1. CWA Part 0 - Introduction

Contents

  1. CWA Part 0 - Introduction
    1. Overall outline
    2. Rationale of the project
      1. General
      2. Current Obstacles to Accessing eGovernment Resources
    3. Policy relevance
    4. Target impact and Membership
    5. Results
    6. Architectural overview
    7. Structure of the CWA
      1. CWA Part 0: Introduction
      2. CWA Part 1a: An approach to resource sharing
      3. CWA Part 1b: Protocol for the Syndication of Service Descriptions
      4. CWA Part 2: Federated Terminological Resources
      5. CWA Part 3: Establishment of a set of Soft Cultural Elements
      6. CWA Part 4: Evaluation and Recommendations
    8. Contributors
    9. Glossary
    10. References

1.1. Overall outline

The CEN/ISSS eGov-Share Workshop aims to define and build a number of tools that can be used to share and federate information about eGovernment resource themselves, with the overall objective to facilitate access to and hence (re-)use of eGovernment resources. These tools include mechanisms to exchange descriptions of eGovernment resources, additional mechanisms to handle terminologies and vocabularies used in describing these resources as well as issues related to cultural diversity in understanding information.

The work of the eGov-Share Workshop is inspired by earlier work done in the CEN/ISSS eGovernment Focus Group in 2006-2007. The earlier work aimed to identify and describe standards being used in eGovernment and to set up a demonstrator where these standards could be registered.

eGovernment resources are all types of resources published electronically under the responsibility of public authorities. They comprise amongst others:

Some of these resources can be both for human and for machine consumption. Both usages have their own distinct requirements. Both have their own cultural diversity issues and for both clean terminology e.g. to delineate fields of application is paramount.

The work in the eGov-Share Workshop takes place in the usual context of Workshop Procedures laid out by the CEN/ISSS rules. The eGov-Share secretariat manages the business plan and operational rules specific for Workshop as presented at the kick-off meeting for Workshop approval. At its kick-off meeting the Workshop also selected a Workshop chair and a Workshop Steering Committee consisting of three Workshop members, the chair, the secretariat and a representative from CEN Central Secretariat. This Steering Committee has assisted the chairman and secretariat in selecting the Project Team of experts that is performing the work and is responsible for the submission of a number of versions of the resulting CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) that is contained in the parts of the current document.

1.2. Rationale of the project

1.2.1. General

It is often considered axiomatic that eGovernment will be a major cost saver for governments across Europe as well as a key competitive factor. Less obvious is how existing eGovernment resources — services, documentation, standards, processes etc. — can be used and re-used with maximum benefit for the common good, particularly across politico-administrative boundaries. Discovery of and access to services is often difficult, often for sheer lack of classification, correct terminology or missing descriptions of services (in a wide sense), but also for lack of language or other semiotic skills, or lack of customer collaboration on exchanges. These problems affect exchanges of concepts and information between governments and between governments and citizens/businesses.

1.2.2. Current Obstacles to Accessing eGovernment Resources

Current obstacles to widespread access to and reuse of eGovernment resources include:

This Workshop will bundle and enhance existing activities in these areas and formulate recommendations on each of these areas in one multi-part CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA).

1.3. Policy relevance

Providing guidelines and tools to support cross-border and cross-agency interoperability is one of the policy priorities of the IDABC program. To implement the policy, a European Semantic Interoperability Centre (SEMIC.EU) was established in 2007. This centre promotes "the reuse of syntactic (e.g. XML schemas) and semantic assets (e.g. ontologies) needed for semantic interoperability".

The work in the eGov-Share Workshop intends to provide a practical way to exchange information between public sector organisations. The tools, ontology and protocol specifications will be contributed to the asset repository that SEMIC.EU is building and maintaining.

