Programmable Messaging for Electronic Government - Building a Foundation

Electronic Government offers citizens and businesses a single interface to all public services, implemented through cross-agency processes and applications. This paper presents a fragment of a software infrastructure that enables agencies to collaborate in the delivery of public services, responsible for automated, process-driven exchange of messages between applications. In addition to basic message exchange, the infrastructure supports high-level messaging through dynamically-enabled horizontal (process independent) and vertical (process dependent) extensions. In particular, the paper presents a fragment of a semantic model to formalize the process of specifying and implementing messaging extensions, and demonstrates a prototype implementation of this model to underpin a reliable delivery of government services.