A SEMIOTIC APPROACH FOR FLEXIBLE E-GOVERNMENT

SERVICE ORIENTED SYSTEMS

Rodrigo Bonacin

CenPRA, MCT, Rodovia Dom Pedro I, km 143,6, 13069-901, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

M. Cecilia C. Baranauskas

Institute of Computing, Unicamp, Caixa Postal 6176, 13083 970, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

Thiago Medeiros dos Santos

CESET, Unicamp, Rua Paschoal Marmo, 1888, Limeira, São Paulo, Brazil

Keywords: Organisational Semiotics, Tailoring, Service Oriented Architecture, e-Government.

Abstract: E-Gov is a multidisciplinary field which addresses many issues ranging from the social sciences to the

technological ones. One of the big challenges is the underlying complexity to elicit and model requirements.

In practice it is quite hard to encompass the requirements of all citizens or organisations involved in the

project. To deal with this challenge we propose a flexible distributed systems approach, which allies

tailoring concepts to Organisational Semiotics methods in a SOA based architecture. It is based on two

Organisational Semiotics methods: the Semantic Analysis, which delivers a stable ontology of the context,

and the Norm Analysis, that can be used to specify the volatile individual and collective requirements. The

paper shows how norms changes in high level interfaces can have effect on different components of the

software architecture. The architecture is experimented in a proof of concept for an e-Gov project.

1 INTRODUCTION

E-Gov systems represent a typical scenario in which

the integration of human factors in a distributed

system is a critical condition for the interaction and

communication between the involved parts. While it

is a multidisciplinary field and addresses many

issues ranging from the social sciences to the

technological ones, a lot of research efforts have

been put in the technology. The use of

interoperability techniques is especially important in

e-Gov. Several projects are adopting Service-

Oriented Architectures (SOA) solutions to deal with

the interoperability problems.

Besides providing alternative ways of accessing

public services, e-Gov projects are also considered

an opportunity to promote the digital inclusion of the

less favoured people and societies. This diversity of

users and needs certainly represents one of the big

challenges of the Human-Computer Interaction and

Requirements Engineering fields for the integration

of human factors in distributed systems. Citizens

with different abilities, educational levels, physical

conditions and preferences require flexible interfaces

and services.

The development of multiple end-user interfaces

and back-office services that implement all citizens’

needs and preferences is certainly impracticable. To

deal with this challenge, in this work we propose an

approach to create flexible distributed systems,

which aims to make the software adaptation and

personalization a smoother process.

By using proper tools, specialists in social

inclusion, domain specialists and the citizens could

themselves adapt and maintain the system, at least in

part, according to volatile individual and collective

requirements.

Changes in features of distributed system, such

as the related to the business process execution,

quality of service and security, can cause collective

effects on the system use. In resource constrained

environments it is necessary to define who can adapt

each aspect of the system (i.e. users, domain

381

Bonacin R., Cecilia C. Baranauskas M. and Medeiros dos Santos T. (2007).

A SEMIOTIC APPROACH FOR FLEXIBLE E-GOVERNMENT SERVICE ORIENTED SYSTEMS.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 381-386

DOI: 10.5220/0002358803810386

 SciTePress

specialists, managers, and designers), when this

adaptation can be done, and where and how it is

done. In order to answer these questions it is

necessary to analyse the social aspects that result in

the definition of responsibilities, duties and

permissions of the agents over the system.

We draw on the idea of Tailoring and on the

theoretical and methodological background of

Organisational Semiotics to design for flexibility.

“Tailoring” can be understood as “the activity of

modifying a computer application within the context

of its use” (Kahler et al., 2000, p. 1). The

“Organisational Semiotics” theories and methods

help us to comprehend the organised behaviour by

studying the use of signs in the real world.

The paper is organised as follows: Section 2

discusses the application of OS concepts and

methods, Section 3 discusses an alternative to

provide flexible e-Gov systems, Section 4 presents

the proposed architecture, methods and tools,

Section 5 discusses a proof of concept, and Session

6 concludes.

