A Formalized Design Method for Building E-Government Architechtures

Abstract

E-government has the main goal of simplifying governmental processes and the interaction between citizens and state organizations. It therefore has to solve the problem of efficient and secure electronic exchange and processing of governmental documents and data across administration domains and boundaries, even crossing country borders. This is a difficult task that imposes a strict set of requirements to the design and modelling of e-government systems and demands the application of standardized architectural frameworks. This paper demonstrates how the ISO/RM-ODP, in combination with the UML notation, supports the de-sign and development of an open distributed e-government system, by addressing these requirements. It further presents a high level case study of how RM-ODP has been applied in the case of the eMayor platform to build a system supporting cross-border transactions between small to medium sized European municipali-ties.