Infrastructure for e-government web services - Internet Computing, IEEE

In efforts to use information and communication technologies for the civil and political conduct of government, many countries have begun supporting egovernment initiatives. The ultimate goal is to improve government–citizen interactions through an infrastructure built around the “life experience” of citizens. This spans several governmental sectors, including social services. In our e-government project, researchers at Virginia Tech and Purdue University have teamed up with Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA), which provides welfare programs to assist lowincome citizens, strengthen families’ and children’s well-being, and help elderly and disabled people. The current process for collecting social benefits within FSSA is time-consuming and frustrating, as citizens must often visit multiple offices located within and outside their hometown. Case officers must use myriad applications, manually determining which will satisfy citizens’ individual needs, deciding how to access each form, and combining the results returned by different applications — all without divulging citizens’ information to unauthorized entities. This difficulty in obtaining muchneeded help hinders many people’s ability to become independent, with consequences for health and well-being. To facilitate the use of welfare applications and expeditiously satisfy citizens’ needs, we wrapped these applications in modular Web services.1 Adopting Web services in e-government enables government agencies to provide value-added services by defining a new service that outsources from other e-government services; to uniformly handle privacy issues; and to standardize the description, discovery, and invocation of social programs. The core of our research is to develop techniques to efficiently access e-government services while preserving citizens’ privacy. To that end we designed and