2 ORGANISATIONAL

SEMIOTICS CONCEPTS AND

METHODS IN DISTRIBUTED

SYSTEM DESIGN

Semiotics, the ancient doctrine of signs, leads us to a

precise understanding of information as various

properties of signs. Anything standing for another

thing or used to signify something else (Peirce,

1931-1958) is an example of a sign: words,

sentences, traffic lights, diagrams, a wave of hand or

a facial expression.

From a semiotic point of view, people can

communicate across multiples organisations, cities,

or countries by sharing signs (socially constructed)

through distributed systems support. By studying the

use of signs in the organised behaviour,

Organisational Semiotics (Liu, 2000) theory and

methods can support us in understanding and

modelling social aspects of distributed systems. In

the e-Gov, entities have to collaborate by using

computational system in order to deliver services to

the population. Semantic, Pragmatic and Social

aspects have influence of in the information sharing

and reuse; methods such Semantic and Norm

analysis (Stamper et al., 1988) can represent the

domain knowledge in order to promote the

interoperability (Fu and Liu, 2006).

In order to reduce the complexity of constructing

tailorable systems, we propose the separation of the

system into two parts (Bonacin et al., 2004): a

“static” part that can be adapted or modified by

programmers, and a “dynamic” part that can be

adapted or modified by end-users (or domain

specialists). We argue that the division of the

“static” and the “dynamic” parts should be mostly

based on social aspects surrounding the system

usage domain.

The architecture and tools to support the

construction of “tailorable” systems is based on two

methods of Organisational Semiotics (Liu, 2000).

The first method adopted is the Semantic Analysis,

which delineates the area of concern of an

organisation and identifies the basic patterns of

behaviour (affordances) of their agents. The

Semantic Analysis produces a stable ontology of the

context. This ontology describes the semantic of the

signs used in a distributed system.

The second method is the Norm Analysis, which

describes the relationships between an intentional

use of signs and the resulting behaviour of

responsible agents in a social context; they also

describe the beliefs, expectations, commitments,

contract, law, culture, as well as business. Besides

the description of the agents’ responsibilities in the

organisation, Norm Analysis can also be used to

analyse the responsibilities of maintaining, adapting

and personalising the system features.

The dynamic part of a “tailorable” system can be

derived from norm specifications; when a norm is

changed or adapted in a specific situation, the

system is also modified. The norms specify what can

be changed and also who is responsible and how the

dynamic part can be changed.

3 PROVIDING AN

E-GOVERNMENT FLEXIBLE

SOLUTION

Information sharing, universal access,

confidentiality, interoperability, open architecture

and standardization are usually addressed in e-Gov

projects (Marchionini et al. 2003). Governments

from the local to the national administration levels

have developed and deployed Information Systems

on the Web and are widely using Information

Technology (IT) in order to promote access to

information, completion of transaction services and

citizen participation (Marchionini et al. 2003).

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) (Newcomer

and Lomow, 2004) has been increasingly used as an

alternative to deal with interoperability issues due to

the very heterogeneous back-office (internal IT

infrastructure) of the public area, and to provide

multi-channel access to e-Gov services.

ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

382

We can understand SOA not only from its

technological features, which emphasize

interoperability, reuse, flexibility, among others, but

also as a wider term, which includes concepts,

policies and practices used to provide relevant

services for their customers (Sprott and Wilkes,

2004). According to this point of view, it is

necessary to identify and design relevant and

adapted services from the customer perspective in

order to develop valuable systems.

Nowadays, Web Services is the most popular

technology to implement SOA. In many cases, e-

Gov interoperability patterns give a special attention

to Web Services patterns. In this paper we consider

the Web Services technology and the concepts

behind them as our implementation platform.

We aim to provide architecture and tools for

supporting the construction of “tailorable” SOA

based system. These tools adopt open standards and

web technology to promote the flexibility in SOA

based systems. The tools support the adaptation of

the front-office and back-office systems based on the

modification in norms modelling.

Regarding the front-office, the system can be

adapted for example to multiple devices, necessities,

and preferences through the specification of norms

that are present in each context of use. Each citizen

could adapt the interface according to their needs;

specialists in digital inclusion could customize the

interface to facilitate the system accesses, and

business specialists and/or designers could change

the front-office according to the business changes.