This also fits the statement made in the last eGovernment Ministerial Declaration (Manchester, 2005) that the Ministers agree "to work together and with the European Commission to share existing tools, common specifications, standards and solutions more effectively and to encourage collaborative development of solutions where necessary" and by European Information Society Commissioner, Viviane Reding who has stated, regarding developments in eGovernment services that: "...there is a lot of activity, but also a lot of duplication of effort. Many issues, such as identity management and interoperability of systems, are common problems. We can tackle these issues more efficiently together than alone..."

1.4. Target impact and Membership

The main target groups for this work are managers and information specialists involved in eGovernment activities on all levels (European, national, regional, local). They are involved as both users and contributors of the collection of descriptions of eGovernment resources that can be built on the basis of the specifications resulting from this Workshop.

Being a practical activity, the Workshop particularly aims at those managers and information specialists who are currently actively involved in development of eGovernment services. Two Open meetings are planned that will aim to involve a larger group of people who are not directly involved at this point it time but may be in the future, or are working in other areas (e.g. eBusiness) that have an interest in developments in eGovernment.

1.5. Results

This Workshop creates specifications that are published as a multi-part CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA), including:

These are specified in a way that makes eGovernment resources sharing a realistic objective, at the same time respecting each individual administration's autonomy. These eGovernment resources should meet the cultural and linguistic requirements of both human consumers and automated systems (for also systems embody specific local requirements). Such information must and will be captured in a structured way as one eGovernment resource that implementers can refer to if desired. Concrete implementation guidelines with regards to these requirements are out of scope of this Workshop, however.

The Workshop results thus constitute a basis for services that allow both public officials and citizens/businesses to locate and access relevant eGovernment resources more easily, irrespective of their location or of the ownership of the resources.

1.6. Architectural overview

The diagram above sketches the relationships between the various areas of work covered in the CWA.

A first important issue to note is that this CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) does not attempt to achieve standardization of local, regional or national approaches to resource description and management of resources and associated information and services, such as asset lists or search facilities. The basic consideration is that those local, regional and national approaches continue to be the responsibility of the local, regional and national administrations, and that standardization of those approaches would not be a realistic aim. Rather, the work aims at providing tools for exchange of information about eGovernment resources held and managed in many locations around Europe and possibly even beyond.

The work in the eGov-Share Workshop does also not aim to provide a solution based on distributed searching, e.g. allowing a user to search concurrently in multiple distributed repositories. Instead, the approach described in this CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) is based on resource federation. This means that if an organisation A decides that it would be interesting for its user base to be able to find information held and managed by organization B, it then 'harvests' the information that is made available from the repository of organization B and includes that information in its own repository. Users of organisation A can then use their local search facilities to also find information about resources held by organization B. Organization B, it needs to be noted, decides which part of the information in its repository it makes available for harvesting by others.

This CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) supposes that the relationship between organization A and organization B is established outside of the tools and approaches described in this CWA, and also does not describe how repositories are discovered. This CWA describes a mechanism to exchange information between two organizations that have agreed to co-operate in this way.

The architectural diagram, therefore includes two Repositories of eGovernment-related information, with their associated Registries that constitute the mechanisms of how this information is exposed to the outside world. These Registries need to be mapped to the general ontology of the Shared Reference Model described in CWA Part 1a.

The mechanism by which the information conformant to the Shared Reference Model is exchanged between two communication partners is described in CWA Part 1b that specifies the notification and exchange protocol based on an ATOM-based transport layer.

In doing the mapping between the information exposed by Registry 1, specific attention needs to be given to the 'translation' of specific terminologies being used in specific eGovernment environments. Workpackage 2 and CWA Part 2 describes mechanisms by which this terminology can be translated so the results make sense to both communication partners.

A further issue that is being addressed by the CWA is the different way that information is interpreted in different cultural environments (countries, languages). Workpackage 3 and CWA Part 3 propose an approach to describing these so-called soft cultural elements in such a way that they can be integrated with the general ontology defined in CWA Part 1a.

