Publications

 A promising strategy to promote good governance is the harnessing of opportunities provided by the use of mobile phones, which are widely accessible to most segments of society. A study recently presented at the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, of which two authors are from the UNU-IIST Centre for Electronic Governance, investigated the strategic use of mobile technologies by governments to achieve the desired development and social inclusion outcomes. The study focused on the case of migrant head porters – local micro-logistics service providers – from Ghana. Its implications include supporting policy efforts for achieving the Millennium Development Goals on poverty alleviation and gender (specifically, women’s empowerment).

 The paper presents the development of a dependable messaging infrastructure for Electronic Government. Based on a few simple concepts like messages, members and channels, the infrastructure was developed to facilitate the exchange of messages by government agencies in a dependable and automated way. The dependability requirement was addressed on various levels: design, development and application. Considering design, the infrastructure comprises a small core offering plain messaging services, a repository of extensions to provide additional services, and a development framework to rigorously specify, implement and verify messaging extensions. Considering development, the infrastructure was build through rigorous use of modeling and analysis in various development stages. Considering applications, government agencies can use the infrastructure to exchange messages through carefully managed logical communication channels and the prudent use of necessary extensions, including extensions to implement required security measures. The paper presents the development and explains why the outcome satisfies the dependability requirement.

 We outline a research project proposal to explore the use of Category Theory (CT) for the integration of distributed systems, as captured in the emerging standard for Open Distributed Processing (ODP). Following the unifying role that CT played for the diverse branches of mathematics, it is to provide a unifying architectural semantics for various concepts of the ODP standard, its viewpoint languages and their Formal Description Techniques (FDT). RAISE and its supporting tools will play the role of the underlying notation and will help to formally design software for conformance checking, consistency between different viewpoint specifications, translation of specifications in different FDTs (functors between many FDTs and CT already exist) and for simulation (virtual machine). CIMOSA, Open System Architecture for Computer Integrated Manufacturing, will provide the first concrete test and the running example for our study.

 The e-Government Activity area in UNU-IIST has grown since the beginning of the e-Macao Project in 2004. A portfolio of projects has been established and successfully executed, from the e-Macao Program - Building a Foundation for Electronic Government in Macao, through the UNeGov.net initiative - Bulding a Community of Practice for Electronic Governance, to concrete research and development projects on: Strategic IT Planning for Public Organizations, Standards and Best Practices for e-Government, Software Infrastructure for e-Government, Semantic Interoperability for e-Government, etc. UNU-IIST is increasingly recognized as a center of research and practice on e-Government, evidence of significant external funds brought to UNU-IIST through such projects, many workshops and schools organized in developing countries, a number of invited presentations, and increasing requests for assistance from various governments and public sector organizations. In order to support the running of such projects, enhance visibility and further increase funding opportunities, a Center for Electronic Governance at UNU-IIST was established in January 2007. The mission of the Center is - working in partnership with institutions from developing countries as well as international and other UN organizations, to build capacity and provide know-how and advice in planning, implementing and evaluating programs for Electronic Governance. The Center will fulfill its mission through a range of activities including: academic research, best practice development, research and development projects, human capacity development, institutional development and development of communities of practice. The purpose of this report is to introduce the Center: Rationale - reasons for establishing the Center; Mission - what is the Center going to do and who will benefit from it; Vision - what do we want the Center to become; Strategies - how will the Center fulfill its vision; Organization - how is the Center going to be organized; and Sustainability - how will we ensure the future success of the Center.

 This paper is a study of the formal semantics of an extended and a virtual enterprise and how it is possible to represent their behaviour by the composition of models of individual enterprises. We consider core activities of an enterprise for manufacturing discrete parts products, modelled in terms of resources, processes and business goals (customer and purchase orders). The extended enterprise allows enterprises to interact, by matching customer and purchase orders. The virtual enterprise allows them to cooperate, by processes which execution cross organisational boundaries. The result is a precise technical meaning for an extended and a virtual enterprise, suitable for symbolic execution, reasoning and foremost, for understanding the difference between both concepts.

 The availability of domain frameworks to enable rapid development of Electronic Public Services (EPS) is essential to meet the increasing demand for mature EPS by various government stakeholders. This paper presents a composite domain framework comprising frameworks to build the Front-Office and Back-Office parts of an EPS. The framework supports a set of domain requirements obtained through a detailed analysis of over 30 concrete public services. After presenting these requirements, the framework is described in four stages - architecture, design, implementation and instantiation - all using UML to capture the artifacts built during development. We also illustrate the application of the framework through a case study in developing an Electronic Licensing Service by means of framework instantiation. We conclude with some comments on the complexity, flexibility and performance of the framework. This work was carried out as part of the e-Macao Project to build a foundation for e-Government in Macao, funded by the Government of Macao SAR.