Norms are used to specify aspects related to the

system usage as well as business. In many cases

norms can be linked to end-user interface elements

that represent actions that should be done by the

agents; therefore, if the norm changes the system

will also change. The norms also specify the access

to the interface that provides tailoring and who has

the authority to change each group of norms.

Regarding the back-office, services

orchestrations, compositions, qualities, and network

settings can be defined by modifications in norms

specifications. For example, norms can specify who

can approve a requirement in a business process. A

business specialist could change this norm.

4 ARCHITECTURE AND TOOLS

Figure 1 shows an overview of the architecture for

flexible e-Gov systems. This architecture provides

the platform independency between front-office and

back-office systems by using Web Services

technology. We can have multiple tailorable end-

user interfaces implemented using different

technologies, accessing heterogeneous back-office

systems. These interfaces are individually or

simultaneous affected by the norms.

The ICE (Interface Configuration Environment)

acts changing the front-office, the services

orchestration, and back-office systems. The ICE

receive context information from the architecture

components, evaluate the norms related to context

by using an inference machine and return to the

components an action plan with the changes do be

done.

The NBIC (Norm Based Interface Configurator)

receives the norm specification in Deontic logic,

manage the norms persistence, and also transform it

in a platform specific language that can be

interpreted by an inference machine on ICE. The

norms can be specified or changed by using norm

modellers, programs that aims to provide high level

interfaces for the users. In the architecture, a norm

modeller is any application which specifies or

changes norms through the NBIC.

According to Figure 1, Norms can also be

captured from the system usage and passed to NBIC;

the front-office interface can capture activities that

result on parameters that inform some norms related

to the system usage. In these interfaces, norms

descriptions are not explicitly specified by the users.

4.1 Example of Usage

Figure 2 shows the interaction between a norm

modeller, the NBIC, the ICE, and a hypothetical e-

Gov system. The following simplified scenario

illustrates how this interaction occurs:

System B

Back-office

service tier

System C

Back-office

service tier

System A

Back-office

service tier

WSDL/SOAP

Service Orchestration

ICE NBIC

WSDL/SOAP

Internet

Portal

Other Interfaces

Norm Modellers

Figure 1: The Architecture Overview.

A SEMIOTIC APPROACH FOR FLEXIBLE E-GOVERNMENT SERVICE ORIENTED SYSTEMS

383

– A business specialist specifies the following

norm by using the norm modeller interface:

Whenever a citizen request a medical

examination, If the responsible Physician has

free schedule positions (s)he is Obliged to

Confirm the Appointment to the next position;

– The norm modeller tools include the norm in the

NBIC by accessing service operations;

– The NBIC translates the norms to a platform

specific language required by the inference

machine, and include in the ICE database;

– The system access the ICE sending the context

information, through a “perception mechanism”,

it could inform for example: the logged user is

the Physician responsible for the examination,

and there is a request on the queue;

– The ICE infers actions to be done by using the

norms specifications and the context

information. It could infer that: Physician is

Obliged to Confirm the Appointment to the next

free position;

– By using rules that link the norm (Bonacin et al.,

2004) to system actions in an action plan, it can

infer that: a service that manage the schedule

and an interface to confirm the appointment

must be called at each logon;

– The system receives the actions to be done by

accessing the ICE, and an action mechanism

interprets the action plan.

Figure 2: Example of NBIC and ICE in use.

4.2 Tailoring Multiple Architectural

Components

In the architecture, the tailoring activities can result

in changes at multiples components. The next

sessions briefly show alternatives to the construction

of tailorable components.

4.2.1 Tailoring the Front-Office Interface

In order to facilitate the construction of the

perception and action mechanisms and to improve

the productivity of the front-office development, we

have developed the Tailoring Framework (TF)

(Figure 3), which provides developers with an

extension of the Apache Struts Framework (Husted

et al., 2006), a largely used framework for web

development with Java technology.

