E-GOVERNMENT AND GRID COMPUTING

Potentials and Challenges towards Citizen-Centric Services

Ivo J. Garcia dos Santos and Edmundo R. Mauro Madeira

Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), P.O. Box 6176, Campinas SP, Brazil

Keywords:

e-Government, Grid Computing, Web Services, Middleware.

Abstract:

The demands for integrated and efﬁcient public services have increased worldwide over the recent years, due

mainly to the proliferation of the Information and Communication Technologies. In order to develop these

new e-Government applications, many challenges are being faced, including higher interoperability claims,

scalability and security issues. Grid computing can be considered an interesting middleware solution for

supporting e-Government thanks to its high computation and massive storage capabilities added to its recent

convergence towards service-orientation. This position paper intends to investigate the state of the art and

the challenges concerning the use of Grid technologies as a support platform for Citizen-centric Services and

Applications.

1 INTRODUCTION

An increasing demand for the delivery of integrated

and efﬁcient public services has been observed world-

wide over the recent years and applications in the area

of e-Government, e-Democracy and e-Participation

are gaining momentum. A recent UN (United Na-

tions) report stated that the “strategic and meaning-

ful application of Information and Communication

Technologies for the purpose of improving the efﬁ-

ciency, transparency, accountability and accessibil-

ity of government is possible if the ultimate objec-

tive of e-government is to promote social inclusion”

(Ahmed, 2006).

Grid computing intends to provide a vehicle for

high computation and massive storage, and no single

application domain can be excluded from its potential

beneﬁts (Maad et al., 2002), being scalability the most

cited one. In addition, the convergence between Grids

and Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) is trans-

forming the Grid into a powerful solution for the inte-

gration of heterogeneous cross-domain applications.

This position paper intends to investigate the state

of the art concerning the use of Grid technologies

in e-Government scenarios, the strategies, challenges

and what still demands further research. It is or-

ganized as follows: Section 2 presents a discus-

sion on e-Government, its applications and require-

ments; Section 3 introduces Grid computing and

shows how it could serve as a supporting platform

for e-Government applications; Section 4 critically

presents the current challenges and open issues to-

wards a full Grid support for e-Government; and ﬁ-

nally Section 5 presents our ﬁnal remarks.

2 E-GOVERNMENT

The term Electronic Government (e-Government), as

an expression, was coined after the example of Elec-

tronic Commerce. It designates a ﬁeld of activity that

has been with us for several decades and which has

attained a high level of penetration in many countries

(Lenk and Traunmller, 2002). E-Government can be

deﬁned as being all processes which serve decision-

making and services in politics, government and ad-

ministration and which use information and commu-

nication technologies (KBSt, 2006). What has been

observed over the recent years is a shift on the broad-

ness of the e-Government concept: the demand now

is not anymore to deliver traditional services on-line,

but to deliver new and dynamic services, which are

144

J. Garcia dos Santos I. and R. Mauro Madeira E. (2007).

E-GOVERNMENT AND GRID COMPUTING - Potentials and Challenges towards Citizen-Centric Services.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - SAIC, pages 144-148

DOI: 10.5220/0002419401440148

 SciTePress

citizen-centric. In addition, the need for citizen par-

ticipation in governmental processes and decisions is

gaining momentum as a way to enforce governments’

transparency and legitimacy, a phenomenon called e-

Participation.

A citizen-centric government can be simply de-

scribed as one that treats citizens and businesses like

customers, so that their needs come ﬁrst, rather than

bureaucracy or other imperatives inside the govern-

ment machine. It considers the following principles

(GOV3, 2006):

1. Treat citizens and businesses as customers of the

government as a whole (and not only of a speciﬁc

agency);

2. Use a government-wide service-oriented architec-

ture to support all interactions;

3. Develop a single place for citizens to get all gov-

ernment information and transactional services;

4. Don’t expect to get it right ﬁrst time, but aim to

move quickly and learn from experience.

