Despina Polemi

A secure e-Government platform architecture for small to medium sized public organizations

Small to medium sized public organizations (SMPOs) share some of their e-Government requirements with their larger counterparts, such as the pending needs for interoperability, security and user friendliness. Additionally, they have some specific needs that are either unique in their context or more demanding due to their characteristics. These are cost and resources considerations, enhanced accessibility and greater scalability due to the larger number of citizens and businesses served and automated processing because of the restricted number of trained personnel. This paper first proposes an architecture for a secure e-Government platform based on Web Services, which addresses the above requirements. Secondly, a specific service is built upon the proposed platform, in which a municipality generates and securely delivers a digital birth certificate to a citizen or another municipality.

CorpWiki: A self-regulating wiki to promote corporate collective intelligence through expert peer matching

One of the main challenges that organizations face nowadays, is the efficient use of individual employee intelligence, through machine-facilitated understanding of the collected corporate knowledge, to develop their collective intelligence. Web 2.0 technologies, like wikis, can be used to address the above issue. Nevertheless, their application in corporate environments is limited, mainly due to their inability to ensure knowledge creation and assessment in a timely and reliable manner. In this study we propose CorpWiki, a self-regulating wiki system for effective acquisition of high-quality knowledge content. Inserted articles undergo a quality assessment control by a large number of corporate peer employees. In case the quality is inadequate, CorpWiki uses a novel expert peer matching algorithm (EPM), based on feed-forward neural networks, that searches the human network of the organization to select the most appropriate peer employee who will improve the quality of the article. Performance evaluation results, obtained through simulation modeling, indicate that CorpWiki improves the final quality levels of the inserted articles as well as the time and effort required to reach them. The proposed system, combining machine-learning intelligence with the individual intelligence of peer employees, aims to create new inferences regarding corporate issues, thus promoting the collective organizational intelligence.

eInvoke: Secure e-Invoicing based on web services

Electronic Invoicing services (e-Invoicing) will have a pivotal role in all the stages of handling Value Added Tax (VAT) for European Member States. Through a systematic introduction of e-invoicing, tax administrators will be able to implement new tools and procedures to carry out alternative controls that are less intrusive on the trading partners. Nevertheless, successful European e-invoicing implementations need to be in compliance with the corresponding European Directive 2001/115/EC. Most contemporary e-Invoicing implementations are proprietary and based on EDI, thus demonstrating great deficiencies. This paper presents an open electronic invoicing system named eInvoke, based on XML, XML cryptography and Web Services, that addresses all security requirements imposed by the Directive.

Engineering and technology aspects of an e-government architecture based on Web services

In order for e-government to be successful there is a strong requirement for approaches that are based on widely accepted technical standards and formal design methods. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the eMayor platform, a Web services based platform that is built as a holistic service framework for the deployment and delivery of e-government enterprise services for European municipalities. The design of the platform is based on the ISO/RM-ODP standard. The goal of the paper is to present both a general architectural overview of the platform and its services, along with the engineering and technology aspects of the architecture as instances of the engineering and technology viewpoints of the RM-ODP standard.

A Federated Privacy-Enhancing Identity Management System (FPE-IMS)

Privacy and identity management should not been treated as generic problems providing generic solutions and architectures. A systematic approach is required against the problems of conducting identity management effortlessly, conveniently and smoothly solving interoperability problems that impede the communication and creation of unified infrastructures and produce an interoperable solution for identity management. This paper aims to contribute towards the proposal of a federated privacy-enhancing identity management system providing all the main tools and services in order address the major privacy requirements, required for the achievement of privacy aware e/m-transactions. This system can be embedded to each reconfigurable framework, enhancing privacy issues on existing web services based platforms, which delivers privacy-aware e/m-organizational services.

Application of Multi-criteria Analysis for the Creation of a Risk Assessment Knowledgebase for Biometric Systems

This paper, presents an enhanced version of a knowledgebase of vulnerabilities, risks and countermeasures for biometric systems. The knowledgebase was created by the application of the Multi-criteria Analysis methodology to the results of desk research, laboratory testing and interviews. The knowledgebase aims to improve risk assessment procedures, by adding the capability of analyzing the risk of the biometric component of an information system. The application of the knowledgebase is demonstrated for clarifying its functions.

Innovative, Secure and Interoperable E/M-Governmental Invoicing

Research into initiatives worldwide shows that although some of the legal and organizational barriers for the adoption of new technologies in e/m-government have been lifted, there are still not many implementations of actual e/m-government services that have been designed based on a common and systematic approach. The most prevailing requirements for e/m-government services, interoperability and security, pose major challenges to e/m-government architects and it is now being slowly understood that Web Services in combination with PKIs may provide the necessary solutions. In this context, this paper presents an innovative e/m-government service based on these technologies, focusing basically on their security and interoperability aspects. The goal of the paper is to demonstrate the services specifications and use cases so that it may act as example for further research and development.

An identity management protocol for Internet applications over 3G mobile networks

This paper, proposes a protocol (IDM3G) for implementing identity management for Internet applications over 3G mobile networks. IDM3G combines the identity management principles of the Liberty Alliance specifications, elements of the OASISs SAML and the 3GPP UMTS security specifications, targeting to a more effective and lightweight identity management solution than the existing ones. IDM3G instead of establishing new authentication and authorization mechanisms, utilizes the latest security features of 3G mobile networks in order to implement trust relationships, focusing on mutual authentication and authorization, avoiding at the same time the submission of the user identity itself.

A Secure Mobile Framework for m-Services

Public key infrastructures (PKIs) is recommended as the most appropriate solutions for achieving secure mobile services. This paper identifies the need for security in mobile communications and investigates the use of lightweight protocols such as the XML Key Management (XKMS) protocol for accessing PKI services. Finally it presents a secure mobile framework based on XML and Web Services-technologies and standards that adopts these protocols.

Applying the ISO RM-ODP standard in e-government

During the last years, governmental organizations have invested considerable effort and financial resources in the development and adoption of e-government services. In order to sustain the quality of their services, governmental organizations need to solve the problem of efficient and secure electronic exchange and processing of governmental documents and data. A major difficulty in this distributed deployment is the fact that these interconnected systems are heterogeneous and they may operate in multiple organisational domains. This paper demonstrates how the ISO/RM-ODP standard offers a general framework to design and develop an open distributed system attuned to e-government environments. This is subsequently supported by a high level case study of how this standard can be applied in the case of a system designed for small to medium sized European municipalities.