A Blackboard-Oriented Architecture for e-Government Service Composition
Costas Vassilakis, Anya Sotiropoulou, Dimitrios Theotokis, Dimitris Gouscos, Terma Karaiskaki · 2005
A requirement for electronic government initiatives to succeed is the ability to offer a citizen-centric view of the government model. The most widely adopted paradigm supporting this task is the life event model, which combines basic services offered from multiple public authorities into a single, high-level service that corresponds to an event in a citizen’s life. This composition is not always straightforward though, because the constituent services are generally developed in an independent fashion, using incompatible input and output formats; moreover the task of synchronising the documents required and pro-duced by the services is tedious to implement and costly to maintain, since changes to requirements and legislation necessitate continuous updates to this scheme. In this paper, we present a blackboard architec-ture that can be used to deliver life-event oriented services to the citizens. The blackboard proposed for this architecture is an active one, undertaking the tasks of conversions, where appropriate. The black-board couples a data flow approach with event-condition-action rules to enable dynamic formulation of life-event services, decentralising their development and maintenance.