A Pragmatic Approach to Interoperability Practical Implementation Support (IPIS) for e-Government Interoperability

In recent years, e-Government interoperability has been a fascinating research and development area in order to facilitate the seamless exchange of information across government sectors. Many researchers have focused on the designing/adopting of Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIFs) and of Enterprise Architectures (EAs) for implementing the interoperability. However, merely adopting the GIFs and EAs would be insufficient since there have been several strong obstacles and barriers on the road to its achievement in the field of e-Government, such as human, semantic and technical issues. In fact, the successful implementation in government interoperability needs more practical and implementable approach. This paper firstly describes those obstacles and barriers with the solution and guideline to overcome them. We propose towards more practical approach covering three dimensions of interoperability: Business, Semantic, and Technical. The approach, is called ‘Interoperability Practical Implementation Support (IPIS)’, considers the adoption/development of integrated three components: a set of tools, an interoperability repository, and a knowledge based system. The set of tools were designed to supporting the three interoperability perspectives; the tool for modeling/specifying business processes of an organization based on UMM, the semantic tool for standardizing/harmonizing data based on UN/CEFACT CCTS, XML Naming and Design Rules, and Recommend 34, and the technical standards usage support tool. For reusability, the IPIS was designed by considering the adaptation of five interoperability repositories: business process, data standardized set, XML Schema standard, web services and technical standards. The knowledge based system integrates the knowledge resources that consist of a collection of best practice cases, ontological concepts in semantic technologies, and the related frameworks. The paper presents the overall methodology and the architecture of IPIS with the three components. By adopting the IPIS, the design, development and implementation of interoperable systems in e-Government can be practically addressed.