The GEA: Governance Enterprise Architecture-Framework and Models

abStract Departing from the lack of coherent and ready-to-use models and domain descriptions for public administration , we present here our effort to build a set of generic models that serves as a top-level, generic and thus reusable Enterprise Architecture for the overall public administration domain. We have called this set of models Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA). GEA has deliberately remained technology independent and following the Model Driven Architecture approach, GEA constitutes a computationally independent model for the domain. GEA has been derived from multidisciplinary influences and insights and identifies two broad modeling areas, called governance mega-processes: Public Policy Formulation and Service Provision. These two, together with the object versus process perspective, form a four-cell matrix that defines four modeling areas for the GEA models. To populate these cells with models we use a challenging metaphor: we model the society-public administration interaction as a discourse to identify important elements and functions of the governance system. Until now, a large number of services has been modeled using GEA and more recently, an extended modeling effort has started with GEA being chosen for use by a national EU-country project. GEA can be also used as a knowledge infrastructure for applying semantic technologies. In this line, it has been used for creating a public administration specialization of a formal Semantic Web Service ontology, namely WSMO.