Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

A great part of applications is increasingly based on the Internet and the needs for changes in these applications happen in shorter and shorter periods. Companies, governments and people who wait for almost instantaneous implementations of those changes stimulate this scenario of high demand for changes. In the context of these fast changes, the approaches based on business rules are aiming for an implementation of solutions that are more flexible to changes and that are in a language easily understandable to business people in a business perspective. This article presents a proposal of a Business Rule Engine customized for e-Government applications, considering the componentization and/or Web “servicification” of life event applications with access to several legacy back office systems. The proposed Business Rule Engine is in conformance with the Business Semantics of Business Rules (BSBR) meta-model, which is in its final phase of specification by OMG.

The use of Information and Communication Technologies in governmental process and services, often known as e-Government, has gained momentum over the last decade. The demands for the on-line delivery of each time more complex and citizen-centric services and also the need for enabling citizen participation in governmental processes and decisions have created a series of technological challenges. If, on one hand, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) appears as a natural and direct solution for problems like heterogeneity, on the other, issues like how to deal with the dynamism of the processes, the autonomy of the different entities involved and the privacy of data being exchanged still must be treated. We present in this article the first steps towards an effective solution to dynamically compose e-government services. These compositions are mediated through policies which provide different levels of autonomy and privacy in the involved interactions. Semantics are used to help building up the compositions, which are made effective through techniques like Orchestration, Choreography or a combination of both.

Incorporating security in the application development process is a fundamental requirement for building secure applications, especially with regard to security sensitive domains, such as e-government. In this paper we follow a novel approach to demonstrate how the process of developing an e-poll application can be substantially facilitated by employing a specialized security ontology. To accomplish this, we describe the security ontology we have developed, and provide a set of indicative questions that developers might face, together with the solutions that ontology deployment provides.

There have been cases, in recent years, where customer information or other personal information has been leaked, and protective measures for personal information have become important. Corporations and other organizations have increasingly adopted software with e-mail monitoring capability to prevent leakage of personal information to the outside through e-mail. However, if the e-mail is encrypted, it is completely impossible to check whether personal information is being improperly sent. The authors have designed and implemented a system for solving such problems. Experiments to detect personal information were conducted using the implemented system, and we were able to confirm the basic effectiveness of the system. This paper reports on those results.

During eGovernment processes often sensitive data are worked on. The authorization to work on or pass data on should not only of security policy certainly, but also by the technology and/or Business Process support systems (BPS Systems) to be supported. HyPR&A, hybrid process-oriented role and task security model, is a model for eGovernment organizations, which support eGovernment processes. In this article HyPR&A is developed and adapted on basis of architecture for Workflow Enactment services for BPS System

Modern hospital environments represent complex, distributed, and cross-organisational enterprises with a variety of complex and distributed systems applications. They include a multitude of resources at different places, they have to accommodate real-time requirements, and they have to support rather complicated and, in many cases, unforeseeable business processes. Many processes must strictly follow certain sets of rules, and both process and resource usage have to be dynamically optimized to guarantee the best service to all patients at all times. This paper discusses how state-of-the art agent technology, enriched with expressive policy constraints, can be used to support provision of better quality care for patients and more efficient health service delivery to health professionals. We apply results of our research in multi-agent systems and policy modelling to a set of requirements in the e-health domain.

This paper focuses on factors affecting the use of Information and communication technologies within a primary health care environment. A case study was carried out to investigate opinions and views of Primary Health Care staff on the provision of electronic health in the UK. The study found that in addition to anticipated concerns such as cost, clinician attitudes to IT, and organisational culture, staff also had concerns such as security and psychological aspects of implementing electronic health among others. The paper discusses the findings of the study and makes recommendations for best practice to ensure success in the pursuit of electronic health in the UK.

This paper takes as background voter apathy and the emergence of petitions as a mechanism for political activity and considers the role of e-petitioning. It describes how an e-Petitioning System is being used to support the Scottish Parliament’s four key principles of: sharing power; accountability; access and participation; and equal opportunities. It highlights the increasing uptake of e-petitions and the gradual understanding of how the integrated discussion forum can be used to facilitate dialogue on issues raised.

We briefly describe the Scottish Parliament Petitions processes and outline the key features of the e-Petitioner System, before showing how the e-Petitioner supports these Parliamentary processes. With a wealth of experience gained through operating the e-Petitioner System successfully at a national level, we then describe how this facilitated the re-engineering of the System for the specific needs of two Local Authorities in England.

Voting technology has seen various changes over the time, starting from traditional ballot voting system to the latest e-voting system. But technology couldn’t affect the popularity of ballot voting system though it doesn’t provide desirable blend of accessibility and efficiency. We believe that an architecture that combines the efficiency of current day technology and the ease of ballot voting system will revolutionize voting. We propose a novel architecture for voting system that uses multiple channels (ATM, Internet, cellular phone, telephone and ballot) and multiple databases to show that it is ideal in achieving accessibility, efficiency, feasibility and flexibility. We show through simulations that the proposed multi channel voting system is suitable for several countries. We compare the cost of this voting system with the traditional one in different scenarios with the help of a new metric.

FrAmework for Multi-agency Environments (FAME) is one of 23 national projects within the e-government strategy to reform and modernize local services in England. Six local projects each worked with an IT supplier (known as a technology partner) to produce a technical system for the exchange and management of client / patient information across agency and professional boundaries. All participants, including the technology partners, insisted that FAME was about people, organizations and change more that it was about technology. This paper draws upon the successes and setbacks of these local projects in order to report some urgent lessons for the implementation of e-government initiatives that involve new working practices for front-line practitioners.