Finally, the testing and evaluation of the tools and approaches proposed by the Workshop is covered by Workpackage 4 and CWA Part 4. This also includes a set of recommendations for the operational phase of the approach described and for further work that could be considered to improve and enhance the approaches for the future.

1.7. Structure of the CWA

This CWA is structured in 5 parts with Part 1 made op of two subparts. The titles and short outlines of the parts are included below. This structure is slightly different from the structure originally envisaged in the business plan of the Workshop. After discussion at the Workshop meeting on 12 June 2008, the Steering Committee proposed to change the structure if the CWA to focus on an "output perspective" (what result would help the audience most) without changing the content agreed by the Workshop in the business plan. This proposal was accepted by the Workshop as the basis for the structure presented below.

1.7.1. CWA Part 0: Introduction

This part describes the overall objectives and approach for the work and provides a glossary and links that are relevant for the understanding of the other parts of the CWA. This part is intended for anyone who wants to get information on the rationale and objectives of the work and any user of one of the other parts of the CWA to get an overview of the relationships of the various aspects of the work.

1.7.2. CWA Part 1a: An approach to resource sharing

This part describes the rationale for and benefits of resource sharing and presents a number of use cases, the architectural framework for this work and guidelines for resource sharing. It then presents the ontology for the description of eGovernment resources and the metadata schema that is used in the work, and deployment guidelines for the tools developed as a reference implementation. This part is aimed at decision makers, eGovernment managers, implementers and information modelling experts.

1.7.3. CWA Part 1b: Protocol for the Syndication of Service Descriptions

This part describes the protocol to be used for the exchange of information about eGovernment resources, with examples of its usage and test cases for the implementation of the protocol. This part primarily addresses architects and implementers of eGovernment-oriented information systems, especially registries. It contents is equally pertinent for implementers of registries and data federation solutions in other domains.

1.7.4. CWA Part 2: Federated Terminological Resources

This part addresses the interoperability issues related to terminology that occur when different authorities use different terms to describe resources, different interfaces to publish them and different ways of semantics to understand and interpret data that has been exchanged. In addition to using different terms for the same service, there is also the possibility that terms that are not 100% identical but only similar or overlapping in their meaning. Based on the specification of a data model, this part describes the realisation and integration of the Terminological Resource Network with a hands-on description of instances of terminological resources and their relationship with real-world examples. It also also contains the description on how existing terminological data sources may be included, especially ebXML RR systems as defined in the ADNOM CWA. A demonstrator will be included in the reference implementation that is the result of the work by the Project Team.

1.7.5. CWA Part 3: Establishment of a set of Soft Cultural Elements

This part specifies the structure for the formalized description of cultural elements and its integration with the general ontology of part 1 and an initial taxonomy of soft cultural elements capturing the ten elements that are identified as the most urgent ones. This part is elaborated in close collaboration with the Unicode Consortium, notably with the TC on the Common Locale Data Repository, and in continuous discussions with LISA. This part is relevant for architects of eGovernment information systems as well as experts in software localization and internationalization across domains.

1.7.6. CWA Part 4: Evaluation and Recommendations

This part documents the test data registration, analysing the pros and cons of the registration process. It will also propose an approach for ensuring continuous operation and contain a report on findings and outcomes of the workshop with recommendations and a roadmap for the future. As such, this part is intended for specifically those members of the audience of managers of eGovernment resources and repositories who want to know how the tools delivered by the Workshop can be used and how they can be developed and maintained in the future.

1.8. Contributors

The core Project Team responsible for the production of the various parts of the CWA are:

The Project team received advice from the Steering Committee with members:

1.9. Glossary

In a next version of the CWA, a list of terms and abbreviations used in the CWA will be included here.

1.10. References

In a next version of the CWA, a list of relevant documentation and sources used in the context of the CWA will be included here.

egovpt_fg: CWA Part 0 (last edited 2008-08-29 09:31:49 by MakxDekkers)