 The paper presents a formal model for a knowledge repository shared by members of a Virtual Community of Practice (VCPs), describes how the repository can be used to underpin collaborative problem solving, and how to build computer support for such processes. The repository comprises the resources used and developed by VCPs particularly through problem solving. As a case study, the paper illustrates how the problem solving process and the underlying repository can be applied in disaster prevention and handling. The repository and the process are formally described using the RAISE Specification Language

 Electronic Government offers a great potential for improving performance, increasing quality of services and reducing costs in the public sector. In order to gain these benefits, organizational changes and re-engineering of administrative processes within and between public agencies has to take place. This, in turn, requires strong government leadership. Countries considered the worldwide leaders in e-government have all created central coordination offices to lead, manage and promote e-government initiatives. In this paper, we present the experiences of Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Singapore and the United States in e-government coordination, as well as discuss the best practices in organizational structures for managing e-government. We also present some recommendations for establishing a central coordination office for Macao.

 There are several well-established surveys on e-government. These surveys employ different assessment models for e-readiness, digital divide and other relevant factors, leading to varying conclusions on the global state of e-government. This paper presents a comparative study of 11 international surveys on e-government between 2001 and 2004. It identifies a common set of 'core indicators' for assessing e-readiness and suggests ways to determine the weights for them. The paper also introduces the concept of a 'target e-ready state' and examines how it may provide a scale for determining the progress of individual countries.

 This document provides an abstract model for manufacturing industry, as it appears in the market context. We identify a number of `players' (consumers, suppliers, traders and producers) and formalize the ways they compete for the shared market. Initially abstract, the model becomes more concrete in a sequence of refinements (conceptual rather than formal) naturally evolving to address such aspects of an enterprise like marketing, finances, administration and production. The companion documents will consider these aspects in more detail. To formalize the game of supply and demand is a prerequisite, we believe, for modelling an enterprise that will provide the most effective answer to the demands of the business environment.

 This paper presents generic domain models to underpin the development of Electronic Public Services (EPS) - from conceptual models, through requirements and architecture, to implementation models. The conceptual model follows the analysis of 25 concrete business licensing and 6 social welfare services delivered by governments to businesses and citizens respectively. Based on this model, we characterize generic business licensing and social welfare services and, following the Governance Enterprise Architecture, synthesize a generic process for delivering Authorization and Certification classes of public services. From the generic process, requirements are obtained and the architecture is defined to support these requirements. The architecture comprises three categories of components - Front-Office, Mid-Office and Back-Office. We present the static and behavioral view of this architecture and show how it supports the variability in the development of concrete e-Licensing or e-Welfare EPS through: concrete process specification at the Mid-Office, binding of specialized tasks to automation support at the Back-Office, and general use of configuration files. Finally, we discuss an Enterprise Application Framework as a particular implementation of the architecture based on open standards, and describe the use of the framework for rapid development of EPS based on concrete project experience. This work was carried out in the context of the e-Macao Project, a two year project funded by the Government of Macao SAR to build a foundation for Electronic Government in Macao.

 A distributed real-time program is usually executed on a limited set of hardware resources and is required to satisfy timing constraints, despite anticipated hardware failures. Static analysis of the timing properties of such programs is often infeasible. This paper shows how to formally reason about these programs when scheduling decisions are made on-line and take into account deadlines, load and hardware failures. We use Timed CCS as a process language, define a language to describe anticipated faults and apply a version of a mu-calculus to specify and verify timing properties. This allows the property of schedulability to be the outcome of an equation-solving problem. And unlike conventional reasoning, the logic is fault-monotonic: if correctness is proved for a number of faults, correctness for any subset of these faults is guaranteed.

 e-Macao is a two-year project to build a foundation for Electronic Government in Macao in terms of readiness assessment, software research and development, and capacity-building for government workforce. The project focused on five main activity areas: (1) survey - a detailed survey of the current state of e-Government practice was carried out, both locally and globally; (2) training - a comprehensive training program was organized for government workforce in technical and management skills for e-Government, promoting collaborative, cross-agency development among government trainees; (3) development - a prototype software infrastructure for e-Government was developed, with example Electronic Public Services delivered to citizens, businesses and government built on top of this infrastructure; (4) research - relevant research was conducted in foundational and applied aspects of e-Government; (5) dissemination - the findings were disseminated inside the project, locally among e-Government stakeholders, and internationally. The project was carried out from July 2004 to June 2006. It was led by UNU-IIST and funded by the Government of Macao SAR through Macao Foundation. UNU-IIST partners on the project were: the Government of Macao SAR, including 44 agencies in all vertical areas of the Government (Administration and Justice, Education and Culture, Finance and Economy, Security, and Transport and Public Works), University of Macau and INESC-Macau. The second phase of the project has been approved by the Government, promoted to a program framework, and extended to last for three more years until end of 2009. The aim of this report is to explain the project, from its aim and objectives, through activities and deliverables, to its organization and evaluation. More information about the e-Macao Project can be found from the project portal at http://www.emacao.gov.mo.

