaboration among private, public, and government entities can only be achieved by proper information dissemination and acceptance of competent Web technologies, AJAX being one of them. Features of AJAX such as sectional processing ability, speed, bridging, portability, and compatibility are viewed with criticality for practical establishment.

In-Stream Data Processing for Tactical Environments

Data dissemination and information management technologies for tactical environments are quickly becoming major areas of research for both military and civilian applications. Critical to the problem is the need for fully distributed information management technologies that are efficient, adaptive and resilient. In this paper, we introduce and discuss a new strategy for tactical data dissemination and processing based on distributed online learning. Starting from a formal description of the problem we introduce our proposed solution and its theoretical properties. We also present and discuss a number of simulation experiments for different data dissemination scenarios, and conclude the work with a discussion on how such techniques may be applied to critical e-government environments under different assumptions of service availability and information release policies.

Users' Acceptance of E-Government

The study seeks to highlight the key variables affecting usage of e-government by internal users of Indian Central Excise. An e-government acceptance model is developed and empirically tested using the 163 usable questionnaire responses from internal users of the Indian Central Excise. A priority of the variables is set by calculating the “total effect” of each variable on “intention to use e-government.” Further, the “total effect” is compared with “ratio of acceptance” and clear recommendations for the Central Excise are generated for increasing the usage of e-government among it users. The model developed here can be applied in other similar e-government projects to test the users’ intention to accept the system.

Analyst-Ready Large Scale Real Time Information Retrieval Tool for E-Governance

With the proliferation of the Internet and rapid development of information and communication infrastructure, E-governance has become a viable option for effective deployment of government services and programs. Areas of E-governance such as Homeland security and disaster relief have to deal with vast amounts of dynamic heterogeneous data. Providing rapid real-time search capabilities for such databases/sources is a challenge. Intelligent Foraging, Gathering, and Matching (I-FGM) is an established framework developed to assist analysts to find information quickly and effectively by incrementally collecting, processing and matching information nuggets. This framework has previously been used to develop a distributed, free text information retrieval application. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive solution for the E-GOV analyst by extending the I-FGM framework to image collections and creating a “live” version of I-FGM deployable for real-world use. We present a Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technique that incrementally processes the images, extracts low-level features and map them to higher level concepts. Our empirical evaluation of the algorithm shows that our approach performs competitively compared to some existing approaches in terms of retrieving relevant images while offering the speed advantages of a distributed and incremental process, and unified framework for both text and images. We describe our production level prototype that has a sophisticated user interface which can also deal with multiple queries from multiple users. The interface provides real-time updating of the search results and provides “under the hood” details of I-FGM processes as the queries are being processed.

A Multi-Agent Service Oriented Modeling of E-Government Initiatives

The recent economic, organizational and technological transformations are motivating developing countries to adopt electronic government applications. The main objective of the e-government project in Sudan is “to achieve a society based on a strong base of industry knowledge in which all segments of the media access to information that leads to the distribution, publication and use of information as widely as a whole contributes to the achievement of economic growth, increase employment and raise the rates and quality of production in all sectors and poverty eradication. However, the project has been based on the use of a client-server architecture that has many limitations. This chapter provides a multiagent service oriented architecture for the implementation of the project based on a thorough review of project documents and implementation reports.

Engaging the Community Through E-Democracy in South Australia

This chapter examines the spread of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in South Australia. It starts by assessing South Australia’s leading role in the adoption of democratic reforms in the nineteenth century. It then suggests that there is not the same enthusiasm for the more contemporary reforms found in the implementation of e-democracy. The chapter draws from an appraisal of internet based initiatives by government, not for profit and private agencies and sets these against best practice models for community engagement. Based on this research it concludes that there is little originality and initiative in the formal State Government sites and that there is little designed to foster e-democracy. What innovation there is can be found in more local and specific community based applications of ICT.

Australia Local Government and E-Governance

This chapter analyses local government’s response to the pressure to modernise its structures through its use of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) to execute its broad range of tasks. The chapter begins by discussing Chadwick and May’s (2003) three basic models of e-government; managerial, consultative and participatory. Using data collected from an analysis of 658 local government websites in Australia together with existing survey research the chapter then analyses the extent to which local government sites fit into the three models. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the issues and problems faced by local government in its attempt to develop e-governance as both an extension of administrative as well as democratic functions.

E-Government Implementation

As e-government becomes increasingly pervasive in modern public administrative management, its influence on organizations and individuals has become hard to ignore. It is therefore timely and relevant to examine e-governance—the fundamental mission of e-government. By adopting a stakeholder perspective and coming from the strategic orientation of control and collaboration management philosophy, this study approaches the topic of e-governance in e-government from the three critical aspects of stakeholder management: (1) identification of stakeholders, (2) recognition of differing interests among stakeholders, and (3) how an organization caters to and furthers these interests. Findings from the case study allow us to identify four important groups of stakeholders known as the Engineers, Dissidents, Seasoners, and Skeptics who possess vastly different characteristics and varying levels of acceptance of and commitment towards the e-filing paradigm. Accordingly, four corresponding management strategies with varying degrees of collaboration and control mechanisms are devised in the bid to align these stakeholder interests such that their participation in e-government can be leveraged by public organizations to achieve competitive advantage.

A Comprehensive Framework Towards Information Sharing Between Government Agencies

Recently, there has been increased interest in sharing digitized information between government agencies, with the goals of improving security, reducing costs, and offering better quality service to users of government services. The bulk of previous work in interagency information sharing has focused largely on the sharing of structured information among heterogeneous data sources, whereas government agencies need to share data with varying degrees of structure ranging from free text documents to relational data. In this work, we explore the different technologies available to share information. Specifically, our framework discusses the optional data storage mechanisms required to support a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). We compare XML document, free text search engine, and relational database technologies and analyze the pros and cons of each approach. We explore these options along the dimensions of information definition, information storage, the access to this information, and finally the maintenance of shared information.

Electronic Government

In this chapter we provide an overview of electronic government as it pertains to national security and defense within the Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We discuss the adoption of web services and service oriented architectures to aid in information sharing and reduction of Information Technology (IT) costs. We also discuss the networks on which services and resources are being deployed and explain the efforts being made to manage the infrastructure of available services. This chapter provides an overview of e-government for national security and defense and provides insight to current initiatives and future directions.