CITIZEN CONTROLLED EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION
IN E-GOVERNMENT
Helder Gomes
ESTGA / IEETA, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
André Zúquete
DETI / IEETA, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
Gonçalo Paiva Dias
ESTGA / GOVCOPP, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
Keywords: e-Government, Privacy, Interoperability.
Abstract: The online provision of public services to citizens, e-government, is here to stay. Its advantages are huge,
both for the government and for the citizens. Life-event service is a sound concept in which services are
designed to cater with citizen real needs instead of government departments needs. But this type of services
requires interoperability between government departments. Among other things, interoperability implies the
exchange of information between government departments which traditionally has been implemented by
direct communication. This direct communication raises privacy concerns on citizens since their personal
information is potentially exchanged without their knowledge and control. In this paper we propose an e-
government model where the citizen controls the exchange of his personal information between government
departments.
1 INTRODUCTION
One of the key aspects of e-government is the use of
Information and Communication Technologies
(ICT) for the provision of public services to the
citizens. However, e-government is not only about
the use of ICT but also about the reorganization of
Public Administration (PA) in order to increase
efficiency and provide better services to its users
(citizens and companies), such as life-event services
and one-stop e-government (Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development 2003;
European Commission 2003).
The provision of life-event services requires
integration of the traditionally fragmented PA
(Klischewski 2004) as well as other private
companies (e.g. banks, insurances, etc.). For
example, the Buying a House life event service
requires the involvement of several PA departments
and private companies (organizations), which have
to interoperate in order to deliver the service. As a
consequence of interoperability, citizen information
previously fragmented across, and confined to,
isolated PA departments is now potentially
accessible to all PA, which raises privacy concerns.
Privacy is a critical issue and is pointed as one
reason for citizen lack of trust in government, which
is one of the barriers to the engagement of citizens in
e-government programs (Eynon 2007).
Given the citizen’s traditional lack of trust in PA
and the amount of information PA departments
collect, some of it with mandatory and confidential
nature, e-government services must be exemplary in
the protection of citizen’s privacy (Lau 2003).
Therefore, interoperability and service delivery
models that foster citizen’s trust and respect citizen’s
privacy are needed. We propose an e-government
interoperability model that places the citizen in
control of the exchange of his personal information
between organizations, namely government
departments or other private companies.
494
Gomes H., Zúquete A. and Paiva Dias G..
CITIZEN CONTROLLED EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION IN E-GOVERNMENT .
DOI: 10.5220/0003402804940499
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2011), pages 494-499
ISBN: 978-989-8425-51-5
Copyright
c
 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Next, in Section 2, we present a short
characterization of e-government interoperability,
followed by the presentation of our model in Section
3. In Section 4 we discuss the model and in Section
5 we present related work and conclude.
2 E-GOVERNMENT
One characteristic of Public Administration is its
functional fragmentation in multiple independent
departments, such as Taxes, Social Security, etc.
Traditionally, each of these departments acts as an
isolated and independent silo with its own
competences, responsibilities, organization and
information. Services are provided and designed
based in their competences and they have no need to
communicate with each other, since citizens have
the responsibility to obtain (from other
organizations) and provide the documents required
for the service he wants.
This model, depicted in
Figure 1, has several
problems such as: (i) inconvenience – to obtain a
service from department Dept1 citizen is required to
go first to other organizations (Dept2, Dept3 and
Dept4) to obtain the required documents; (ii)
complexity – citizen must be aware of PA
complexity, i.e., which department(s) provide the
service(s) he needs; (iii) privacy – documents
produced by departments have a standard, uniform
format targeted for multiple uses, usually with more
information than the required for many of those
uses.
Figure 1: Traditional model for provision of services by
the Public Administration.
The traditional paradigm above described is
being improved and replaced by the introduction of
ICT in the PA, in the context of e-government
initiatives. E-government addresses not only the use
of ICT but also the reorganization of PA in order to
provide better services to its users (European
Commission 2003). Two important service delivery
concepts arose: one-stop government and live-event
services.
With one-stop government, services are provided
in a single point of contact and targeted to the
intended public (Kubicek & Hagen 2000). PA
departments provide their services in a conveniently
located single place, thus avoiding the
inconvenience and waste of time for citizens to go
from organization to organization, which may be far
from each other. One-stop shops are examples of
provision of public services based in this concept.
With one-stop e-government, TIC is used as a
platform for the delivery of online one-stop services
to the users (Dias & Rafael 2007).
