OBSERVATORY ON INTEROPERABLE eGOVERNMENT
SERVICES
eGov-Interop'05 Annual Conference
23 -24 February 2005 – Geneva (Switzerland)
UDDI Services in
eGovernment Services
Luis Álvarez Sabucedo and Luis Anido
Universidade de Vigo
Spain
eGov Interop'05 - Feb 23-24, 2005 - Geneva (Switzerland)
Introduction
• During last years we are witnessing an amazing
development of eGovernment projects and
initiatives.
• In future, global project, where final goals are
addressed, are fulfilled in an integral perspective
• Nevertheless, several steps remain in the way to
this major goal.
• One of the major enhancements is related to the
inclusion of semantic support for operations.
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Agenda
• Architectural Proposal
• UDDI Overview
• OWL-S for Service Description
• OWL-S Servers: new approach
• Dealing with UDDI Server
• Conclusions
Luis Álvarez Sabucedo eGov Interop'05 - Feb 23-24, 2005 - Geneva (Switzerland) 3
Agenda
• Architectural Proposal
• UDDI Overview
• OWL-S for Service Description
• OWL-S Servers: new approach
• Dealing with UDDI Server
• Conclusions
Luis Álvarez Sabucedo eGov Interop'05 - Feb 23-24, 2005 - Geneva (Switzerland) 4
Considerations about architecture
• Costumers for the project are also the
stakeholders of projects as they pay it by its
taxes.
• Procedures must be auditable for both citizens
and administration.
• Data integrity and data confidentiality are under
strict constraints.
• Data interchange may involve a large chain for
data processing and must be kept under control
on each single step.
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Proposed Characteristics
• Open Source.
• Adoption of open standards.
• Interaction of any agent.
• Support for multiplatform devices.
• Ontology-driven.
Luis Álvarez Sabucedo eGov Interop'05 - Feb 23-24, 2005 - Geneva (Switzerland) 6
Architecture Model
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Architectural Proposal
• A weak point: current-fashion UDDI Server.
– Semantic support. We find no support for ontology-driven
information as this kind of servers are not oriented towards
semantic data.
– Security. Lack of services such as non-repudiation on origin
or integrity.
– Lack of support for particular specifications.
Luis Álvarez Sabucedo eGov Interop'05 - Feb 23-24, 2005 - Geneva (Switzerland) 8
Agenda
• Architectural Proposal
• UDDI Overview
• OWL-S for Service Description
• OWL-S Servers: new approach
• Dealing with UDDI Server
• Conclusions
Luis Álvarez Sabucedo eGov Interop'05 - Feb 23-24, 2005 - Geneva (Switzerland) 9
UDDI Overview
• The Universal Description, Discovery and
Integration (OASIS) is aimed to encourage the
provision of service for the discovery and
interaction among different entities.
• Services provided:
– White Pages. This service deals with name and contact
information.
– Yellow Pages. This service provides a categorized way to
organize the provided services.
– Green Pages. This service addresses technical details about the
service.
• UDDI is expected to be a key component on the
core of Web Services.
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UDDI Overview
• Data structures:
– businessEntity (white pages service): name,
description, contact information, ...
– businessService (green pages services):
information about the service actually
provided.
• Drawbacks: No security concerns,
No support for semantic contents, …
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Agenda
• Architectural Proposal
• UDDI Overview
• OWL-S for Service Description
• OWL-S Servers: new approach
• Dealing with UDDI Server
• Conclusions
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OWL-S for description service
• Ontology Web Language – Service: an ontology
for describing Web Service with semantic
information.
• Some interesting advantages:
– Web Service discovery and invocation.
– Web Service composition.
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OWL-S for description service (II)
• To accomplish these promising goals, OWL-S
establishes three different levels for data related
to Web Services:
– Service Profile : “What it does?”
– Service Grounding : “how”
– Service Model : “how it actually works”.
• As result of this intelligent data interchange,
systems may provide some interesting
advantages from previous data-based systems
Luis Álvarez Sabucedo eGov Interop'05 - Feb 23-24, 2005 - Geneva (Switzerland) 14
Agenda
• Architectural Proposal
• UDDI Overview
• OWL-S for Service Description
• OWL-S Servers: new approach
• Dealing with UDDI Server
• Conclusions
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OWL-S Servers
• We propose an OWL-S Server. It provides
also several additional services:
– certification of the submitted data,
– support for additional security capabilities
– additional facilities for advanced services in collaborative
environments.
• We need some assumptions:
– there is a client in the system that needs to deliver an operation
in this framework.
– This operation is expressed in the terms of a given ontology
that we will assume suitable for the problem and known by the
full environment.
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OWL-S Servers
• Points to bear in mind:
– It is not possible to state that a service exactly meets
the requirements.
– The information the server looks through is already
stored in the server due to security concerns.
• Information may be ciphered by using
XMLSignature and many other techniques.
• The key component in this server is the logic
reasoner.
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OWL-S Servers
• We propose a new
ontology. Main features for
these enhancements
include:
– Definition of a set of
ObjectProperty’s to
express features linked to
services.
– Definition of a set of
Class’s to characterize
actors involved in
operations: citizens, PAs.
• Under these constraints,
the operation will be made
of the following steps:
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Agenda
• