Ms Silvia-Adriana Ţicău (MEP, Committee of Industry, Research and
Energy, European Parliament) discussed the importance of security in relation
to the future EU Digital Agenda and how SOA can be used in this context.
Ms Ţicău stressed that the future interoperability solutions for electronic public
administrations will be greatly dedicated to the interaction among them and
the implementation of the Community policies and activities. According to Ms
Ţicău, the future EU Digital Agenda focuses on eGovernment Interoperability.
A main barrier in eGovernment interoperability has been identified in the lack
of interoperable public key infrastructures (PKI), even at the national level.
The new eGovernment action plan of the Commission should begin where the
last action plan ended, because not all the goals of the i2010 action plan have
been achieved. For example, i2010 aimed at achieving 50 per cent of all
public procurement to be performed electronically by 2010, which is not the
case.
There is a definite trend towards the creation of a single centralised
eSignature infrastructure, which allows specific applications to simply plug in.
Nevertheless, it is important to find the right granularity: services should be
user friendly and able to support wide information-sharing and reusability of
services. Applications that can benefit from SOA include pluggable security
services, security management, and cryptographic services. They also include
pre-packaged services, in terms of user-friendliness and security of
eGovernment services.
As far as the SOA eGovernment systems are concerned, they provide a
service of a loosely coupled architecture designed to meet business needs.
SOA can facilitate the cross-border interoperability of eGovernment Systems
and help public authorities to be interconnected easily and facilitate
eParticipation.
Ms Ţicău noted that there is a need for a service registry for eGovernment
services for the transparent provision of services to the citizens and as for
eGovernment, SOA is considered to be the future. It is important to use
standards and separate services from interfaces. Standardisation, competition
and regulation should be balanced and this requires collaboration between all
stakeholders, mainly for security services that could be designed through
SOA.
Mr Sobolewski asked Ms Ţicău about the meaning of the term “sharing” noting
that only through meta-programming sharing can occur. Ms Ţicău explained
that there are interoperability problems at the national level requiring the
definition of the correct level of granularity so that public administrations can
integrate existing services. It is important to define the right level of trust for
each service provided. A Member State cannot easily use part of services
existing in another Member State, in case insufficient credentials are involved.
Smart e-Government Services based on the Recognition of
common Intent
Ms Margarete Donovang-Kuhlisch (IBM Deutschland GmbH) discussed
Smart eGovernment Services based on the recognition of common intent.
Ms Donovang-Kuhlisch explained that as Europe develops towards a
politically and economically integrated body, agencies, organisations, and
enterprises from various nations face the challenge of having to collaborate
and provide services to achieve common goals and create prior negotiated
and intended outcomes.
While European and national legislations set context and rules for such
business conduct; in multi-national service-oriented ecosystems, agile
business process management necessitates more than an underpinning
ontology to ensure semantic interoperability. It requires a complete business
process management language (BPML) based on a formal grammar to
support inter-nation administrative business processes automatically.
Governments turn “smart” by becoming network-enabled, effect-oriented and
context- and history-aware.
According to Ms Donovang-Kuhlisch, IBM has done a first case study that
addresses the collaborative exploitation of common intent in the context of
pan-European eGovernment services for a typical life event of a citizen, in
particular, a family’s residence relocation from Germany to Belgium. Based on
this example, the presentation explained how this could be applied to “extend
the SOA paradigm in semantic interoperability in the eGovernment context”.
In conclusion, the presentation argued that any European Initiative (e.g.
PEPPOL) should leverage the emerging capabilities of the future “Internet of
People, Things, and Services”. IBM invested into the Government Industry
Framework to deliver an instantiation of the “European Generic Public
Services Conceptual Model”. As both an analytics and infrastructure service
provider, IBM and its business partners offer a strategic partnership to develop
the eGovernment business model.
The Architecture framework for Federal IT Governance –
SOA and EAM for the German Federal Administration
Mr Christian Mrugalla (German Federal Ministry of the Interior) presented
the architecture framework for “Federal IT Governance – SOA and EAM for
the German Federal Administration”.