The static part of the interface can be

implemented as a regular Struts application, and the

dynamic part is specified through new tags to be

included into JSP (Java Server Pages) source code

that access XML based files with the adaptable and

extensible content. The XML files content substitute

the parts indicated as tailorable during the execution

time. It will produce code that can be interpreted by

the web browsers such as: html and script languages.

The information about the application context is

captured by the TF and inserted into ICE in a

transparent way.

Based on the norms specification, the inference

machine infers actions to be done. The actions are

captured by the framework and included in session

variables. Additional tags access the session

variables with the action plan and specify where

changes in the interface will occur and the content to

be presented according to the XML files. The XML

files specify objects and components that are

modified according to the inferred action. The tags

also encapsulate the complexity of representing

norms and usage information.

Figure 3: The Tailoring Framework.

An additional tool, the AMPI tool, can be used

by an interface specialist to manipulate the XML

files. As the interface is defined by the actions

inferred by norms interpretation, the end-user

ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

384

application interface provides to them the

opportunity to change the system by changing the

norms specification.

4.2.2 Tailoring the Service Orchestrations

In SOA, services can be orchestrated and composed

in order to constitute complex services according to

business requirements. Nowadays, BPEL (Business

Process Execution Language) (Thatte et al., 2003)

engines are widely used for this purpose.

In the architecture, part of the process is defined

using BPEL and part using norms. As a final result,

when a norm is changed the effects are reflected in

the orchestration. Figure 4 shows the ICE interaction

with business processes execution. In this

alternative, several processes of different engines

instances can invoke the ICE as a partner link.

Figure 4: ICE and Business Processes Execution.

The BPEL invocation element can be distributed

over multiple points of each process specification in

order to inform the usage aspects from different

parts of the architecture. The norms are not

necessarily attached to a specific business process,

but some norms are valid in a wider context, since

they are specified into ICE.

The norms evaluate the context as a whole and

the actions can have effects on many processes. An

action plan is received by each process, and BPEL

eventHandlers deal with each action to be done.

Process activities and decisions are associated to

each action.

4.2.3 Tailoring the Back-Office

According to Figure 5, for each service exported by

the back-office, an additional operation was included

that implements an action mechanism, which

evaluates the action plan and does the appropriated

changes. The back-office service tier links the

actions to the back-office elements.

The main difficulties in the back-office tier

adaptation are the presence of legacy systems with

low level of flexibility. The actions and

consequently the effect of the norm changes on

back-office are restricted by the legacy system

flexibility. However, the flexible part of the systems

(even if small), and the new flexible back-office

services can be changed by norms if the

appropriated mapping is done. For each system, a

specific strategy should be applied according to the

internal architecture of the back office system.

Figure 5: Back-Office tailoring.

Additionally the back-office system should also

provide context information for the ICE. According

to Figure 5, a service tier encapsulates the access

and provides the data structure required by ICE.

5 THE APPLICATION OF THE

PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE

The architecture was applied to a proof of concept in

a web site of an e-Gov project that we are

conducting (Bonacin et. al., 2006). The town of

Catanduva is based on agricultural activities, and it

is starting an industrialization process. The majority

of Catanduva citizens has few or no access to IT

infrastructure.

We were contacted to provide a solution to allow

the citizens to access the government services, but

understanding “access” in a broad sense, i.e., we

were called to design a technically and socially

accessible way of allowing the citizens to effectively

interact with the system. The architecture was

applied in a minimalist web site design where the

citizens could participate of the project given

opinions and including questions about issues

related to the main public areas such as: education,

healthcare, tributes, sport and transport.

We have explored three scenarios: the access by

people with subnormal vision, the access by people

with difficulty to use the mouse, and a business

requirement change that results in the necessity to

audit the site.

Although this web site is not big enough to stress

all the architectural features, it pointed out some

A SEMIOTIC APPROACH FOR FLEXIBLE E-GOVERNMENT SERVICE ORIENTED SYSTEMS

385

issues to be addressed in the practical application in

real use:

– Performance and scalability issues. The ICE acts

as a core element of the architecture, the

application requests the ICE many times even in

simple tasks. This issue can be addressed by

using replication and parallel processing;

– Security issues. Some elements of the

architecture and tools present security faults, for

example: there is not an authentication of norms

modellers;

– Norms complexity and versioning. In a real

situation the number of norms to be manipulated

can be to too high. The manipulation of norms

can be too complex in some cases.

