Costas Vassilakis, George Lepouras, Akrivi Katifori
Information and Software Technology, Volume 51, Issue 2 (February 2009), Pages 325-336

Abstract
Since the beginning of the electronic era, public administrations and enterprises have been developing services, through which citizens, businesses and customers can conduct their transactions with the offering entity. Each electronic service contains a substantial amount of knowledge in the form help texts, rules of use or legislation excerpts, examples, validation checks etc. This knowledge has been extracted from domain experts when the services were developed, especially in the phases of analysis and design and was subsequently translated into software. In the latter format though, knowledge cannot be readily used in organizational processes, such as knowledge sharing and development of new services. In this paper, we present an approach for reverse engineering electronic services, in order to create knowledge items of high levels of abstraction, which can be used in knowledge sharing environments as well as in service development platforms. The proposed approach has been implemented and configured to generate artifacts for the SmartGov service development platform. Finally, an evaluation of the proposed approach is presented to assess its efficiency regarding various aspects of the reverse engineering process.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

D. Gouscos, S. Rouvas, C. Vassilakis and P. Georgiadis
Proceedings of the OOIS 2002 conference, pp. 19-30.

Abstract
Although electronic transaction services are considered to be a necessity for e-government, it has not been possible insofar to unleash their full potential. E-forms are central to the development of e-government, being a basic means for implementing the majority of the public services considered as required for local and central public administration authorities. In this paper, we present an object-oriented model for e-form-based administrative services, which spans the e-service lifecycle, including development, deployment and use by enterprises and citizens, data collection and communication with legacy information systems. The proposed approach encompasses semantic, structural and active aspects of e-forms, providing thus an inclusive framework for modelling electronic services.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Costas Vassilakis, George Lepouras, Constantin Halatsis and Tomas Pariente Lobo
Electronic Government vol. 2 no 1, 2005.

Abstract:
With the need for electronic services to be developed and deployed more and more rapidly, it is imperative that concrete models of electronic services are developed, to facilitate systematic work of electronic service stakeholders, concrete semantics and coherent representations across services developed within an organisation. Using the XML language to develop such a model, offers a number of additional advantages, such as rich semantics, facilitation of data interchange, extensibility, high abstraction levels and possibility for mechanical processing. In this paper we present the design aspects of an XML model for electronic services, which has been used for building a repository of interlinked elements representing e-services. A web-based interface for the management of this repository and a tool for automatically compiling e-service descriptions into executable images have been developed alongside. The model has been evaluated by a mixture of electronic service stakeholders, and the results of this evaluation are also presented.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Costas Vassilakis, George Lepouras, Stathis Rouvas and Panagiotis Georgiadis
International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2005.

Abstract:
On their route to the electronic era, organisations, release on the web more and more complex form-based services, which require users to enter numerous data items interrelated by business rules. In such a context, it is crucial to provide optimal form layouts, in order to present the service users with interfaces that facilitate their work. This paper presents an integrated environment, which exploits data item interrelations manifested by the business rules (or validation checks) to optimise the layout of the web forms comprising a complex service. The approach is validated through its application on a tax return form e-service.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Costas Vassilakis, George Lepouras, Stathis Rouvas, Panagiotis Georgiadis
Proceedings of the CAiSE 2003 Forum, pp. 149-152.

Abstract:
Transaction services offered by public authorities vary from simple forms with few fields to multi-form compound documents with hundreds of input areas. In the latter case, field placement within forms is of particular importance for facilitating the filling and error correction processes. In this paper we present an approach to improving the form layout by exploiting validation checks that are usually associated with electronic forms, as well as semantic information that may be attached to form fields by designers.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Ontology for e-Government public services
Costas Vassilakis, George Lepouras

Encyclopedia of E-Commerce, E-Government and Mobile Commerce, 2006

Abstract:
In this work, the usage of ontologies for meeting requirements related to e-service composition, e-service cataloguing, change management and administrative responsibility is examined. An ontology for e-government services is presented, covering various aspects of services, including administrative responsibility, meta-data, involved documents and legislation. Both the development and usage phase of the ontology are covered and directions for further exploitation of the potential offered by the ontological representation are given.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Costas Vassilakis, George Lepouras, Akrivi Katifori
Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2006)

Abstract
Although electronic transaction services are considered to be a necessity for e-government, it has not been possible insofar to unleash their full potential. E-forms are central to the development of e-government, being a basic means for implementing the majority of the public services considered as required for local and central public administration authorities. In this paper, we present an object-oriented model for e-form-based administrative services, which spans the e-service lifecycle, including development, deployment and use by enterprises and citizens, data collection and communication with legacy information systems. The proposed approach encompasses semantic, structural and active aspects of e-forms, providing thus an inclusive framework for modelling electronic services.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.