In December 2008, Germany’s Federal Government adopted a new steering
concept for its IT. One of the main tasks of the corresponding implementation
plan was setting up active architecture management. It soon became clear
that the special challenges of a cross-sectoral IT-steering could not be faced
by a pure technical approach and a more comprehensive view was needed.
Currently, Germany’s federal administration is on the way to set up an
Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) bridging political goals via
business processes towards technical patterns and standards. Within one
year, the fundamentals of a meta-model have been developed (an English
version is available) and adopted. This model reused many ideas from
international schemas like TOGAF and especially FOAF – an architecture
framework developed by the US federal government.
According to Mr Mrugalla, it soon became clear that service orientation is the
first-choice instrument for building a bridge between business processes and
technical solutions. Services are basically logical collections of functionalities
with the potential to be implemented in technical components. On one side,
this view is generic enough to respect the technological independence of the
IT service providers for the German government; on the other side it can still
provide the means to enable authorities to formulate and follow strategic IT
planning. Thus, SOA does not appear as an a priori element; instead it is a
natural consequence of the federated steering environment.
This could also be the future of pan-European cooperation in the field of EAM.
The primary scope of the architecture framework is the back office. This term
includes the IT infrastructure within federal authorities, and the internal IT
service providers in terms of classical eGovernment. In order to achieve the
main potential of eGovernment by seamless integration of process chains in an interoperable way, the importance of the back office architecture must not be underestimated. The EAM (by linking technical decisions and information models with business processes and strategic goals appropriately) is believed
to be one of the key elements in obtaining high-class eGovernment services
and interoperability in a way that is both economic and sustainable.
Summing up, the presentation gave an overview on the meta-model, the
status already achieved and the next steps.
SOA in Online Planning: Case Study
Mr Richard Love (Mayo County Council, Ireland) discussed SOA in online
planning by using a concrete example of how SOA was used with Mayo
County Council to enable the local authority to accept applications and
observations online, and how SOA is currently expected to underpin the
proposed national ePlanning portal.
In this case, several systems were tied together, using web services to
leverage data between discrete systems. In the case of the national portal, it
is planned that web services will be the method of communication used
between the national portal and local authorities to allow customers to search
and monitor applications as well as to validate online submissions so that
forms can be accepted centrally and processed locally.
Mr Love also presented how SOA was used in smaller scale applications,
such as the provision of road information during a weather crisis (displaying
Twitter feeds using an RSS reader).
The experience gained indicates that distributed systems needed to be in
fixed locations (ex. URLs cannot move, web service locations cannot move).
In addition, significant changes to the overall system generally require
cooperation and coordination of all parties that may result in down-time if not
carefully managed.
The main lesson learned is that SOA is actually the quickest and least
expensive option for integrating disparate systems. Furthermore, it is the best
option for sharing data between agencies as the alternative is massive datatransfer,
copying or reducing security to allow real-time access to databases.
1st Roundtable
The morning session concluded with a roundtable discussion.
Questions by Mr Pascal Verhoest:
Is SOA the right solution to the right problem?
Mr Sobolewski noted that the definition of the problem is the most important
aspect in every computing issue. In addition, the data representation cannot
be addressed in a universal manner. For example, XML is appropriate for describing arbitrary documents, however, in cases where high volume data
are needed to be stored and transferred, XML cannot be used as it greatly
increases the amount of data needed to provide the same information.
Therefore, it is important to agree that there is no single type of data
representation or technology for every eGovernment service. Everything
should co-exist; a frame should not be designed for one service –
implementation and configuration is what should be thought first when
designing a service.
Mr Sobolewski continued that a design should isolate the business logic
regardless of the technical aspects and provide services that are location
dependent, always replicated, managing documents, and providing reliability.
Basically, there is a need to identify the data, eGovernment operations, and
control strategies that can be reused.
Question from the audience:
The proposed approach is generic and this may cause problems
in the implementation of services. Shouldn’t eGovernment stay
focused on the current needs?
Mr Mrugalla agreed that complexity has to be reduced and that the approach
should not be mainly technical. Information technology should be run for
business purposes. Technological details are getting in the way of business
and communication needs, instead of focusing on functionalities and
business. He also stressed that an analysis of interoperability in the Member
States could potentially support and identify the way to move forward.
Ms Donovang-Kuhlisch added that service orientation should be adopted by
the business sector. It should be functional and citizen-oriented, alongside
implementing technology. However, due to security standards, and semantics,
the technical interoperability of web services becomes too complicated. In the
context of eGovernment across Europe, the service implementation should be
industrialised, highly scalable, and trustworthy deriving from a credential
platform.
Question from the audience:
Do the problems persist due to the current models in place?
Mr Mrugalla agreed that in many ways, this is true. The Information models
and designed solutions are great for technology purposes, but they cannot
apply to real business issues. Thus, a current shift is necessary in the design
of technology that corresponds and serves specific business needs.
Question from the audience (Aggelos Charlaftis):
The Public sector should serve the citizens first. Citizens are not
clients and the current solutions do not provide a citizen-oriented
approach. It seems that there is an interest to solely serve
businesses. Is there an option for the citizen?
Ms Ţicău agreed that eGovernment should be citizen-centric and userfriendly.
Citizens should be empowered through services they are authorised
to use, and the user interface should be dynamic, presenting only available
services tailored to the needs of the citizen.
Mr Love presented a different perspective: based on a survey that Mayo
County had administered with title “All our Services are Customers” – it seems
that significantly more service requests come from businesses in comparison
to citizens. For this reason, from an IT perspective, it makes mores sense that
eGovernment focuses in the automation of business related services.
However, citizens also benefit from this, as the reduction of effort necessary to
handle business requests allows public administrations to address citizens’
service requests quicker than before.
Ms Donovang-Kuhlisch added that eGovernment must equally serve both
citizens and enterprises; and if it serves the society and economy, actual
implementation will come out of it.
Mr Sobolewski commented that there is a need to showcase the functionality
of eGovernment. The identification of use cases could become a useful start.
Ms Donovang-Kuhlisch replied that there are numerous use cases that show
what governments can do. For instance, one Danish initiative two years ago
dealt with the challenge to come up with a catalogue of eGovernment cases
and identified 12 categories in which these cases could be classified. The
service catalogue recorded 5,000 use cases broken down in different
organisations, public sector, insurance companies, etc. to serve the business
and citizens.
Mr Mrugalla noted that when dealing with enterprise architecture for
eGovernment, one should expect the unexpected and be flexible. New needs
arise every day; therefore modelling each use case would not be very useful.
Mr Sobolewski commented that use cases can support the definition of how to
reach eGovernment. In order to find what service would be necessary, there
should be more services to choose from. For instance, in the case of the
network, the web became useful because of the huge number of services that
are available. Nevertheless, architecture is necessary in this case and for this,
it is important that use cases have been identified.
Question by Mr Pascal Verhoest:
The level of granularity has not yet been solved. Why is this, the
case?
Mr Hugo Kerschot replied that a reason could be the complexity behind
public services. What is necessary to identify is how and in what sense SOA
can help to force simpler processes or simplify services.
Mr Sobolewski added that simplification is not related to complexity of the
environment or IT. It is related to abstractions. Following the history of
information technology, the increase in complexity led from procedural
programming to structured programming, then to object oriented programming and now to distributed-programming. SOA necessitates the existence of
Service registries. Web services as a technology does not require a service
registry and can be thus reduced to client-server architecture. However, this
leads to the current software crisis, because client-server architecture does
not scale well in a distributed computing environment.
There is a need to turn from protocol oriented services to object oriented
services to deal with new operations. More services are necessary to decide
which system can have all the semantics for the domain of interest. A
distinction must be made between software languages, such as Java, and
programming languages, which must be domain specific; in this case, a
programming language for eGovernment would be needed that is not
currently used by anyone.
Ms Ţicău replied that services should be user-friendly and value the citizen. It
is important to follow the process of granularity and define the architecture. It
is also important to identify how every piece of information may be
encapsulated into different types of services and thus reduce complexity. Cost
savings could be achieved if the analysis of eGovernment operations could
identify the right services (now provided in parallel from different public
authorities) and have them separate from the interface.
WE THE ECOUMENISTS :WE ARE GOING TO SUPPORT EUROPE
IT SEEMS THAT WE HAD AN IMMEDIATE RESPONSE TO OUR PREVIOUSLY POSTED ARTICLE
http://feraios.blogspot.com/2010/05/globalists-are-trying-to-find-solution.html
SOME ECONOMISTS,SUPPORTERS OF GLOBALIZATION,EITHER FROM THE CONSERVATISM POINT OF VIEW OR BY THE LEFTIST ONE ARE JUDGING ISSUES ,WE DONT BELIEVE WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE,AS THEY CLAIM TO PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE,BUT FOR SURE ON PURPOSE.
EURO'S UNDERVALUATION WAS ,IS AND WILL BE A MUST.
WHAT ECONOMICAL CYCLES IN USA AND GLOBAL CENTERS ,ARE TRYING TO PREVENT IS EXACTLY THAT.
BECAUSE WITH THIS ACTION WE ARE GOING TO KEEP OUR JOBS,PRODUCTION AND SOCIETY IN A STABLE,PROSPEROUS AND RELIABLE BASIS FOR THE FUTURE.
CHINA THATS WHY DOESN'T ENTER IN THE GLOBALISTS ECONOMIC SYSTEM,KEEPING ITS CURRENCY OUT AND GATHERING HUGE AMOUNTS ON OTHER NUMISMATIC VALUES.
OBAMA'S TEAM HAS UNDERSTOOD THAT AND IS DOING REMARKABLE WORK,BEING SURROUNDED BY THE PRINCIPLES OF GLOBALISATION.WE DOUBT ITS ABILITY TO GO AGAINST THE FRAMEWORK OF THE MEKKA OF CAPITALISM.
WE MUST KEEP EURO TO BE VALUED LESS THAN A DOLLAR,THEN WE SHALL BEGIN....
SINCERELY YOURS
A.CH.
PS.ABOUT NEXT CRISES PLS FOLLOW TITLED LINKS AND VIDEOS
We’re Not Greece
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and the crisis in Greece is making some people — people who opposed health care reform and are itching for an excuse to dismantle Social Security — very, very happy. Everywhere you look there are editorials and commentaries, some posing as objective reporting, asserting that Greece today will be America tomorrow unless we abandon all that nonsense about taking care of those in need.
The truth, however, is that America isn’t Greece — and, in any case, the message from Greece isn’t what these people would have you believe.
So, how do America and Greece compare?
Both nations have lately been running large budget deficits, roughly comparable as a percentage of G.D.P. Markets, however, treat them very differently: The interest rate on Greek government bonds is more than twice the rate on U.S. bonds, because investors see a high risk that Greece will eventually default on its debt, while seeing virtually no risk that America will do the same. Why?
One answer is that we have a much lower level of debt — the amount we already owe, as opposed to new borrowing — relative to G.D.P. True, our debt should have been even lower. We’d be better positioned to deal with the current emergency if so much money hadn’t been squandered on tax cuts for the rich and an unfunded war. But we still entered the crisis in much better shape than the Greeks.
Even more important, however, is the fact that we have a clear path to economic recovery, while Greece doesn’t.
The U.S. economy has been growing since last summer, thanks to fiscal stimulus and expansionary policies by the Federal Reserve. I wish that growth were faster; still, it’s finally producing job gains — and it’s also showing up in revenues. Right now we’re on track to match Congressional Budget Office projections of a substantial rise in tax receipts. Put those projections together with the Obama administration’s policies, and they imply a sharp fall in the budget deficit over the next few years.
Greece, on the other hand, is caught in a trap. During the good years, when capital was flooding in, Greek costs and prices got far out of line with the rest of Europe. If Greece still had its own currency, it could restore competitiveness through devaluation. But since it doesn’t, and since leaving the euro is still considered unthinkable, Greece faces years of grinding deflation and low or zero economic growth. So the only way to reduce deficits is through savage budget cuts, and investors are skeptical about whether those cuts will actually happen.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that Britain — which is in worse fiscal shape than we are, but which, unlike Greece, hasn’t adopted the euro — remains able to borrow at fairly low interest rates. Having your own currency, it seems, makes a big difference.
In short, we’re not Greece. We may currently be running deficits of comparable size, but our economic position — and, as a result, our fiscal outlook — is vastly better.
That said, we do have a long-run budget problem. But what’s the root of that problem? “We demand more than we’re willing to pay for,” is the usual line. Yet that line is deeply misleading.
First of all, who is this “we” of whom people speak? Bear in mind that the drive to cut taxes largely benefited a small minority of Americans: 39 percent of the benefits of making the Bush tax cuts permanent would go to the richest 1 percent of the population.
And bear in mind, also, that taxes have lagged behind spending partly thanks to a deliberate political strategy, that of “starve the beast”: conservatives have deliberately deprived the government of revenue in an attempt to force the spending cuts they now insist are necessary.
Meanwhile, when you look under the hood of those troubling long-run budget projections, you discover that they’re not driven by some generalized problem of overspending. Instead, they largely reflect just one thing: the assumption that health care costs will rise in the future as they have in the past. This tells us that the key to our fiscal future is improving the efficiency of our health care system — which is, you may recall, something the Obama administration has been trying to do, even as many of the same people now warning about the evils of deficits cried “Death panels!”
So here’s the reality: America’s fiscal outlook over the next few years isn’t bad. We do have a serious long-run budget problem, which will have to be resolved with a combination of health care reform and other measures, probably including a moderate rise in taxes. But we should ignore those who pretend to be concerned with fiscal responsibility, but whose real goal is to dismantle the welfare state — and are trying to use crises elsewhere to frighten us into giving them what they want.
THE GLOBALISTS ARE TRYING TO FIND A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEMS THEY HAVE CREATED IN ALL GLOBE
ECONOMICAL ANALYSIS FOR DEBTS AND CRISIS IS ONLY ONE FACTOR OF UNDERSTANDING ,COMPARED TO THE WHOLE , AS IT IS BEING EXPRESSED BY AT LEAST THREE PARAMETERS,POLITICS AND GEO PHILOSOPHY A.CH.
In Greek Debt Crisis, Some See Parallels to U.S.
It’s easy to look at the protesters and the politicians in Greece — and at the other European countries with huge debts — and wonder why they don’t get it. They have been enjoying more generous government benefits than they can afford. No mass rally and no bailout fund will change that. Only benefit cuts or tax increases can.
Yet in the back of your mind comes a nagging question: how different, really, is the United States?
The numbers on our federal debt are becoming frighteningly familiar. The debt is projected to equal 140 percent of gross domestic product within two decades. Add in the budget troubles of state governments, and the true shortfall grows even larger. Greece’s debt, by comparison, equals about 115 percent of its G.D.P. today.
The United States will probably not face the same kind of crisis as Greece, for all sorts of reasons. But the basic problem is the same. Both countries have a bigger government than they’re paying for. And politicians, spendthrift as some may be, are not the main source of the problem.
We, the people, are.
We have not figured out the kind of government we want. We’re in favor of Medicare, Social Security, good schools, wide highways, a strong military — and low taxes. Dealing with this disconnect will be the central economic issue of the next decade, in Europe, Japan and this country.
Many people, including some who claim to be outraged by the deficit, still haven’t acknowledged the disconnect. Just last weekend, Tea Party members helped deny Senator Robert Bennett, the Utah Republican, his party’s nomination for his re-election campaign, in part because he had co-sponsored a health reform plan with a Democratic senator. Economists generally think the plan would have done more to reduce Medicare spending than the bill that passed. So, whatever its intentions, the Tea Party effectively punished Mr. Bennett for not being a big enough fan of big government.
Or consider the different fates of two parts of President Obama’s agenda. Mr. Obama has unrealistically said that taxes do not need to rise on households making less than $250,000, and this position has come to be seen as an ironclad vow. He has also called for billions of dollars in sensible cuts to agribusiness subsidies, tax loopholes and the like. The news media and Congress have largely ignored these proposals.
The message seems clear: woe unto the politician — in Washington, Athens or London — who tries to go beyond platitudes and show some actual fiscal restraint.
This situation obviously can’t continue, as Robert Greenstein, perhaps the leading liberal budget expert, points out. Mr. Greenstein’s politics make him sympathetic to the worry that all the deficit talk will become an excuse to pull back on stimulus spending while unemployment remains high or to gut social programs. But he also knows the numbers well enough to understand that our Greece moment, whether it takes the form of a crisis or not, is coming.
“Most of the public thinks, ‘If only the darn politicians could get their act together to cut waste, fraud and abuse, and to make tax avoidance go away and so on,’ ” Mr. Greenstein, head of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says. “But the bottom line is, there really is no avoiding the hard choices.”
•
For Greece and possibly other European countries, change will come from the outside. The countries lending the money for the Greek bailout — chiefly Germany — are demanding big cuts to the welfare state. Greek citizens will soon have a harder time retiring in their 40s.
Here in the United States, we’re likely to have the chance to solve our problems before our lenders demand it. Those lenders continue see the American economy as a safe haven, thanks to our history of strong economic growth and political flexibility.
It is even possible that future growth will make the current deficit projections look too pessimistic. That sometimes happens when the economy is weak. In the wake of the early 1990s recession, for example, almost no one imagined that the budget would show a surplus by the end of the decade.
But the main issue isn’t the near-term deficit — the one created by the recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts and the Obama stimulus. The main issue is the long-term deficit.
As societies become richer, citizens tend to want better schools, better medical care and other government services. This country is following that pattern, but without paying the necessary taxes. That combination has us on a course to Greece-like debt.
As a rough estimate, the government will need to find spending cuts and tax increases equal to 7 to 10 percent of G.D.P. The longer we wait, the bigger the cuts will need to be (because of the accumulating interest costs).
Seven percent of G.D.P. is about $1 trillion today. In concrete terms, Medicare’s entire budget is about $450 billion. The combined budgets of the Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation and Veterans Affairs Departments are less than $600 billion.
This is why fixing the budget through spending cuts alone, as Congressional Republicans say they favor, would be so hard. Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has a plan for doing so, and it includes big cuts to Social Security and the end of Medicare for anyone now under 55 years old. Other Republicans have generally refused to endorse the Ryan plan. Until that changes or until the party becomes open to new taxes, its deficit strategy will remain unclear.
Democrats have more of a strategy — raising taxes on the rich and using health reform to reduce the growth of Medicare spending — but it is not nearly sufficient.
What would be? A plan that included a little bit of everything, and then some: say, raising the retirement age; reducing the huge deductions for mortgage interest and health insurance; closing corporate tax loopholes; cutting pensions of some public workers, as Republican governors favor; scrapping wasteful military and space projects; doing more to hold down Medicare spending growth.
Much of this may be unpleasant. But by no means will it doom us to reduced living standards or even slow economic growth. We can still afford to spend more on Medicare — even more per person — than we do today, and more on education, the military and other areas, too. We just can’t afford the unrealistic promises that the government has made. We need to make choices.
“It’s not a matter of whether we have the resources to solve our problems,” as Alan Krueger, the chief economist at the Treasury Department, says. “It’s a matter of political will.”
For now at least, our elected officials are hardly the only ones who lack that will.
E-GOVERNMENT -SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE (A)
WE WOULD LIKE TO PRESENTING THE E-GOVERNMENT WORKSHOP,HOLD AT BRUSSELS ON 17/02/10 “Service Oriented Architecture pushed to the limit in eGovernment”.
AT THIS EVENT OUR CONSULTANCY AFFILIATED EPAPHOS TEAMWORK HAD THE HONOUR PARTICIPATING IN.
Using SOA for structured composition of services
Ms Mechthild Rohen (Head of ICT for Government and Public Services Unit of the Information Society and Media Directorate-General) opened the workshop and stated that the purpose of the workshop is to bring people together to discuss ideas and good practices in the area of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). SOA is only a part of the activities that the Unit is currently dealing with, among which are policy, legal and technical as well as research issues related to eGovernment.
The objective of the workshop is to exchange experiences on SOA. Ms Rohen
noted that in her capacity as the chairperson of the eGovernment subgroup of
the i2010 high level group, she has observed that SOA is considered one of the key elements of innovation for many Member States.
According to the Ministerial Declaration adopted in Malmö in November 2009,eGovernment should focus on four policy priorities. These priorities, defined and supported by the Member States, include an overall improvement in terms of the (i) empowerment of citizens and businesses; (ii) the single market; (iii)
efficiency and effectiveness and (iv) pre-conditions supporting achieving the priorities above.