Functionalities such as: conflict detection, and

versioning could improve the NBIC efficiency.

These requirements are important to the

application of the architecture in other services of

the Project, which will be used in large scale (e.g.

healthcare appointments). However the main

objective of the architecture to provide flexibility

was achieved in the proof of concept.

6 CONCLUSIONS

E-Gov systems require flexible applications due to

the diversity of users and stakeholders. The

Semantic and Norm analysis help us to construct a

detailed modelling of the organisation and the

communication process in a distributed system. In

addition it also provides an indication of what are

the static and volatile requirements.

Architecture and tools take advantage of this

property for the construction of flexible distributed

systems. This architecture makes use of SOA

principles to provide links between the Norm

specification in high level interfaces and the changes

at different and heterogeneous components. A case

study was conducted in order to evaluate the

architecture.

As further work we propose the improvement of

the architecture in order to be more flexible, scalable

and secure; we are also improving the support for

norm specification and manipulation. A deeper

analysis of the norm changes occurrences and the

capabilities to reflect changes in e-Gov systems will

be also investigated in next steps.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank CNPq (476381/2004-5) for funding this

project, and colleagues from NIED, IA, IC at

Unicamp, and CenPRA for valuable contributions.

REFERENCES

Bonacin, R., Baranauskas M.C.C., and Liu, K. (2004).

Interface Design for the Changing Organisation: an

organisational semiotics Approach. In Virtual,

Distributed and Flexible Organisations, Kecheng Liu

(Ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 15, 236-256.

Bonacin, R.,

Simoni, C. A. C., Melo, A. M., and

Baranauskas, M. C. C. (2006). Organisational

Semiotics: Guiding a Service-Oriented Architecture

for e-Government. Proceedings of International

Conference on Organisational Semiotics, M. C. C.

Baranauskas and K. Liu (Eds.), 47-58.

Fu, Y. and Liu K. (2006). Design of Interoperable Content

Management Using Semiotic Methods. Proceedings of

International Conference on Organisational

Semiotics, M. C. C. Baranauskas and K. Liu (Eds.),

37-46.

Husted T., Dumoulin C., Franciscus G., Winterfeldt D.,

and McClanahan, C. R. (2002). Struts in Action:

Building Web Applications with the Leading Java

Framework. Manning Publications.

Kahler, H, Morch, A., Stiemerling, O. and Wulf, V.

(2000). Special Issue on Tailorable Systems and

Cooperative Work, Computer Supported Cooperative

Work, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1 (9).

Liu K. (2000). Semiotics in information systems

engineering, Cambridge. University Press.

Marchionini, G., Samet, H., and Brandt, L. (2003). Digital

government. Communications of the ACM, 46(1), 25-

27.

Newcomer E., and Lomow, G. (2004). Understanding

SOA with Web Services. Addison Wesley Professional.

Peirce, C.S., 1931-1958. Collected Papers, Cambridge,

Mass: Harvard University Press.

Sprott D. and Wilkes L. (2004). Understanding Service-

Oriented Architecture, CBDI Forum, Retrieved

November, 27, 2006, from

msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-

us/dnmaj/html/aj1soa.asp

Stamper, R. K., Althaus, K. e Backhouse, J. (1988)

MEASUR: Method for Eliciting, Analyzing and

Specifying User Requirements. In Olle, T. W.,

Verrijn-Stuart, A. A. e Bhabuts, L. (eds.)

Computerized Assistance During the Information

Systems Life Cycle. Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, 67-

116.

Thatte, S., Andrews, T., Curbera, F., Dholakia, H.,

Goland, Y. Klein, J., Leymann, F., Liu, K., Roller, D.,

Smith, Trickovic, I., and Weerawarana, S. (2003).

Business Process Execution Language for Web

Services Version 1.1. Retrieved November, 27, 2006,

from http://www-

128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/specification/ws-

bpel/

ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

386