A Blackboard-oriented Architecture for e-Government service composition

Costas Vassilakis, Anya Sotiropoulou, Dimitrios Theotokis, Dimitris Gouscos
Proceedings of the IRMA 2005 conference.

Abstract:
A requirement for electronic government initiatives to succeed is the ability to offer a citizen-centric view of the government model. The most widely adopted paradigm supporting this task is the life event model, which combines basic services offered from multiple public authorities into a single, high-level service that corresponds to an event in a citizen's life. This composition is not always straightforward though, because the constituent services are generally developed in an independent fashion, using incompatible input and output formats; moreover the task of synchronising the documents required and produced by the services is tedious to implement and costly to maintain, since changes to requirements and legislation necessitate continuous updates to this scheme. In this paper, we present a blackboard architecture that can be used to deliver life-event oriented services to the citizens. The blackboard proposed for this architecture is an active one, undertaking the tasks of conversions, where appropriate. The blackboard couples a data flow approach with event-condition-action rules to enable dynamic formulation of life-event services, decentralising their development and maintenance.

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