The fourth priority, pre-conditions, includes innovation in administrations,
where SOA is believed to be a key element. Technology is maturing and the
Member States are ready to develop new public services. New architecture
paradigms should be used to make administrations more efficient and effective. Several Member States have already started with the implementation. The EC is planning to look into the possibilities offered by
SOA for eGovernment through pilots and other actions together with the ISA (previously IDABC) Unit of the European Commission's Informatics Directorate-General.
The European Commission is currently in the process of developing an eGovernment action plan for 2011-2015 – based on the Ministerial eGovernment Declaration of Malmö (Nov 2009) - with the intention to include SOA related activites. However, currently not enough experience on implementing SOA exists in Member States. This is also what the workshop is aiming to achieve: to share experiences and knowledge on SOA.
In conclusion, Ms Rohen pointed two questions that this workshop will aim to
address:
1. What is the level of granularity to which it is possible to break down the components of services to build new services?
2. What is the expected economic impact of using SOA? The current economic crisis necessitates the use of efficient and cost effective development and delivery of services. Therefore, the question relates to
the allocation of cost towards developing SOA or migration of services to SOA and the maintenance costs of these services.
In conclusion, Ms Rohen anticipated a fruitful workshop and encouraged speakers and attendees to participate. Following Ms Rohen’s introduction, Mr Pascal Verhoest and Ms Hannele Lahti (ICT for Government and Public Services Unit of the Information Society and Media Directorate-General)
acting as the workshop moderators introduced the morning session and the first presentation of Mr Sobolewski.
Object SOA for Structured composition of services
Mr Michael Sobolewski (Texas Tech University (TTU), US) discussed service-oriented computing in the context of object-oriented (OO) distributed platforms. Mr Sobolewski argued that a platform consists of virtual computer resources, a programming environment allowing for the development of
distributed applications, and an operating system to run user programs and to facilitate the solution of complex user problems. Therefore, in his presentation,Service Protocol-Oriented Architectures are contrasted with Service Object-Oriented Architectures, and a meta-computer platform (SORCER) based on a service object-oriented architecture is described and analysed.
Furthermore, Mr Sobolewski presented a new object-oriented network programming methodology that uses the intuitive metacomputing semantics and the new “triple command” design pattern. Basically, the pattern defines how service objects communicate by sending one another a form of service requests called exertions that encapsulate the triplet: data, operations, and control strategy.
He continued that one of the first OO metacomputer platforms were developed under the sponsorship of the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) – the Federated Intelligent Product Environment (FIPER),with funding of $ 21.5 million.
The goal of FIPER is to form a federation of distributed services that provide engineering data, applications, and tools on a network. A highly flexible software architecture had been developed (1999–2003), in which engineering tools like computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE),product data management (PDM), optimisation, cost modelling, etc., act as federating service providers and service requestors.
The “Service-Oriented Computing Environment” (SORCER) builds on top of FIPER to introduce a metacomputing operating system with the necessary system services, including a federated file system, and autonomic resource management to support service-oriented metaprogramming. It provides an
integrated solution for complex metacomputing applications. The SORCER metacomputing environment adds an entirely new layer of abstraction to the practice of service-oriented computing – exertion-oriented (EO) programming with complementary federated method invocation.
The EO programming makes a positive difference in service-oriented programming primarily through a new metaprogramming abstraction as experienced in many service-oriented computing projects including systems deployed at GE Global Research Center, GE Aviation, Air Force Research Lab, and SORCER Lab, TTU.
Following the presentation, Mr Sobolewski provided further technical details on how the SOOA concept operates, as the result of a question from the audience (Mr. Aggelos Charlaftis, Belgium). More specifically, he presented the difference in terminology in the OO paradigm, where the collection of services is abstract and the service definition itself is an interface; services are not provided by servers as in the case of the client-server architecture, but by service providers, who implement the service interface. He also presented the mechanism that allows a service to be requested, a service provider to be identified, and the service result to pass to the service requestor in a distributed environment, where objects are not confined within a computer, but they are released to the network.
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