2.1 Applications

The e-Government applications can be classiﬁed into

the following categories:

• e-Services: On-line delivery of traditional ser-

vices for citizens (tax declarations, document re-

quests etc) and initiatives like One-Stop Govern-

ment Portals;

• e-Democracy / e-Participation: Applications to

improve citizen participation in the government

decisions, including e-Voting, pools and discus-

sion forums. Also, tools that increase the public

administration transparency, like budget reports,

are important in this category.

• e-Business: All on-line interactions between the

public and the private sector, ranging from e-

Procurement initiatives to legal and ﬁscal trans-

actions;

• e-Archiving: Services for storage and retrieval

of public documents, reports, and also public li-

braries.

These application can be also classiﬁed according

to three interaction levels (KBSt, 2006):

1. Information: covers the provision of information

to people, businesses and other elements of soci-

ety. Users on this level merely act as recipients of

information;

2. Communication: interactive and participation ser-

vices which enable the exchange of news, mes-

sages and information. These services range from

simpler solutions, such as e-mail or web-based

discussion forums, right through to more complex

applications, such as video conference systems;

3. Transaction: represent the highest interaction

level and include, for instance, the electronic re-

ceipt and processing of applications or orders as

well as the provision of forms which can be ﬁlled

in on the computer and directly sent to the correct

recipient. Electronic payment or tendering sys-

tems also belong to this category.

2.2 Requirements

Considering the technological aspects, the SAGA

(Standards and Architectures for e-Government Ap-

plications) speciﬁcation cites the following as key re-

quirements for the success of any e-Government ef-

fort (KBSt, 2006):

• Interoperability: the administration processes

must be co-orientated so that the e-Government

applications implemented can interact with each

other. The interoperability can be further classi-

ﬁed into three levels:

1. Organizational interoperability primarily de-

termines when and why certain data are ex-

changed;

2. Technical interoperability refers to the mere

possibility to exchange information, including

the deﬁnition of transmission routes and proto-

cols;

3. Semantic interoperability exists when two sys-

tems exchange data in such a manner that the

data is interpreted in the same way by both

communication partners and misunderstand-

ings are ruled out. This applies not just to the

form but also to the content of the data trans-

mitted.

• Reusability: reuse can take place on several dif-

ferent levels of abstraction, e.g. exchange of expe-

rience between agencies and the use of joint data

and process models, architecture samples and cen-

tral services.

• Openness: applications should feature well-

deﬁned and documented interfaces or be encap-

sulated in such a manner that they can be in-

tegrated via portals, and standards should be

adopted whenever possible;

• Scalability: ensure the usability of applications

as requirements change in terms of volume and

transaction frequency;

• Security: the applications and the supporting

middleware should guarantee that information

E-GOVERNMENT AND GRID COMPUTING - Potentials and Challenges Towards Citizen-Centric Services

145

can only be accessed, modiﬁed or published

in compliance with a predeﬁned (and possibly

ﬁne-tuned) security policy, preserving its conﬁ-

dentiality and integrity. In addition, some e-

Government applications demand further security

requirements like user anonymity, identity-theft

protection and non-repudiation.

2.3 Approaches

Different approaches are found in the literature to

implement e-Government applications and platforms.

An approach for the semi-automated design of data

ﬂows between Web Services that are semantically de-

scribed using different ontologies and data represen-

tations is introduced in (Barnickel et al., 2006). The

approach includes a rule-based mechanism for user

transparent mediation between ontologies and is in-

tended to be used in e-Government scenarios span-

ning multiple application domains. In (Medjahed

and Bouguettaya, 2005) the authors present a sys-

tem which automatically generates Web services cus-

tomized to citizens needs and also to government

laws and regulations. The project, called WebSe-

nior, proposes three levels of service customization:

the Citizen level, the Service level and the User in-

terface level. A metadata ontology, used to describe

e-Government services and operations, is also intro-

duced.

