UPCITY: A SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE

FOR E-PARTICIPATION

Adrian Buzgar and Sabin Buraga

Faculty of Computer Science, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iaşi, Romania

Keywords: eGovernment, Rich internet application, Service-oriented architecture, GIS, Zoomable user interfaces.

Abstract: This paper proposes U

PCITY, a Service-Oriented Architecture for eGovernment. UPCITY tracks the stages of

a local community problem-solving workflow on an interactive map, by using a zoomable user interface, as

well as a timeline to add a temporal dimension to data present in the system. Usability related features, as

well as interoperability with popular social networks, are used to encourage citizen participation. We

provide an extensible platform by means of a flexible plug-in system, exemplified by an epidemic tracker.

1 INTRODUCTION

With eGovernment, technologies that are maturing

in the context of Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005) can be

leveraged to help governance reach a broader

audience and a closer, more direct relationship with

citizens. In most developed countries, the question is

no longer whether the government is present online,

but rather to what extent (Chadwick & May, 2003).

This work proposes U

PCITY, a collaborative

online platform which aims to involve citizens,

authorities and other third parties in a partnership for

local and regional development. In the current

implementation phase, our project seeks to increase

the efficiency of solving community problems at a

local level, and to facilitate information exchange

especially in the case of success stories at a national

level and even across state borders. Being a

platform, U

PCITY provides a flexible plug-in system

for other purposes, such as tracking epidemics.

The current technological backdrop together with

the pervasive nature of online social networking,

provide new avenues for eGovernment applications

to reach their users, with a better chance at fulfilling

the promise of democratizing governance. In the

case of our project, we consider that using popular

social networks, such as Twitter (Java et al., 2007),

can speed up information exchange and help raise

awareness, owing to the viral pattern of information

spread offered by microblogging.

From a technical perspective, we believe that

blending Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

(Dangermond, 2009) with current generation Rich

Internet Application (RIA) frameworks improves

usability. Moreover, in the case of such large data-

spaces, we use techniques such as zoomable user

interfaces (Gundelsweiler et al., 2007) to enhance

visualization and navigation.

The paper starts with a brief domain overview,

towards the end of which we point out a set of

principles that have shaped U

PCITY. We then

describe the Service-Oriented Architecture (Erl,

2005) of our platform, with emphasis on

interoperability and extensibility via the plug-in

system. Our work continues with a case-study that

lists key features of the current implementation

phase of the project. Finally, we lay out the next

phases of the project and come to conclusions.

2 RELATED WORK

A recent UN survey (UN, 2008a) placed Sweden,

Denmark and Norway in the top three positions of a

global eGovernment readiness index, with Romania

ranking 51

From an economic viewpoint, eGovernment is a

growing sector, with incentives coming from

governments and regional entities such as the

European Council, aimed at encouraging software

solutions to improve government services and

interaction with citizens and businesses. Initiatives

such as the European Union i2010 development

strategy (EC, 2005), focus on software for efficient

information dissemination for governance-related

325

Buzgar A. and Buraga S.

UPCITY: A SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR E-PARTICIPATION.

DOI: 10.5220/0002803703250332

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technology (WEBIST 2010), page

ISBN: 978-989-674-025-2

Figure 1: UpCity Architecture.

issues, but also increasingly on citizen participation

in the process of local and national decision making.

Projects geared towards eGovernment suffer

from the same development issues as any other

software, however the issue is often compounded by

the fact that such projects are funded through

taxpayer funds and should return investment through

effective and efficient use. U

PCITY was initially

planned as a submission for the Software Design

category of Imagine Cup 2009, one of the most

popular IT-oriented student competitions, organized

and sponsored by Microsoft. As such, we had less

practical financial issues to resolve, but rather

planned the system so as to reduce the total cost of

ownership for a future deployment with local

authorities.

A number of frameworks (Jones et al., 2007;

Gupta & Jana, 2003) have been proposed for the

purpose of evaluating eGovernment applications.

Authors contend that a fine-grained blend of social

and non-social factors need be considered when

evaluating eGovernment applications, rather than a

simple cost-benefit analysis. With the prevalence of

the Social Web in mind, we decided to avoid

creating a de novo online social network, but rather

to leverage the wide use of the most popular ones,

such as Facebook and Twitter, in order to quickly

spread information generated within our system.

