Modeling public administration services using the Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA) framework: tutorial proposal for the 9th International Conference on Digital Government Research, Montreal, Canada May 18--21, 2008

ABSTRACT

The aim of this tutorial is to introduce to the audience the Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA), which is an Enterprise Architecture for Public Administration (PA). As such, GEA consists of a set of technology independent models that describe the PA domain.

An Enterprise Architecture is the description of the structure and behavior of an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational subunits, aligned with the organization's core goals and strategic direction. The primary purpose of creating an Enterprise Architecture is to ensure that business strategy of the organization is inline with its IT investments.

Enterprise Architectures can also be extended in the government domain. For example, the U.S. Federal Government uses an Enterprise Architecture to inform the Capital Planning and Investment Control process. The Federal Enterprise Architecture reference models serve as a framework to guide Federal Agencies in the development of their architectures. Other related efforts can be found in the following links:

• USA: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/a-1-fea.html

• New Zealand: http://www.e.govt.nz/standards/fea/

• UK: http://www.cio.gov.uk/documents/cto/pdf/enterprise_ar chitecture_uk.pdf

• Denmark: http://en.itst.dk/architecture-and-standards/oio-architecture-framework

• Open Group: http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/

The tutorial will not remain at the theoretical level. An application that is used to model PA services following the GEA object model for service provision will be presented. Consequently, the tutorial consists of two parts. In the first part, the GEA models will be introduced and discussed. In the second part, the audience under the guidance of the presenters will be given the chance to model PA services using the tool that has been developed.

It is worth mentioning that PA agencies of two EU Member States are already using GEA for modeling their services.

The tutorial will be presented by experts in the area of e-Government, PA domain and service modeling.

REFERENCES

• 1: Peristeras V., Loutas N., Goudos S., Tarabanis K., A Conceptual Analysis of Semantic Conflicts in Pan-European E-Government Services, Journal of Information Science, 2008 (awaiting publication)
• 2: Goudos, S., Peristeras, V., and Tarabanis K. 2007. A Semantic Web Approach for Mapping Citizen Profiles to Public Administration Services based on Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA) model. WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications, ISSN 1790-0832, Vol. 6, No. 6 (June 2007), 1283--1289
• 3: Loutas, N., Goudos, S., Peristeras, V., and Tarabanis K. 2007 A Public Administration Reference Domain Ontology in Web Service Modeling Language. In Proceedings of the 8th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference (dg.o, May 20--23, 2007 Philadelphia, PA, USA), 238--239
• 4: Trochidis, I., Tambouris, E., and Tarabanis, K. 2007. An Ontology for Modeling Life-Events. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2007, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA), IEEE Press, 719--720
• 5: Wang, X., Vitvar, T., Peristeras, V., Mocan, A., Goudos, S., and Tarabanis, K.2007. WSMO-PA: Formal Specification of Public Administration Service Model on Semantic Web Service Ontology. In Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2007), 96
• 6: Peristeras, V. 2006 The Governance Enterprise Architecture - GEA - for Reengineering Public Administration. Doctoral Thesis. University of Macedonia
• 7: Peristeras, V., Goudo, s S., Vitva, r T., Mocan, A., and Tarabanis K. 2006. Towards Semantic Web Services for Public Administration based on the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) and the Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA). In Proceedings of the 5th EGOV International Conference (DEXA 2006, Krakow, Poland).
• 8: Peristeras, V., Tarabanis, K. 2006. Reengineering the public administration modus operandi through the use of reference domain models and Semantic Web Service technologies, In Proceedings of the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium on The Semantic Web meets eGovernment (SWEG, Mar. 27--29, 2006, Stanford University, California, USA)
• 9: Peristeras, V., Tarabanis, K. 2005. The GEA Generic Process Model for Public Administration Service Execution, In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference for Business Information Systems (8th BIS 2005, Poznan, Poland, April 22--24, 2005)
• 10: Peristeras, V., Tarabanis, K. 2004. Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA): Domain Models for e-Governance, In the Proceedings of the 6th ACM International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC'04, Delft, The Netherlands, 2004)
• 11: Peristeras, V., Tarabanis, K. 2004. Advancing the Government Enterprise Architecture - GEA: The Service Execution Object Model. In R. Traunmuller (Ed.): Electronic Government, 3rd International Conference, DEXA (EGOV 2004, Zaragoza, Spain, August 30 -- September 3, 2004) Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3183 Springer 2004, 476--482
• 12: Peristeras V., Tarabanis, K. 2004. The Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA) Object Model. In Maria A. Wimmer (Ed.) Knowledge Management in Electronic Government, 5th IFIP International Working Conference (KMGov 2004, Krems, Austria, May 27--29, 2004) Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3035, Springer 2004, 101--110
• 13: Tarabanis, K., Peristeras, V., and Koumpis, A. 2001 Towards a European Information Architecture for Public Administration: The InfoCitizen project, chapter in "E-work and E-commerce: Novel Solutions and Practices for a Global Networked Economy", vol.2, pp. 1075--1081, B. Stanford-Smith, E. Chiozza (editors), IOS Press, Amsterdam
• 14: Peristeras V., Tarabanis, K., and Fragidis, G. 2001. Building an Enterprise Architecture for Public Administration: A High Level Model for Strategic Planning. In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Information Systems (June 2001, Bled, Slovenia), 987--998
• 15: Peristeras V., Tarabanis, K. 2000. Towards an Enterprise Architecture for Public Administration: A Top Down Approach. European Journal of Information Systems, vol. 9 (Dec. 2000), 252--260.

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
GEA, e-Government, modeling, ontology, public administration, public service, semantic web