A Web Services Based Architecture for Improvement of the Transparency and Decision-making in Public Administration

Transcription

1 A Web Services Based Architecture for Improvement of the Transparency and Decision-making in Public Administration Emil Stănescu, National Institute for R&D in Informatics - ICI, Bucharest

2 Presentation Outlines egovernment and Public Administration issues Goals in designing a transparent system for e-government European and global tendencies in e-government Benefits of using Web-services in public administration Integration of Web-services and legacy applications Services Oriented Architecture and the dynamic e-government system An example of Web-services based Architecture for e-government Web Services security Conclusions

3 egovernment and Public Administration issues The e-government consists in the utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to improve the communication and the efficiency of public services. We can say e-government is to public administration what e-business is to private firms. The e-government objectives are achieved, in principle, by integrated Public Administration Information Systems.

4 Interactive factors in Public Administration Application domains of e-government are: on-line information on-line access to information bases workflow and document management on-line services e-procurement. e-government application levels are: central government local government regional government.

5 Goals in designing a transparent system for e-government Identification of potential users motivation and needs and their user rights Organizing communication with citizens in order to develop their motivation Organizing motivation and training of state employees The necessity of a comprehensive information system for public administration, which to provide efficiently useful information to citizens and firms The possibility of a citizen to have access to verify that the information referring to him is accurate Free access of citizens to any information produced by public administration unless some objective rules state otherwise Keeping the coherence of information, by organizing contents upgrading Keeping of an accurate information, and suitable for the persons who will use it Transparency of the administrative procedures. Government services relevant to a given citizen activity must be available from a single point Development of general interest nomenclatures: basic registers population, enterprises and institutions, streets and roads, ground parcels, buildings, juridical data bank, administrative dictionary economic information systems - taxes and customs, social security, statistics, financial intermediation social information systems - education, instruction, libraries, culture. Development of a reliable communications infrastructure

6 European and global tendencies in e-government eeurope Programmes - eeurope 2005 Action Plan identifies the availability of modern public services as a key target. Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) Program aims the EU administration to support interoperability of back office processes, standardization and the provision of pan- European services. For achieving interoperability, IDA and the European Commission will issue, an agreed interoperability framework to support delivery of pan-european e-government services to citizens and enterprises. Tendencies around the e-government in Europe: Improvement of processes, simplification of policies, and elimination of policies and procedures that do not add value Necessity of systems designing around processes not restricted by organizational boundaries Achievement of the relationship of the citizens with Public Administration, across many administrative units, at local or central level

7 What the Web-services are? Web-services describe a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over an Internet protocol backbone. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the basic language for Web-services and it is used for defining and processing data WSDL (Web Services Description Language) defines Web-services interfaces, data and message types, interaction patterns, and protocol mappings SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) defines an envelope for Web services communication, over HTTP, SMTP etc. protocols, and provides a format for transmitting XML documents over a network and a convention for representing RPC interactions. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) is a Web services registry and discovery mechanism, and is used for storing and categorizing business information and for retrieving Web-services.

8 Benefits of using Web-services in public administration Web-services share business logic, data and processes through an interface used by applications across a network Web-services allow different applications from different sources to communicate with each other, and because all communication is in XML, Web-services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language The user of the public administration services has access to accurate data in real time, indifferent of the source of data or the working place of the user These technologies are great promises for transparency in public administration and leverage the decisional actions But, An architecture based on Web-services is not so simple and is a great challenge for all actors implied in designing and implementing a such system It is a great concern about security of information in these administrative system

9 Web-services communication Web-services standards and technologies improve Internet use by enabling program to program communication using two major types of application interaction patterns: Remote procedure call (online). The RPC-oriented interaction sends a document formatted specifically to be mapped to a single logical program or database Document oriented (batch). A program can communicate with a Web-service sending an XML document created in the form of a message, and it, eventually receives a reply across the network, also in the form of an XML document.

10 Integration of Web-services and legacy applications Web-services can be used for e-government integration, connecting applications run by various departments and public organizations, which cooperate in achievement of some business processes. Actual used solutions link existing, monolithic applications into a common infrastructure, while Web-services are designed to allow a smaller, modular functionality that can be assembled and reassembled into dynamic processes. Most EAI technologies are designed to form discrete, pre-specified connections, while Web-services enable open-ended, one-to-many connections. Web-services can be deployed with incremental cost and effort. An example of a system using XML as a support of communication and a broker for establishing the parts involved in communication.

11 Evolution of systems integration There are emergent Web-services technologies based on XML, which are specialized on certain activity fields such as: ebxml-electronic Business using extensible Markup Language XBRL-eXtensible Business Reporting Language (for financial information) SAML-Security Assertion Markup Language (for encoding the authentication and authorization information in XML format) RSS-Really Simple Syndication (used to list articles on news websites allowing lists outline-structured information) BPML-Business Process Management Language. Evolution of information systems from proprietary, separated systems to more standardized, integrated, based on Web-services systems.

12 Services Oriented Architecture and the dynamic e-government system Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on open standards can be the basis for the enterprise architecture. We must design a targeted environment with different views of a department s architecture: business process, data/information, applications, and technology infrastructure and the relationships among those elements. Principles for implementing SOA: Integration between software resources should be loosely coupled Service interfaces for software resources should be universally published and accessible Program-to-program messaging must be complaint with open Internet standards Applications can be constructed by stitching together core business processes with outsourced software components/resources An increase in the availability of granular software resources should improve the flexibility and personalization of business processes Reusable outsourced software should provide cost and/or productivity efficiencies to service consumers.

13 An example of Web-services based Architecture for e-government 1. Roles and relationships that are met in e-government: citizens, businesses, employees and governmental agencies Possible business roles in an e-government agency Service Requester that has two activities: o Content Aggregation o Service Aggregation Service provider Registry Broker Agregator/Gateway 2. Decomposition of the system in functional units 3. The way that content of information system, is linked to the transaction processing.

14 Web Services security There are two basic ways to implement Web-services security to manage security at the channel level Using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) credentials and SSL certificates Configuring a local certificate server and then sending out certificates to the companies that need to access your Web services Configuring the system to only allow Web services calls over a secure PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) or IPSec (a protocol for negotiating encryption and authentication at the IP level) connection to modify the package to support security Implementing custom SOAP headers that allow embedding of security information into the headers Configuring encryption at the package level that requires the server and client have access to the public and private keys necessary to encrypt and decrypt the secured packages Using Microsoft s Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA), that has the ability to implement custom filters that can validate SOAP requests, perform method level authentication, and even cancel method invocation in cases where the filter detects an anomaly.

15 Conclusions Transparency can be a measure of efficiency of an integrated information system for public administration and of the government itself. The paper outlines the utility of using standardized services for governmental agencies Standardized XML and Web-services based technologies permit an integration of existing applications and a development step-bystep of new services in a public administration agency. Webservices and open standard XML technologies permit a cross departments integration of services The citizens can access the governmental information easier and can use a single point of access for achieving certain official tasks that implies cooperation of two or more governmental agencies The decisions can be better taken having more information, in real time, from different levels as Web/services can offer.