Chadwick & May (2003) identified three major

interaction patterns for eGovernment applications:

‘managerial’, ‘consultative’, and ‘participative’. The

solution we present is aimed at the last, meaning the

truer form of citizen participation – or rather,

eParticipation (Macintosh, 2006). To achieve this

goal, we developed an interactive map onto which

we model a problem-solving workflow. By problems

we refer to infrastructure, health, education, public

safety, environmental or other issues, insofar as all

aspects submitted by citizens can have a clear

geographic context (e.g. their neighborhood). A

similar approach was used in an interdisciplinary

project for the metropolitan area of Venice, Italy

(Barbieri et al., 2009).

Having reviewed the above studies, a number of

goals emerged that we believe should increase the

likelihood of success of our approach: usability,

interoperability, openness, and extensibility.

Usability, as defined by the ISO (1998), is the

extent to which each context of use of an application

can achieve specified goals with effectiveness

(accuracy and completeness of a task), efficiency

(minimal amount of effort), and satisfaction.

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Interoperability refers to the broad use of Web

services for inter-platform communication, but also

3 ARCHITECTURE

3.1 Overview

Our proposed solution uses a Service Oriented

Architecture (SOA) structured on three layers, as

shown in Figure 1.

Considering usability, we have employed a Rich

Internet Application (Allaire, 2002) client-side

technology, namely Microsoft Silverlight (Scanlon,

2008; Papa, 2009). An important factor in our choice

was the availability of mapping tools for Silverlight.

We were thus able to integrate all aspects of user

interaction in the interactive map rich client.

Depending on the remoteness of a specific area,

mapping resolution – e.g. data granularity and

different levels of detail – may vary from one

provider to another. For that reason, U

PCITY offers

the possibility of dynamically changing the map

provider from a number of choices: Google Earth,

OpenStreetMap, Virtual Earth, and Yahoo Maps.

We were able to import accurate roadmap data

from the OpenStreetMap service and generate client-

side controls which can then be overlaid onto other

map tile-sources (e.g. satellite imagery). This in turn

led to the development of a lightweight plug-in for

community requested infrastructure which could be

used for rural areas where road access needs

improvement.

The rich client is also able to export reported

issues to Twitter via tinyURLs (automatically

shortened URLs), which can then be used to zoom in

directly to a problem of interest.

The mobile client of U

PCITY also resides in the

presentation tier. This is a separate application

directed at the needs of authorities in the field. Its

functionality is presented in the case study section.

The business logic of the application consists of

a modular service endpoint that defines a set of basic

operations available to different plug-ins, as well as

common services – e.g. spam filtering for the

comments. Access to the server-side ensues through

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), a

SOAP-based protocol (Gudgin et al., 2007).

Sensitive services are secured, whereas general

information retrieval services are left as a public

API.

The persistence layer is developed using SQL

2008 (chosen for its ability to index spatial data). It

exposes a safe and heterogeneous hierarchy of

entities used by plug-ins. SQL Server 2008 provides

a number of data mining opportunities (the business

intelligence module) we are exploring.

Figure 2: Plug-in System.

3.2 Details Regarding the UPCITY

Plug-in System

Extensibility is provided by a plug-in model

extending throughout each layer. Plug-ins can be

meant as core functionality (i.e. always-on, such as

the cartographic plug-in) or as actual extensions –

for example, the local community issues plug-in or

the epidemic tracking plug-in.

One noteworthy aspect is the actual management

of plug-ins as .NET or Silverlight assemblies. Since

Silverlight is actually a reduced subset of the .NET

runtime, the Dynamic Linking Libraries (DLLs)

compiled for the whole framework class set will not

function in Silverlight. In effect, two types of DLLs

are compiled, a specialized type for the client-side

and a general purpose type for the server-side, which

runs the entire .NET framework. This means that in

the case of plug-ins, common assemblies from

Figure 2 must be compiled for both platforms. In

Visual Studio, this process can be automated using

the SLAsm tool (Bendahan, 2009).

In the deployment phase, the U

PCITY rich client

currently only contains the base feature set necessary

to query the business server for available plug-ins,

which are then delivered and coupled at runtime,

based on user requests. Once a plug-in is installed,

its client-side assembly directs custom operations

towards the server-side assembly without knowledge

of the transport mechanism, which is safely hidden

UPCITY: A SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR E-PARTICIPATION

327

Figure 3: Issue Plug-in – the City Overview.

in the core assemblies. Likewise, the business logic

of each plug-in is responding unaware of the

communication channel. The same principle applies

to persisting custom plug-in entities, i.e. the actual

CRUD (Create-Read-Update-Delete) operations are

hidden behind a secure interface made available to

plug-ins.

