Franco Arcieri

Process Mining Manifesto

Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. There are two main drivers for the growing interest in process mining. On the one hand, more and more events are being recorded, thus, providing detailed information about the history of processes. On the other hand, there is a need to improve and support business processes in competitive and rapidly changing environments. This manifesto is created by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and aims to promote the topic of process mining. Moreover, by defining a set of guiding principles and listing important challenges, this manifesto hopes to serve as a guide for software developers, scientists, consultants, business managers, and end-users. The goal is to increase the maturity of process mining as a new tool to improve the (re)design, control, and support of operational business processes.

A layered IT infrastructure for secure interoperability in personal data registry digital government services

In this paper we describe the architectural solution defined and implemented to ensure secure interoperability among information technology (IT) systems managing personal data registries in Italian municipalities and Ministry of Interior. The architecture features a clear separation between security services, provided at an infrastructure level, and application services, exposed on the Internet as Web services. This approach has allowed to easily design and implement secure interoperability, since - notwithstanding the huge variety of IT solutions deployed all over the Italian municipalities to manage personal data registries - existing application services have not required major changes to be able to interoperate.

Experiences and issues in the realization of e-government services

Certification of the executed service is a critical issue for an e-government infrastructure. In fact, given the legal value that is often attached to data managed and exchanged by public administrations, being able to document the actual execution of e-services is of the utmost importance. This is made more complex in cases, as often happens in the public administration sector, where e-services are based on legacy systems managed by autonomous and independent organizations. In this paper we discuss, starting from real-life e-government systems developed in Italy, the introduction, within the standard three tier architecture for e-services, of new control components, based on efficient algorithmic techniques, providing solutions for this issue.

Coherence maintainance in cooperative information systems: the access key warehouse approach

In this paper, we present and discuss a novel architectural approach supporting the integration among legacy information systems of autonomous organizations. It is based on the use of a data wareho...

An integration approach to the management of geographical information: CARTECH

CARTECH, an SQL-based geographical information system, is presented. It is based on the integration approach, of coupling systems for dealing with traditional, descriptive data, with tools for the management of spatial data. Its key feature is the extension of the relational data model, to deal in a uniform way with both descriptive and spatial features of geographical information. The SQL language has also been extended in order to provide a uniform interface for processing both alphanumeric and spatial-geometric data. The architecture integrates the INGRES database management system for the treatment of non spatial data and the GEOTECH library for the management of spatial/geometric data. The article briefly describes the logical data model and focuses on architectural aspects of the developed integrated system, discussing the extended-SQL interpreter and query processor. An application of CARTECH to land resource management is presented and performances are discussed.<<ETX>>

Distributed territorial data management and exchange for public organizations

The development of information systems based on territorial data (e.g. land planning, geo-marketing, vehicle management, traffic guidance, etc.) is usually highly complex and expensive. A large part of the cost is due to the fact that the real value of geographical data for a given application purpose is highly dependent on the match between the data quality characteristics and the application target. On the other hand, high availability and easy exchange of territorial data relative to a given region are fundamental ingredients to support economic development in many service sectors that are increasingly based on IT systems. Hence, a critical issue for any public administration in its role as a policy-making organization is the definition of a techno-organizational infrastructure ensuring, at the same time, cooperation and competition in this critical market. In this paper, we describe fundamental ideas underlying a possible approach to deal with such an issue. The lines discussed have been implemented and tested in a system prototype developed in Italy, whose realization was promoted by the Italian Authority for Informatics in Public Administration (AIPA).

A Reference Architecture for the Certification of E-Services in a Digital Government Infrastructure

Certifying the execution of a service is a critical issue for an e-government infrastructure. In fact being able to document that an e-service was actually carried out, given the legal value that is often attached to data managed and exchanged by public administrations, is of the utmost importance. This is made more complex in cases, like it often happens in the public administration sector, where e-services are based on legacy systems managed by autonomous and independent organizations. In this paper we discuss the introduction, within the standard three tier architecture for e-services, of an architectural subsystem providing certification functions. This architecture features both physical and functional independence from the application level and is made up by new control components providing a highly efficient solution for certification requirements. Our solution has been successfully tested in real-world systems developed in Italy to support digital government functions.

SICC: An Exchange System for Cadastral Information

We discuss in this paper the major issues we faced during the design, proto- typing and implementation of the “Sistema di Interscambio Catasto-Comuni” (SICC), namely the system for italian cadastral data exchange among the main organizations involved in Italy with the treatment of cadastral information, that are Ministry of Finance, Municipalities, Notaries, and Certified Land Surveyors.

Verifying Extended Criteria for the Interoperability of Security Devices

In the next years, smart cards are going to become the main personal identification document in many nations. In particular, both Europe and United States are currently working to this aim. Therefore, tens of millions of smart cards, based on hardware devices provided by many different manufacturers, will be distributed all over the world, and used in particular to accomplish the security tasks of electronic authentication and electronic signature . In this context, the so called Common Criteria define the security requirements for digital signature devices. Unfortunately, these criteria do not address any interoperability issue between smart cards of different manufacturers, which usually implement digital signature process in still correct but slightly different ways. To face the interoperability problem, we realized a complete testing environment whose core is the Crypto Probing System ©Nestor Lab , an abstract interface to a generic cryptographic smart card, embedding a standard model of the correct card behavior, which can be used to test the digital signature process behavior, also in the presence of alternate or disturbed command sequences, in conjunction with automatic verification techniques such as model checking . The framework allows to verify abstract behavior models against real smart cards , so it can be used to automatically verify the Common Criteria as well as the extended interoperability criteria above and many other low-level constraints. In particular, in this paper we show how we can verify that the card, in the presence of a sequence of (partially) modified commands, rejects them without any side effect, remaining usable, or accepts them, generating a correct final result.

Certifying performance of cooperative services in a digital government framework

One of the major challenges in the digital government arena is the capability of providing good quality services to citizens. The critical issue is that for a given service a citizen usually interacts with a single provider even if service supply and management requires coordination and cooperation among many autonomous organizations. This means that a single user request spreads in the underlying distributed information system and activates a number of information flows among organizations involved, with various roles and responsibility, in service provision. A main issue is how events in the distributed system can be objectively monitored so that the service provider can (i) understand and manage problems in the overall service supply process and (ii) certify quality of provided service. What makes this scenario especially complex is that, beyond technical aspects, for any solution to be successful, it has to comply with requirements of independence and autonomy of the various organizations involved. In this paper we discuss how we tackled and solved this issue in real-world systems defined for the Italian public administration and argue that our solution can provide a reference architecture to deal with this kind of problem.