Tailorable E-Government Information Systems

Abstract

Real-world information, knowledge, and procedures after which information systems are modeled are generally of dynamic nature and subject to changes, due to the emergence of new requirements or revisions to initial specifications. E-government information systems (eGIS) present a higher degree of volatility in their environment, since requirement changes may stem from multiple sources, including legislation changes, organizational reforms, end-user needs, interoperability, and distribution concerns, etc. (Jansen, 2004; Prisma Project, 2002; Scholl, Klischewski, & Moon, 2005. To this end, the design and implementation of eGIS must adhere to paradigms and practices that facilitate the accommodation of changes to the eGIS as they occur in the real world. Object-oriented technologies have been extensively used to encapsulate reusable, tailorable software architectures as a collection of collaborating, extensible object classes; however the inherent conflict between software reuse and tailorability has inhibited the development of frameworks and models that would effectively support all requirements exposed by eGIS (Demeyer, Meijler, Nierstrasz, & Steyaert, 1997). The lack of such frameworks has lead to eGIS that cannot easily be adapted to the new requirements, mainly because only the predetermined specifications are taken into account and design decisions are fixed during the implementation phase (Stamoulis, Theotokis, Martakos, & Gyftodimos, 2003). A key issue to a viable solution eGIS modeling is the provision of the ability to multiple public authorities (PAs) to represent different aspects of the same real-world entity, while maintaining at the same time information consistency. Aspect representation is not only limited to data elements that describe the particular entity, but may extend to behavior alterations, when the entity is examined in different contexts. For example, an entity representing the citizen is expected to assume the behavior of beneficiary, when used in the context of the Ministry of Social Security, and the behavior of taxpayer, when accessed from the Ministry of Finance’s eGIS. Distinct behaviors may rely on different data representations and/or respond differently in requests. In this work we present a role-based modeling and implementation framework, which can be used for building eGIS and we argue that this model promotes the tailorability and maintainability of eGIS.