International Journal of Information Technology Convergence and Services (IJITCS) Vol.3, No.3, June 2013
DOI:10.5121/ijitcs.2013.3301 1
A SERVICE ORIENTED DESIGN APPROACH FOR
E-GOVERNANCE SYSTEMS
Rama Krushna Das
1
and Manas Ranjan Patra
2
1
National Informatics Centre, Berhampur, India
ramdash@yahoo.com
2
Department of Computer Science, Berhampur University, India
mrpatra12@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Today electronic Governance (E-governance) is no more a buzzword but a reality as countries all over the
worldwide have shown interest in harnessing governance with state-of-the-art information and
communication technology(ICT), in order to foster better governance. However, the inherent complexities
of E-governance systems remain as a challenge for the architects to develop large scale, distributed, and
interoperable E-governance applications. Besides this the dynamic nature of such applications further
complicates the system design. In this paper, we present a design approach based on the service oriented
paradigm for building E-governance systems. We also formalize concepts like service environment, service
composition, and service collaboration which are some of the important ingredients of our design
approach. In the sequel we highlight the suitability of our approach through some E-governance service
provisioning scenarios.
KEYWORDS
E-governance, Service oriented design, service window, service provisioning
1. INTRODUCTION
Electronic Governance is an application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
for delivering government services, facilitating information exchange among various
stakeholders, and integrating different stand-alone systems with a view to foster better
governance. It is an approach in which the Government and its citizens, businesses, and other
arms of government can transact certain activities using different ICT tools and techniques. The
objective of e-Governance is to make government services available anywhere, anytime to the
citizens, employees, businesses, and other nongovernmental agencies in a convenient, efficient
and transparent manner. It attempts to reach out to the stakeholders, even in remote areas, to
provide information in real time. It tries to enhance operational efficiency and productivity by
operating seamlessly among government departments and concerned agencies. The majority of e-
government initiatives are aiming at improving government processes by cutting process costs,
managing process performance, making strategic connections in government and creating
empowerment within the government architecture. Accordingly, connection between
governments and citizens (and other stakeholders) can be improved [6]. In addition, the
interactions associated with the use of such rich pool of organizational and technological
platforms in e-governance, creates a “task-oriented” forum of engagement between governments
and other stakeholders [3][7][8]. Successful implementation of e-government initiatives depends
not only on the availability of “resources” but most importantly on the adoption of appropriate
implementation-oriented paradigms that describe the growth and evolution of e-governments
International Journal of Information Technology Convergence and Services (IJITCS) Vol.3, No.3, June 2013
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[11]. The following sections of the paper explains about independent servicers and interdependent
services in Government departments and the approach to achieve interoperability, the ability to
handle heterogeneity and scalability.
1.1. Design challenges in E-governance systems
E-governance can be viewed as a digital means of public administration which essentially
facilitates the process of delivery of information and services to the public. Such systems keep
evolving as governments at different levels strive to adopt new governance style for achieving
higher degree of effectiveness. In practice E-governance systems are inherently incremental in
nature and it is hard to foresee all future requirements at a much early stage of development.
Therefore, one really finds it difficult to integrate applications developed by different parties
using varieties of technologies. Typical characteristics of E-governance systems includes, they are
highly interoperable, large-scale, distributed, and heterogeneous systems cutting across
geographical boundaries and administrative domains. Therefore, achieving interoperability
among E-governance applications towards seamless integration and information exchange is of
paramount importance.
The above characteristics of E-governance systems necessitate the choice of a suitable design
approach to build different applications to realize a pragmatic system. Some of the requirements
of the design approach are:
I. the ability to handle heterogeneity so that independently developed systems can be
integrated
II. the ability to achieve interoperability so that applications exchange information seamlessly
III. the ability to handle scalability so that new applications can be added and the system can
support growing number of users
IV. the ability to provide transparency so that complex processing details can be hidden from
the users thereby achieving a higher level of abstraction
2. SERVICE ORIENTED DESIGN PARADIGM
In recent years, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as an architectural style that
advocates reuse and integration of software components irrespective of their location and
implementation. It has been advocated as a suitable paradigm for crafting next-generation large
scale applications. While the SOA approach strongly reinforces well-established, general
software architecture principles such as information hiding, modularization, and separation of
concerns, it also adds additional themes such as service orchestration, service choreography,
service repositories, and concepts like service bus.
Service-orientation is a new way of thinking about software systems that require interoperability.
It helps one to identify certain high-level functionalities that can be deployed as logical units. One
who is interested in availing a specific functionality can possibly do so by requesting the logical
unit through the provided interfaces(s) without bothering about how the functionality is actually
worked out. This feature enables one to provide common interfaces to applications, thereby
enhancing the interoperability and reusability of already available functionalities of applications
running on different platforms. Eventually, this would help in rapid integration of applications
and automate most of the business processes of organizations.
International Journal of Information Technology Convergence and Services (IJITCS) Vol.3, No.3, June 2013
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2.1. The Notion of Service
The notion of service has been defined in different way in the literature. Service has been
described as an encapsulated unit of functionalities [10]. It has also been considered as a logical
manifestation of some physical resources (like programs, databases, devices etc.) grouped as a
process that an organization exposes to the network [9]
. A pragmatic definition of service can be
found in [4] wherein Service is defined as an externally observable behaviour of a
software/hardware component which possibly hides the internal processing details that is required
for the realization of a requested service, and is accessible only through a set of well-defined
interfaces. In the context of web services, a service is viewed as an application or business logic
that can run on a web server by exposing its functional capabilities to clients [2]
. One thing that is
apparent in all these definitions is: service is a conceptual entity that facilitates certain actions in
response to a set of stimuli from its environment. The stimuli can be in the form of messages or
explicit invocation programs that trigger some internal processing at the service provider, which
may not be visible to the service requestor.
