Alberto Polzonetti

Knowledge-based platform for eGovernment agents: A Web-based solution using semantic technologies

Currently eGovernment is clearly gaining momentum in our society. Many solutions and projects are being developed and, among the large amount of used tools, semantics is called to play a paramount role. In order to overcome issues related to cooperation, interoperability and accessibility of services in the domain, semantics can be used to improve in-use solutions and to develop new mechanisms able to support the development of expert and intelligent systems in eGovernment. This paper addresses a semantic based philosophy to tackle a holistic platform for the domain taking into account the knowledge of the administrations. By means of intelligent documents and Life Events, as they are presented in the paper, it is possible to build up a intelligent platform to host eGovernment services, as proved by the successful study case Tecut portal.

The e-Government digital credentials

Digital identities, profiles and their management enable online interactions and transactions among people, enterprises, service providers and government institutions. In this paper, after having examined the European identity management policies, we explain the differences between digital identity and digital citizenship and introduce digital credentials. We also discuss how an identity management framework, composed by shared and standardised services supporting authentication procedures, can change within the e-Government domain. The paper concludes by outlining future trends and the potentiality of the extended digital identity in both public and private sectors.

Business Processes Verification for e-Government Service Delivery

Domain experts knowledge represents a major source of information in the design and the development of user-centric and distributed service-based applications, such as those of e-government. Issues related both to the communication among domain and IT experts, and to the implementation of domain dependent requirements in service-based applications, have to be carefully considered to support both Public Administrations efficiency and citizen satisfaction. In this article, we provide as user-friendly approach toward business process assessment via formal verification. Starting from a semi-formal notation, well understood and largely used by domain experts, we provide a mapping to a formal specification in the form of a process algebra. This transformation makes possible formal and automatic verification of desired quality requirements. The approach has been already applied, with encouraging results, in the e-government domain to verify the quality of business processes related to the delivery of e-government digital services to citizens. Moreover, the approach is supported by a plug-in for the Eclipse platform permitting to have an integrated environment in which to design the process model and to assess its quality.

Direct Verification of BPMN Processes through an Optimized Unfolding Technique

Business process analysis is one of the most important and complex activities of Business Process Management. Business processes are typically defined by business experts which ask for graphical and user-friendly notations. Nevertheless most notations used typically lack precisely defined semantics limiting the possibility of analysis to informal approaches such as observation techniques. To support formal verification techniques it is necessary to define a precise mapping between the adopted user-friendly notation and a formal language. In this paper we propose a Java based verification approach for Business Processes modeled using the BPMN 2.0 standard. In particular, we defined a precise Java mapping for the main elements of the BPMN 2.0 notation. The relations among the different elements of a BPMN 2.0 specification are supported by the inclusion of specific attributes and methods in the created Java objects. The behavior of a set of interrelated objects, corresponding to a BPMN 2.0 specification, can be explored using an algorithm we defined for the purpose. Such an algorithm permits to avoid the state explosion phenomenon using an ad-hoc unfolding technique. A plug-in for the Eclipse IDE platform has been developed. It permits to have an integrated environment in which to design a business process, to verify it, and to check the result of the verification in order to improve the business process itself. This iterative approach can continue until all the issues highlighted by the verifier are solved. The approach and the prototype have been successfully applied to real scenarios within the Public Administration domain, with encouraging results.

Cloud computing for network business ecosystem

Traditionally, computing infrastructure has been a substantial burden for companies. But what happens when business are unchained from their physical infrastructure and allowed to focus on business goal ? The model of infrastructure as a service and cloud computing bring us closer to this possibility. In this paper we discussed the growth of the web based service industry. The myriad of service now available over the internet rely on data center spread around the world. One of the major new trends in computing the rise of what is known as cloud computing, in witch not only service are offered remotely over the internet, but also a full menu of computing resource such a computing power, storage, databases, and many other resources.

Improving Trust in Composite eServices Via Run-Time Participants Testing

The Service Oriented Architecture paradigm promises to open and integrate Public Administration offices in order to provide high-value e-services to citizens. Nevertheless to foster real usage of e-services by citizens, in majority still not fully acquainted with Internet technologies, it is necessary to put in place mechanisms to reduce as much as possible perceived system misbehavior. e-Services often handle personal and sensible data, therefore trust on the behavior of the system becomes of primary importance. In this paper, focusing on run-time composition of e-services, we provide an approach that reduces the possibility that the system will fail as consequence of interoperability issues among run-time discovered services, and after that sensible data have been provided by the citizen. The approach uses run-time testing to assess interoperability between services, and model-checking based techniques to reduce the number of test-cases to be applied. An exemplificative case-study is also illustrated and discussed.

HawkEye : a tool for collaborative business process modelling and verification

In this paper we propose a collaborative Business Process modeling approach where multiple stakeholders can be coordinate considering global and local views on Business Processes. In the modeling phase we use a standard language such as BPMN 2.0 that provides both local view, via collaboration specification, and global view, via choreography models specification. The approach provides support also for analysis activities aiming at reconciling local and global views to effectively and efficiently derive inter-organizational Business Processes. For the analysis phase we adapted well known verification approaches in order to check behavioral constraints.

FedCohesion: federated identity management in the marche region

Federated identity management is a set of technologies and processes supporting dynamically distribute identity information. Its adoption in Public Administrations maintains organizations autonomy giving at the same time citizens support to access the services that are distributed across security domains. In this paper, we propose the Marche Region experience for what concern federate identity management focusing on the regional authentication framework, named FedCohesion. It is bases on Security Assertion Markup Language standard and it results from Cohesion re-engineering. It is the old style legacy authentication framework. We first present resulting architecture showing supported identification process and pilot applications. Lessons learned and opportunities have been also presented.

Policy makers and performance management in e-government domain

This article examines the current and future development of (e)government policy making, and the critical role that measurement and impact analysis has in this. There is a clear movement from an almost exclusive focus on the efficiency impacts of e-Government for government itself to more attention being paid to effectiveness impacts, as well as to wider governance impacts. This is going hand-in-hand with a change away from measuring only the inputs and outputs of e-Government initiatives towards much greater emphasis on analyzing and measuring the outcomes for constituents and the impacts for society as a whole, for example through increased public value. In addition, the article considers likely future e-Government measurement trends which involve moving both policy target setting and measurement from central government to local government, from the back-office to the front-office, and to frontline professional staff, whether care or medical professionals, police, community workers, teachers, etc. Taking this further, it also seems likely that in future constituents themselves will also be involved in policy target setting and measurement when directly related to their own use of public sector services and facilities.

Designing quality business processes for E-government digital services

Research works and surveys focusing on e-Government Digital Services availability and usage, reveal that often services are available but ignored by citizens. In our hypothesis this situation can be justified since defined service delivery processes do not sufficiently take into account social aspects and mainly focus just on technical aspects. Domain knowledge, related to how delivering high quality e-Government Digital Services, remains in most of the case in the mind of e-government stakeholders. To address these issues we have developed a quality framework to assess delivery process strategies of services. Moreover we have introduced a user-friendly approach permitting to assess, using formal verification techniques, a delivery process with respect to the defined quality framework. The approach has been also implemented in a plug-in for the Eclipse platform and it has been applied to real case scenarios from the Public Administration domain. In this paper we report and discuss the results we obtained from the conducted experiments. First of all the experiments provided encouraging results confirming that the approach we developed is applicable to the e-government domain. Moreover we discovered that delivery processes, defined for the services under study, reach low quality marks with respect to the framework.