In (Senger et al., 2006) the authors propose the

adoption of a grid computing platform as an en-

abling infrastructure for the development of large, dis-

tributed, e-democracy applications, illustrated with

an example in the ﬁeld of policy formulation. A

semantically-enriched and service-oriented middle-

ware for the support of e-Government applications is

the proposal of (Santos et al., 2005). In this project,

called CoGPlat, new services are dynamically com-

posed with the help of semantic descriptions and their

execution is mediated through a set of interaction

policies.

3 GRID COMPUTING FOR

E-GOVERNMENT

We consider a Grid to be a ”sharing environment

implemented via the deployment of a persistent,

standards-based service infrastructure that supports

the creation of, and resource sharing within, dis-

tributed communities” (Foster and Iamnitchi, 2003).

These resources (for instance computers, applica-

tions, data) are owned by various administrative or-

ganizations and shared under locally deﬁned policies

(this administrative domain is usually called a Virtual

Organization, or VO).

The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)

represents an evolution towards a Grid system ar-

chitecture based on Web services concepts and tech-

nologies. The Globus Toolkit (Foster, 2006) is a

community-based, open-architecture, open-source set

of services and software libraries that support Grids

and Grid applications. It addresses issues of security,

information discovery, resource management, data

management, communication, fault detection, and

portability. Its latest release, GT4, is fully based on

Web Services and represents a deﬁnite step towards

the convergence of Grid technologies and Service-

oriented architectures.

This convergence to SOA, added to the inherent

support for large scale processing and storage, makes

the Grid an interesting middleware approach for the

support of e-Government applications. In Table 1 we

present a relationship between the e-Gov application

requirements presented in Section 2.2 and how the

Grid infrastructures support (or not) them.

Table 1: e-Government x Grid.

Requirement Support No Support

Interoperab. Technical Semantic

Reusability Yes -

Openness If standards -

are used

Scalability Processing Reliable

and Storage Descentralized

Control

Security Authentication, Speciﬁc e-Gov

Message Applic. Security

Protection Requirements

The interoperability requirements are satisﬁed by

the Grid mostly in the technical level, due to the

use of approaches like SOA and technologies like

Web Services. The lack of semantic support is fur-

ther discussed in the next Section. The reusability

requirements are much more related to the applica-

tion/service model itself than to the middleware in-

frastructure, but we believe the Grid, due to its coop-

erative and relative open environment facilitates the

reuse of services. Concerning the third requirement,

openness, the use of standards and well deﬁned inter-

faces are supported by the latest Grid solutions, like

the GT4.

The fourth requirement, scalability, is deﬁnitely

considered the biggest Grid advantage over other mid-

dleware approaches, but it is important to note that

this scalability is only an advantage in terms of pro-

cessing power and storage space. The e-Government

process security requirements impose a limit to this

scalability in terms of process control, i.e., a fully de-

ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

146

centralized control is not acceptable for most e-Gov

scenarios and therefore this represents a bottleneck

for the growth of the Grid (what is not true in other

application domains). The last requirement, security,

has very good support in the Grid environments when

we consider user authentication and message protec-

tion/cyphering. Next section discusses why additional

e-Government security requirements are still not fully

supported by the Grid.

4 CHALLENGES

In the previous section we discussed the relationships

between the Grid infrastructure and the middleware

requirements imposed by the applications in the e-

Government domain, showing what the Grid supports

and what it does not support. In this section we de-

tail our analysis focusing on the main challenges for

the requirements interoperability, security and scala-

bility (see Table 2 for a summary of the open issues

presented in this Section).

Table 2: Challenges towards a full Grid Support for e-Gov.

Interoperability

- Semantic descriptions + Ontol-

ogy Support

- Workﬂow (DAG) Support + efﬁ-

cient fault Tolerance mechanisms

- Accessibility

Security

- Fine-tuned information access

policies

- Anonymity and Identity-theft

protection mechanisms

Scalability

- Correct VO model choice

- Enhanced control mechanisms

- Traceability + Auditing support

4.1 Interoperability

The so-called Semantic Web Services have gained

momentum over the last years and are being consid-

ered as powerful (or even essential) mechanisms to

enable fully interoperable services (see Section 2.2).