4 CASE STUDY

4.1 Important Features

As previously stated, UPCITY uses a specific

workflow with community reported issues. The

following phases are observed:

Issue Reporting and Awareness Raising. In this

phase, citizens will submit problems they face in

their communities. However, before these problems

show up on the map with the identified status (the

blue icon), a validation is necessary. There are two

models present in the system that perform this task:

• An anonymous reporting system provides

citizens with an easier way of inputting

problems. This is however prone to abuse,

therefore a security policy only allows a limited

configurable amount of issues reported from a

unique address in a given time-frame (e.g. one

per day). This model is enforced on the client-

side by means of Silverlight locally stored

cookies and on the server-side by tracking

addresses. Both measures are completed with a

simple validation tool used by public servants

responsible with specific problem categories.

• Authenticated users do not have limits on the

number of reports; however, the same validation

from authorities is used to filter out spam and

other more subtle forms of abuse.

Once an issue has been validated, it is visible on

the overall map. All such entities are visualized

using the zoomable user interface using details on

demand (Shneiderman & Plaisant, 2004). In effect,

this means that most details associated with an

object are requested from the server and displayed

only when they are requested by the user, leaving

the interface free of clutter and unnecessary details.

Each issue has an associated information area

and toolset presented on the right side of Figure 3.

This includes facilities for a mini-forum – or a

similar social Web-based application – in which

other citizens can add comments and resources.

An important feature is community voting. This

can be used by authorities to assess the significance

of current problems and prioritize according to

public opinion. In order to further raise awareness,

we provide an easy method of exporting issues to a

user’s Twitter account. This generates a link that

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once followed by another individual, will navigate

PCITY directly to the relevant issue.

Issue Solving. This phase offers special features

for helping authorities in their efforts to solve the

reported issues. We have developed a separate

mobile client for this purpose, as shown in Figure 4.

It uses a GPS device to determine nearby reported

issues for public servants in the field. In

consequence, status reports and resources (e.g. on-

site taken photos) can be easily attached to existing

issues. The interface has been optimized for quick

access to information, through sorting based on

criteria like public opinion. This facility opens

interesting perspectives on eJournalism (Briggs,

2007).

All changes can be viewed from the Web client

in real-time, thanks to an asynchronous retrieval

mechanism. This in turn accelerates the flow of

information and makes the entire process more

efficient, besides the obvious interactivity bonus.

The Web client includes a separate management

panel for authorities. Status updates can be added

there, and the state of an issue can be changed to

reflect an applied solution. Another special feature is

that of finding similar solutions to local problems

based on previous results elsewhere. Thus, success

stories can be replicated, and inefficient measures

already taken by other local administrations can be

avoided.

Issue Closing (with positive feedback). Once a

solution has been reached – from the point of view

of the authorities – there are a number of ways to

“close” an issue. Once the state changes a feedback

process is activated, in which citizens may vote

again, this time to express their satisfaction with the

measures taken.

Depending on the initial public reaction and

other factors, a conclusion is reached in the system.

Positive or neutral results close the issue with a

green checkmark. Achieving this state will provide

satisfaction both to citizens and to public servants,

and as such promotes action and involvement on

both sides.

Issue Closing (with negative feedback or due to

inaction). In certain cases, the community may

decide that the authorities’ solution was inadequate,

in which case the corresponding icon signifies this

final state. This is also the state reached by issues

which have seen long periods of inactivity on the

part of the authorities.

Besides modeling the above workflow, we have

developed a number of other features to help

navigate the potentially large data-space, as well as

add a temporal dimension to the spatial data

presented.

All of the computation involved in the following

topics is carried out on the client machine. This is an

advantage for rich client visualizations, because it

completely offloads this task from the business

server.

Figure 4: UPCITY Mobile Client.

4.2 Tag-based Navigation

A simple folksonomy model (Fu, 2009) is used to

allow users to add significant tags to issues reported

in the system. Tags are then visually represented on

spokes coming out of each issue. Animated links are

then drawn and can be navigated towards all

matching issues present in the current visible area, as

shown in Figure 5.

This feature can then be used to assess the

outspread of a certain problem, locally as well as

regionally or globally, depending on the current

level of zooming.

4.3 Visual Approach for Searching

A number of aspects are important when discussing

search functionality for the UPCITY system. Firstly,

since most information of interest to a specific user

will be in their immediate locality – i.e. their

neighborhood or city – and the respective data is at

least partially already displayed on the client

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Figure 5: Tag-based Navigation.

machine, in most cases searches will not incur

server-side queries, but instead filter already loaded

data. Secondly, rather than display results in a list,

PCITY can take advantage of the interactive map

and show results directly at their location.

The actual process is an animation that

emphasizes matching issues by slightly increasing

their size. Moreover, non-matching data is de-

emphasized, depending on entity type – respectively

non-matching issues are grayed out and reduced in

size, while non-matching infrastructure entities (e.g.

roads) are left grayed-out, without other visual

transformations.

