Keywords: Interoperability, Enterprise Systems, Architectures, eGovernment, eBusiness.

Abstract: During the last few years, research and practice worldwide have shown that enhancing interoperability among organizations, systems or software applications is a multi-disciplinary issue of critical importance, touching upon processes, data and technical standardization. Fortunately, researchers and practitioners have started to realize the impact of interoperability in achieving true one-stop service provision for citizens and businesses, in fostering collaboration between enterprises or in minimizing the needed investment for maintaining complex systems. Current research results show that there exist common practices to be shared among public sector organisations and private sector enterprises, in attempts related with aligning organisation and processes, tackling semantic and technical shortcomings, building relevant architectures and finally achieving the legal interconnection and co-operation of systems. The identification of such common areas between eBusiness and eGovernment can then lead to a joint exploration, enhance reuse of the real paradigms and real exploitation of results by enterprises and administrations. Also future interoperability research directions, as emerging from relevant strategies and research roadmaps of important stakeholders, and also from relevant research workshops, are outlined. Furthermore, it is argued that interoperability research should be extended towards "knowledge interoperability" as well, and deal with the development of methods and architectures enabling the exchange of knowledge among co-operating organizations.

Keywords: Interoperability Architectures, Electronic Transactions, Service Integration.

Abstract: Escalating economic and societal demands of today, along with the continuous advancements in ICT, push enterprises and administrations to move towards networked paradigms and leverage electronic transactions in their everyday practices. Although technical solutions providing the necessary interoperability means to enable such practices have been rigorously provided during the last years, their adoption and application by the foregoing stakeholders still remains limited. Several qualities of the existing solutions in technical and business level concerning the way the manage workflows, data mappings, business and legal rules along with the use of proprietary technologies and their inability to be readily set up and deployed, act as the main inhibitors for any potential users. The present work discusses the characteristics of the predominant centralized and decentralized architectural patterns for eTransactions, identifies the weak points of every case and proposes a hybrid architectural approach that brings together the "best of breed" of both paradigms. Additionally, specific insights, methodologies and underlying technologies are proposed with an objective to support the effective implementation of the proposed architecture and its basic components.

Keywords: eGovernment, Process Modeling, Interoperability, Public Administration Portals, Municipal Services.

Abstract: Public Administration desks are in any country the most active point of transactions between the state governments and the citizens. This fact emphasises the importance of services offered by Public Administrations and in the modern technological era, it is essential for Information Technology to provide solutions for transforming these traditionally offered services into electronic transactions that could be initiated over the Internet, aiming at the facilitation of the citizen's life, who is the eventual "client" of any government.. Although public administrations have strived over the last few years to meet this goal, their individual attempts resulted in isolated, ad-hoc systems, offering a small piece of the whole service bouquet. As the connectivity generated by the Internet is opening new opportunities in service delivery, public administrations are seeking ways to deliver integrated value-adding services though an Interoperable environment. The goal of a systematic service composition, which will guarantee eGovernment Interoperability, can be accomplished with an effective method of modeling the public services, in order to expose their interfaces and their actual workflow. Applying this method in Greek Municipalities by respecting the context of the emerging Greek eGovernment Interoperability Services Framework, various services have been analyzed, leading to corresponding generic process patterns.

Keywords: Semantic Interoperability, Data Modeling, Business and Government Semantics, Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS), Universal Business Language (UBL)

Abstract: The dawn of the XML era appears insufficient to guarantee a holistic approach in electronic transactions, as long as the semantics confusion, the lack of a common understanding of the underlying data and the business standards dilemma prevail and prevent data interoperability issues from being resolved. As various e-Government initiatives are being realized throughout the world, an imperative need for creating unified governmental data models that will facilitate the seamless exchange of information and the deployment of interoperable systems in Enterprises and Central, Regional and Municipal Government emerges. After attempting to identify relevant research that has been undertaken in the field of data modeling, the present paper analyzes the scope and the objectives of the business information modeling oriented towards governmental data. Based on UBL (Universal Business Language) and CCTS (Core Components Technical Specification), a component-based data modeling methodology enhancing business-to-government interoperability is proposed, creating the basis for a repository of governmental data models. The approach adopted may also serve as guidelines for creating and transitioning between "generic - harmonized" and "specific - contextualized" documents. A real world paradigm extracted from the Periodic VAT Statement document finally comes to prove the soundness of the proposed methodology.

Keywords: Interoperability, eGovernment, Maturity Matrix.

Abstract: Targeting systematic and formal description methods for interoperability levels of public sector organisations and systems is emerging as an important research challenge in interoperability for governments and administrations. The Government Interoperability Maturity Matrix (GIMM) that is proposed in this paper aims to provide administrations with a simple, self-evaluation method that can be used to assess the current status of the administrations concerning eGovernment interoperability and the steps that need to be taken to improve their positioning in respect to system implementation and services provision to citizens and businesses. The paper expands the three types of interoperability considered in the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) identifying several Interoperability Attributes that need to be taken into consideration in order to evaluate each organisation positioning in eGovernment interoperability and presents the rational of the Methodology that has been formulated and introduced. Within this modeling context, levels of existing interoperability status of organisations are clearly defined, while certain practices or directions lead to interoperability state changes within the maturity matrix.