Life-event services are services targeted to
satisfy citizen’s daily needs (Vintar et al. 2002). Due
to the functional fragmentation of PA, services
needed by citizens to handle common events in
every one’s life (as buying a car, the born of a child,
etc.) typically span across several services from
several PA departments. A life-event service should
integrate in a single entry point all the partial
services provided by the different departments that
together fulfil the citizen real-life need. PA
departments should adapt and integrate in order to
convert a set of partial services and processes into a
single service and the correspondent back-office
process. One big advantage of this approach is that
citizens don’t need to get acquainted with PA
complexity (Dias & Rafael 2007).
The provision of life-event services demands for
interoperability between PA departments.
Interoperability is commonly analysed at three
levels: technical, semantic and organizational.
Technical level deals with the technology necessary
for the systems at organizations to communicate
with each other. Semantic level deals with a
common understanding of government concepts.
The integration of departments to provide citizen-
centric services is handled at the organizational
level. Interoperability at this third level is the most
difficult to achieve, since it implies reorganizations
that interfere with power and responsibility
relationships between people and institutions
(Kubicek & Cimander 2009).
At the higher level of e-government maturity
models (United Nations & American Society for
Public Administration 2002; Layne & Lee 2001)
PA provides citizen-centric services supported by
PA departments fully integrated and transparent to
citizens. This brings huge advantages both for the
government and for the citizen. Advantages for the
government are, for example, efficiency gains
caused by lower redundancy and simpler processes.
Citizens’ advantages are better and more convenient
services. However, all this integration brings more
CITIZEN CONTROLLED EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION IN E-GOVERNMENT
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vulnerabilities and hence a threat to citizen privacy
(Brooks & Agyekum-Ofosu 2010).
It has been reported that many e-government
initiatives fail (Heeks 2003). The citizens’ lack of
trust in e-government systems is one of the causes
for this failure (Eynon 2007). This lack of trust
comes, for example, from fears of privacy violation,
and also from a generic lack of trust regarding the
governments (Dutton et al. 2005). Ironically, much
of these fears were enhanced by the integration of
government departments, as the previously existent
fragmentation and isolation of PA provide the
citizen some degree of privacy (Bannister 2005).
This is an important issue given the mandatory
nature of much information that the citizen provides
to the state.
One measure against the lack of trust is to allow
the citizen to control his information, namely to
verify its accuracy and correctness, and to control
and verify who accesses it and for what purposes
(Eynon 2007). The model we propose in next
Section is in line with this approach by placing the
citizen in control of the exchange of his information.
3 PROPOSAL
In our model, the citizen is placed between
organizations (PA departments and companies),
controlling the exchange of his information. To
obtain a service from an organization he gathers the
required information, from other organizations, and
decides about its delivery: he controls which
information flows from an organization to another.
Organizations act as providers and consumers of
citizen information that is obtained from, and
delivered to, the citizen. Organizations no longer
need to directly communicate with each other. To
effectively control his information the citizen must
have a novel and appropriate tool, a digital e-
government wallet (egWallet), an application that
assists him in storing, managing, receiving and
delivering his personal information.
Life-event services can be modeled as a set of
partial services, that executed in an appropriated
workflow satisfy a citizen real-life need. The
workflow has inputs (information provided by the
citizen and participating organizations) and produces
outputs, at least for the citizen. Depending on the
citizen specific context, for a given life-oriented
service, multiple workflows can exist, possibly
involving different services and different input and
output information. The selection of the specific
workflow instance and the management of
interactions with participating organizations, for
delivery and retrieve of information, are made by the
egWallet according to citizen privacy definitions.
Figure 2 illustrates this model.
Figure 2: Service provision model with exchange of
information controlled by citizen.
Before start describing the model, a first
presentation of concepts is needed. The concepts are
based in the Information Card Ecosystem (Burton
2009) but are extended beyond identification or
authentication.
Organizations provide and consume citizen
attributes. An attribute is any item of information
that belongs to the citizen. It can be anything from
personal attributes as name, age and other, to objects
like documents, pictures, movies, etc. Attributes are
stored, managed and presented to the citizen, within
the egWallet. Attributes are aggregated in egDocs
(e-government Document), and egDocs are what a
citizen delivers and receives from the services he
requests. An egDoc can be issued by an organization
(Attribute Provider) and can be created and issued
by the citizen himself using attributes he owns and
possibly other egDocs he carries in his egWallet. An
egDoc binds its issuer to the attributes it contains.