As such, a quick visual transition attracts the

viewer’s attention toward relevant items.

4.4 Local Statistics

The concept of locality is also used for statistics.

From the perspective of local authorities, it is only

natural that a top of the most promoted issues should

only include local data. Consequently, as the visible

area is shifted and other cities are viewed, voting

data is recalculated based on the specific locality and

shown. Since this is done in real-time, interesting

trends in issue popularity can be observed, as a

problem visibly gains the support of the local

community, and proper measures can be taken.

In order to promote a positive competition

between communities, a composite CityRank index

is computed based on community involvement and

local authorities’ efficiency. This is evident in

Figure 3 in the top-left corner.

Figure 6: U

PCITY timeline facility.

4.5 Timeline

Mapping data is a traditionally associated with static

imagery. However, in the UPCITY platform the

process involved in identifying and solving

community issues has a natural temporal dimension.

This can be depicted using the timeline facility,

which basically adds a movie control box to the

map. Figure 6 shows how user voting occurs over

time, once the timeline has been started. As the

timeline progresses, new issues will appear on the

map and older ones will switch states until they

hopefully become solved and eventually disappear.

The natural objective is then to have as few

unsolved problems as possible and to dispatch new

issues efficiently.

4.6 Extensibility Showcase: Epidemics

Using data gathered from the World Health

Organization, a plug-in was developed for

monitoring the outspread of the recent swine

influenza pandemic.

The timeline functionality, presented in the

previous section, was reused to display a worldwide

evolution of reported cases and deaths for swine flu

in May-June 2009. Only countries with reported

cases had graphical controls overlaid onto the

default satellite imagery. A snapshot regarding the

Central Europe status is visible in Figure 7.

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Figure 7: Swine flu tracker, the Central Europe snapshot.

5 CURRENT RESULTS

The UPCITY platform was initially planned and

developed during the Imagine Cup 2009 competition

(www.imaginecup.com), an IT-oriented event

organized by Microsoft, which has reached over

three hundred thousand participants in 2009.

The project was submitted in the Software

Design category of the competition, and won the 1st

Prize during the finals in Cairo, Egypt, in July 2009.

The competition emphasized the theme “Imagine a

world where technology helps solve the world’s

toughest challenges” and a strong relation to the

United Nations proposed MDG – Millennium

Development Goals (UN, 2008b). All issue-related

icons present in Figures 3-6 are the official icons

used by the UN to depict MDGs.

During the competition, our team has entered a

partnership with the City Hall of Iasi (pop.:

400,000), Romania, and is currently in the final

phases of deploying a pilot for the local community.

6 FURTHER RESEARCH

The next stage of our project is the local deployment

and subsequent customization of UPCITY in order to

better adapt it to the needs of the city of Iasi.

Although internal data can be accessed through our

SOAP API and linked via Twitter, there is so far no

way for search engines to index it. This is a common

problem with thick client technologies.

A possible solution would be to mirror the

internal database to a semantic repository and

remodel entities using the widespread RDF –

Resource Description Framework (Becket et al.,

2004) model, in order to provide a SPARQL

endpoint for reusing data in the context of Linked

Data initiative (Bizer, Heath & Berners-Lee, 2009).

7 CONCLUSIONS

This paper has proposed UPCITY, an eGovernment

platform aimed at eParticipation. By implementing

novel visualization patterns (zoomable user

interfaces, details-on-demand), usability increased.

This coupled with the existing feature set (i.e.

monitoring community issues in both spatial and

temporal dimensions) encourages citizens to become

involved in a partnership for development with local

authorities.

PCITY not only tends to the needs of citizens,

but also to those of public servants. A dedicated

mobile GPS client was developed for aiding

personnel in the field with tracking nearby issues

and providing status updates.

The proposed platform uses a Service-Oriented

Architecture, as well as a flexible plugin system to

ensure openness and extensibility. As showcased,

our system can be extended to other purposes, such

as tracking current pandemics (e.g. swine influenza).

Overall, U

PCITY leverages current Web

technologies, as well as the success of popular

online social networks, in order to serve the interests

of not only individuals, but entire communities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We need to acknowledge the efforts of the other two

members of the Imagine Cup Software Design team,

Călin Juravle and Andreas Resios, graduates of the

Faculty of Computer Science, 'A.I. Cuza' University

of Iasi, Romania. We also thank Microsoft, the

organizers of Imagine Cup 2009, for helping our

project gain much traction and visibility. Last but

not least, we thank the City Hall of Iaşi, Romania for

their valuable support.

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