The actual Grid implementations still lack support for

semantic descriptions and ontologies and this is cer-

tain an issue that is demanding efforts from the re-

search community.

In addition, most Grid platforms offer full support

only for ”Bag-Of-Task” applications, i.e., applica-

tions composed of independent tasks that do not need

to communicate within each other in order to com-

plete. That is for sure a big challenge to be faced, as e-

Government processes are usually described as work-

ﬂows or DAGs (Direct Acyclic Graphs) and many of

its tasks are interdependent. There are already some

alternatives, like the use of a speciﬁc scheduler (e.g.

CONDOR over Globus), but they are still poor in

handling aspects like fault tolerance and recovery. A

scalable and autonomic management of the Grid (in-

cluding efﬁcient fault handling mechanisms) remains

a goal, and experiences are being learned from solu-

tions implemented in approaches like the Peer-to-Peer

networks (Foster and Iamnitchi, 2003).

Last, but not least, middleware-level support for

mobile devices required by some e-Government ap-

plications, added to accessibility mechanisms for dis-

abled and senior citizens is still subject of research.

4.2 Security and Scalability

Due to the nature of the data and processes involved,

many e-Government applications have speciﬁc secu-

rity requirements, some of them determined by local

speciﬁc legislation. Though some Grid implemen-

tations like the GT4 have very good security mech-

anisms, usually focused on authentication and mes-

sage privacy, the support for demands like anonymity

and identity-theft protection still need enhancements.

Also, the support for ﬁne-tuned information access

policies fully integrated to the service environments

needs to be improved.

If we consider Grid environments based on Peer-

to-Peer infrastructures and also opportunist Grid ap-

proaches, further security issues must be considered.

These issues are mainly related to the lack of control

over the tasks imposed by the inherent decentraliza-

tion of these approaches.

Besides that, a critical issue for a successful e-

Government support over the Grid seems to be the

correct modelling of the Virtual Organizations. This

is strongly dependent on the application category (see

Section 2.1), on the interaction model and also on the

participating entities. For example, if we consider a

global e-Procurement application, that can be clas-

siﬁed in the category e-Business/Transaction, a VO

could be deﬁned having as members all Governmen-

tal agencies together with all credited private business

partners/suppliers. On the other hand, if the applica-

tion ﬁts in the category e-Democracy/Transaction, the

VO would be formed only by the Government depart-

ments involved in decision making processes.

Finally, the ability to follow on-line the status of

the different running processes and the possibility of

performing late auditing procedures is also required

by many e-Government applications as a way to in-

crease the public administration transparency. On one

hand, this requires both extra storage and processing

power, which might be successfully provided by the

E-GOVERNMENT AND GRID COMPUTING - Potentials and Challenges Towards Citizen-Centric Services

147

Grid. On the other hand, this represents an extra con-

trol issue that should be better solved in the middle-

ware (Grid) level and not left to the applications.

5 FINAL REMARKS

We believe that the proposal of effective solutions

to enable fully interoperability among heterogeneous

and inter-organizational systems remains a key is-

sue in the development of new citizen-centric e-

Government services. Grid computing’s promise to

provide a vehicle for high computation and mas-

sive storage added to its recent convergence towards

service-orientation has transformed it into an interest-

ing middleware solution for supporting these new ap-

plications.

On one hand many inherent characteristics of

the Grid middlewares are of great importance for

e-Government applications, namely processing and

storage scalability and also the support for technolog-

ical interoperability. On the other, there are some im-

portant issues that still need to be handled: support for

complex workﬂow-based processes, enhanced fault

tolerance mechanisms, speciﬁc security requirements

and support for semantic and ontologies for instance.

Nevertheless, we believe the potentials for the

Grid are very high and as long as these challenges

are faced, it may become a very solid and powerfull

middleware solution for e-Government applications.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the Brazilian agen-

cies FAPESP, CAPES and CNPq, and the project Gi-

gaBOT for the support.

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