There are three types of egDocs: Personal, Managed
and Provided. Personal egDocs are those created by
the Citizen with attributes he owns, e.g., any object
he produces or any statement he produces. Provided
egDocs contain long-lived attributes managed by
another entity, Attribute Provider, and might be
addressed to an identified entity or set of entities,
which should be the only ones able to use it. An
example of a Provided egDoc is a receipt received as
a result of a service. Managed egDocs contain
metadata describing how to obtain short-lived
attributes from its Attribute Provider. These short-
lived attributes must be obtained before each and
every use. An example of a Managed egDoc is the
credit card information to be presented to pay for a
service.
Organizations provide services to citizens. When
providing services, they always act both as Attribute
Providers and Attribute Consumers. They act as
Attribute Consumer since every service requires
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some sort of information (attributes) from the citizen
to be executed (e.g. citizen identification-mail).
These attributes are provided by the citizen, in the
form of egDocs that might be obtained requesting
services from other organizations. They act as
Attribute Provider since every service results in the
production of some set of attributes, encapsulated in
an egDoc, such as a receipt, a certificate, etc.
Let’s consider that citizen wants a service from
Dept1. The service may be a life-oriented service,
and the citizen may get to this point coming from
some life-oriented portal. When the citizen contacts
the service, he gets a “roadmap” for the service that
describes (i) the service required attributes, (ii)
Attribute Providers where they can be obtained, (iii)
the attribute gathering sequence, (iv) the resulting
outputs, and (v) the organization policies that are
applied on the information provided by the citizen.
This “roadmap” is processed by the egWallet to be
adapted to the specific citizen context. For example,
imagine the egWallet contains the citizen marital
status attribute. When accessing some service, if
egWallet receive a “roadmap” requesting some
attributes based on the citizen marital status, it
cleans from the “roadmap” all that do not apply and
presents to the citizen only the required attributes
that effectively apply to his context. All required
attributes are presented in the egWallet together with
the associated information, as possible Attribute
Providers, policies, etc. Some of the required
attributes may already be stored in egWallet while
others may not. According to citizen preferences, the
egWallet can start obtaining the missing attributes,
or wait for the citizen decision. When all attributes
are gathered, the citizen may decide to request the
service and the egWallet delivers all the required
attributes to the service and, at its conclusion,
receives the produced egDocs. Since the service may
take some time to be concluded, the egWallet can be
configured to automatically check for its conclusion.
To assist the citizen in the analysis of his interaction
with government, egWallet registers all transactions.
A concrete scenario might be the application of a
university student for a scholarship. To do this, in
Portugal, students are required to present a family
tax declaration to prove the number of family
members and the family incomes, and a proof that
he has no debts to Social Security. These required
documents clearly provide more information than
the strictly needed for the scholarship application
(e.g., the amount spent in medical care, in the tax
declaration), thus violating the basic need-to-know
principle. High Education Ministry systems are now
connected to Tax Ministry and Social Security
Ministry systems and students are no longer required
to present those documents as the conveyed
information is directly obtained from the proper
sources. However, privacy issues still exist: students
have no guarantee that only strictly need information
is exchanged.
On the contrary, in the model we propose, a
student has full control over which information is
exchanged between organizations since it is
provided by him. When a student accesses the
service to apply for the scholarship, he receives a
“roadmap” listing all the required attributes (the
number of family elements and family income from
the Tax Ministry and a no debts statement from
Social Security Ministry, among others). The student
can clearly verify that only strictly needed
information is required. He instructs egWallet to
obtain those attributes, by accessing the
correspondent services and possibly providing other
attributes. After gathering all required attributes he
instructs egWallet to request the service to apply for
the scholarship, provide the required attributes and
receive an egDoc with the application receipt.
Depending on the student’s preferences much of
these egWallet actions may be automated.
4 DISCUSSION
4.1 Privacy
The model we propose has the advantage of making
the citizen aware of the information flows on which
his information is involved. By having the egWallet
registering which information is disclosed, for which
service and when, a citizen has the control over
which information each organization knows about
him. Also he is able to check if services only require
strictly needed information and if it is not the case,
for non mandatory services, he cans always give-up.
It should be noted that after information is
provided, citizen looses the control over it. For this
reason, the citizen must be aware of the conditions
under which he provides his information.
Organizations should provide privacy and security
policies stating their practices and their liability in
case of compliance failures. In the same way, a
citizen defines, in egWallet, the conditions (policy)
under which he agrees to provide his information.
The egWallet compares citizen policies with
department policies and warns the citizen when they
don’t fit. Nevertheless, the citizen always has the
final decision about providing his data.
Citizen awareness regarding the conditions on
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which citizen information is provided is not possible
when organizations directly exchange information.
This awareness makes the citizen able to take
informed attitudes on this subject by doing
suggestions or by complaining to the competent
authorities, for example.