 Design with reuse typicaly accepts only those components in the repository which succesfully match a given query specification, otherwise tries to obtain the needed components by adaptation, composition or programming. The purpose of this paper is to describe how it is possible to formalise design which can also accept imperfect components - satisfying one in a chain of increasingly weak specifications. We also capture the effect using such imperfect components has on the overall design, its controlled degradation, and discuss how the approach can support a design method based on the incremental upgrading of imperfect components.

 The paper presents some challenges to Seamless e-Government, and proposes a technical solution - Government-Enterprise Ecosystem Gateway (G-EEG) to address them. G-EEG is a framework through which multi-organizational processes and applications can dynamically build, apply and evolve complex communication structures to asynchronously exchange messages in specific application contexts, e.g. to deliver seamless public services. In addition to basic messaging, G-EEG supports high-level messaging functions through dynamically-enabled horizontal (process-independent) or vertical (process-dependent) extensions. A number of extensions are described as solutions to the challenges for seamless e-Government. Currently a research prototype, G-EEG is specified formally and implemented using open standards.

 Many governments worldwide are establishing one-stop portals to provide access to various public services based on the needs of citizens or businesses and not the internal structure of the government. A critical support for such one-stop portals is a workflow infrastructure, supporting the matching of the needs against provided services and coordination of the implementing processes, often spanning several government agencies. This paper describes a generic workflow infrastructure for one-stop government - GovWF. GovWF supports the operations of a Virtual Government Organization - a hierarchy of agencies providing collectively a set of public services, while offering a uniform one-agency view to its customers. Conceptual and formal models are provided to rigorously describe the operations of GovWF. We describe how GovWF is implemented and also present a case study for illustration.

 The paper addresses the requirements for human capacity development for e-government in general and for Macao in particular. It starts by justifying the training of public officers as a critical success factor for e-government. It then presents some basic principles and guidelines for formulating an effective e-government training policy for public officers, followed by specific skills-sets considered essential for e-government according to: the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the UK Office of the E-Envoy and the US Chief Information Officer (CIO) University. In addition, the paper highlights the best practices in the development of public workforce for e-government. The paper reveals that allocating at least 10% of e-government budget on training and capacity development is essential for successful e-government programmes. It concludes with some recommendations for developing the public workforce for e-government in Macao.

 A policy framework is the backbone of public governance and a major contributor to its quality. Such a framework is particularly required in the areas where public governance seeks technology support, as is the case for Electronic Governance (e-Governance). This report explains the need for a comprehensive set of policies, and presents a model for policy interventions supporting e-Governance development. The model comprises a classification of policies based on their nature and applicability, and describes core areas for which policy interventions are required. The report also presents three major scenarios for the use of the model: (1) a tool to help design and analyze critical policy interventions by developing and transition nations, (2) a template to understand different alternatives for interventions, and (3) a checklist to review all niche areas to be regulated. In particular, the application of this model to the Indian context is discussed.

 We introduce a necessary test for the claims about provable fault-tolerance: having proved to tolerate several faults, we must tolerate (provably) any combination of them. One notable failure to pass this test is bisimulation. The paper presents a class of bisimulations which are fault-monotonic and within CCS support compositional design of component specifications by stepwise refinement, each step increasing or at least preserving the current level of fault-tolerance.

 We present a service-oriented survey for government agencies and its applications to e-government planning. The survey documents for each agency its mission, structure, resources, on-line presence and perceptions about e-government. It considers all kinds of interactions within the agency (unit-to-unit), within the government (agency-to-agency) and between government and non-government entities (government-to-citizen, government-to-businesses, etc.) as services. We explore various uses of this survey such as: identifying key agencies and possible agency alliances, recognizing sharable resources for e-government, discovering opportunities for new e-services, formulating common infrastructure and staff training needs, and supporting the drafting of government-wide strategies for e-government. The survey has been applied and tested through a comprehensive analysis of the public administration system in Macao, China.