Based on the notion of service, software applications can be designed in an implementation
independent manner using the abstract concept of service as the fundamental design entity. Each
service encapsulates certain clearly specified functions while hiding implementation details of the
service under reference. Such service entities can be reused and even combined to build
systems/subsystems to implement higher level services. In this approach software development
begins by analysing an application domain and identifying a set of services to be provisioned.
These services form the fundamental design objects upon which a complete system can be built.
2.2. Service-Oriented Software Engineering
The notion of service is undoubtedly going to play a very important role for organizations that try
to model their applications as a set of service entities providing certain services that can be
consumed by those who request for it. In order to take benefit of the service-oriented paradigm it
is necessary to develop a precise understanding of the related concepts and use them consistently
right from the requirements elicitation phase through the design phase up to implementation. In
other words, there is a need for developing a software engineering approach to specify what
service is and systematically follow a methodology to implement applications based on the
service-oriented concepts. A typical service oriented architecture is presented in the Figure-1.
Figure 1. Service Oriented Architecture: Conceptual Model
International Journal of Information Technology Convergence and Services (IJITCS) Vol.3, No.3, June 2013
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This concept is based on an architectural style that defines an interaction model between three
primary parties: the service provider, who publishes a service description and provides the
implementation for the service, a service consumer, who can either use the uniform resource
identifier (URI) for the service description directly or can find the service description in a service
registry and bind and invoke the service [1].
2.3. Suitability of Service Oriented Design Approach for Developing E-
governance Systems
There is a whole range of E-governance Systems which have been implemented by various
governments all over the world. The most prominent ones can be categorized as G2C, G2E, G2G
and G2B. While G2C refers to a set of services exchanged between government and the citizen,
G2E is set of services exchanged between government and government employees, G2G is a set
of services exchanged between government agencies, and G2B is set of services exchanged
between government and the business community. The common aspect in all these applications is
the delivery of service. Thus, the notion of service is already inherent to the E-governance
Systems. This characteristic of E-governance Systems makes it suitable to be modelled using
service oriented design approach. Moreover, one can extend or change the design objects on
demand. SOA based solutions are composed of reusable services, with well-defined, published
interfaces. It also provides a mechanism to integrate existing legacy applications which is an
important requirement of E-governance Systems.
3. PROPOSED SERVICE ORIENTED DESIGN APPROACH
Considering the nature of E-governance applications, here we have proposed a design approach
that is pragmatic and can address most of the requirements of the current E-governance system
development. Our focus is to develop an approach that is realistic and very closely corresponds
to the manner government services are offered to a wide variety of user groups and accessed by
the citizens. It should also take into account services at different levels of abstraction, in the sense
that certain services can be provided straightway whereas certain other services may require
invocation of other related services in order to provision the requested service. Some of the key
concepts that we employ in our design approach are: the notion of service window, service
composition, service collaboration, and service enactment. Each of these concepts is formalized
in the following sections using the RAISE specification language. The benefit of having such a
formal description in the form of abstract specifications is to provide a precise understanding of
the design concepts which can be systematically concretised to an implementation model.
3.1. Service Types
Services requested by users may require different levels of processing. Depending on the
complexity of processing requirement we categorize services into three different types, namely,
readily available services, composable services, and collaborative services.
Let us consider the following services of different Government departments for the province of
Odisha in India, for explaining service types.
S
0
: Below Poverty Line(BPL) service, provided by Panchayat Raj Department.
S
1
: Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) service, provided by Panchayat Raj Department
S
2
: National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) service, provided by Panchayat Raj
Department
International Journal of Information Technology Convergence and Services (IJITCS) Vol.3, No.3, June 2013
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S
3
: Rashtriya Sawasthya Bima Yojna(RSBY) service, provided by Finance Department
S
4
: Indira Awaas Yojana(IAY) service, provided by Panchayat Raj Department
S
5
: Kutir Jyoti Yojna(KJY) service, provided by Energy Department
S
6
: Mamta Service, provided by Health Department
The use case diagram in Figure-2 below describes the interaction between the user and the
various services described above. The RSBY Service is interdependent on NREGS Service and
BPL Service, whereas KutirJ Service is interdependent on IAY Service and BPL Service. When
the user invokes AAY and Mamata Service they are dependent only on BPL Service.
3.1.1. Readily available services
These are services that do not require complex processing. For instance, a citizen applies for a
residence certificate. Such a request can be serviced after verifying some standard documents and
can be made available to the citizen. The other similar services form Revenue Department are
Nativity Certificate, Income Certificate, Social Status(caste) certificate etc.; from Health
Department Birth Certificate , Death Certificate, Disability Certificate etc.; from Agriculture
Department identification of small farmer and marginal farmer; from Social welfare Department
Old Age Pension, Widow Pension etc.; from Welfare Department Student Scholarship, Free
study books etc.; from Panchayat Raj Department NREGA Job card, BPL card etc.; The
following class diagram in Figure-3 explains the attributes and operations of BPL service.
Figure 3. BPL Service Class Diagram
Figure 2. Use case diagram of the referred services