Finally, the issue of trust in government practices
still remains: will government use the data strictly
for the stated purposes? But, this is a political and
cultural issue, not a technology problem.
4.2 PA Reorganization
Together with the use of ICT, reorganization of PA
is a common characteristic of e-government
definitions. At the upper level of e-government
maturity models, PA is fully integrated and services
are life-oriented and based in simple and efficient
inter-organizational processes. This level of
reorganization is not easy to implement as it
involves many political and hierarchical issues.
On the other side, the improvement on service
provision convenience might not be the single
motivation for full integration of PA systems.
Gathering of intelligence information is also a
motivation, especially after 11 September 2001,
(Yildiz 2007) and this raises huge privacy concerns.
So, the full integration of PA is not a consensual
feature. Fragmentation and independence of PA also
has its advantages. The model we propose do not
requires that level of integration of PA and still
allows for the provision of life-oriented services
with citizen controlled exchange of information
between independent organizations.
The level of reorganization implied in our model
is not as deep as full PA integration. However,
reorganization of internal processes and definition of
common PA information models, among others, are
examples of reorganization aspects still needed.
4.3 Information Model
The provision of inter-organizational services
demands for common information models. This
applies both for the full integration of PA and for the
model we propose. The difference in our model is
that information models applicable to the citizen
information must be public and available to
egWallet, so it can handle service interactions and
manage citizen information. Also, those models
should be defined in a computer understandable
form, e.g., by ontologies. This also improves
egWallet versatility to cope with changes in
information models.
An import aspect to address is that of document
formats. PA departments typically provide
information based in standard documents which
contain a standard set of information items
(attributes). To implement the minimal information
disclosure principle, it is important to break those
document formats and have services requiring only
the specific information items really in need and
departments providing services that delivers only the
asked attributes and not whole documents as today.
For instance, if an organization needs to know if you
are older than 65 years, it should ask for this specific
attribute from someone that knows the citizen’s birth
date instead of asking for a complete birth
certificate. This implies to break with PA practices
and that PA information models go to the
information item (attribute) level of detail.
4.4 Incentive to Development
This model has the potential to promote the
development of new citizen-centric tools for
assisting the citizen in e-government transactions by
combining services provided by PA departments and
private companies. Since services are publicly
available, and based in some open technology,
citizens and businesses can develop their own new
ways of interaction with e-government, possibly
more adapted to their specific needs.
4.5 Model Applicability
The model proposed in this paper has been thought
for the provision PA services to citizens (G2C). Its
applicability for scenarios of provision of services to
businesses (G2B) and other government agencies
(G2G) was not considered. Moreover, the model has
not been thought for the provision of mediated
services to elderly or other people that delegate in
others their transactions with government.
5 RELATED WORK
AND CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we presented an e-government model
that supports the provision of life-event services
with the citizen controlling the exchange of his
information between organizations. It is the citizen
responsibility to provide its information to services
requiring it, possibly after obtaining it from services
provided by other organizations. This way, a citizen
has a better control over who has access to his
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personal information and for what purposes.
As already mentioned our model is based in the
Information Card Ecosystem (ICE). But ICE is
essentially targeted to provide token information to
access control mechanisms when accessing services,
while we propose its use for the general exchange of
citizen information.
The provision of e-government services centred
in citizen needs is not a novelty. OneStopGov
(http://www.onestopgov-project.org) is an example
of a project addressing citizen-centred e-government
services. Services are provided in active life-oriented
portals that allow the tailoring of services based on
the citizen context and profile. The portal conducts a
dialog with citizen to obtain the specific citizen
circumstances and determine which documents are
to be presented by citizen and which exact service
versions are to be executed (Tambouris & Tarabanis
2008). This same concept is used in our model,
except that the dialog is conducted locally (by the
egWallet), based in a set of rules provided by the
service (“roadmap”).
The concept of a eWallet (electronic wallet) has
been proposed as a tool for the management of
personal information in Internet transactions (Al-
Fedaghi & Taha 2006). However, it is not intended
for the type of transactions we propose. The
egWallet concept is also related with Personal Data
Ecosystem (http://personaldataecosystem.org) as it is
intended to manage data generated by users.
The promotion of citizen and business initiative
for the development of citizen tailored services has
already been proposed by the concept of e-Citizen,
but for development of portals as service mediators
between government and citizens (Filho 2005).
Our model is still a vision; some important future
work is: (i) study and selection of a language to
express the life-events’ “roadmaps”; (ii) Analyse PA
information models and its adequacy to our goals;
(iii) definition of an implementation architecture.
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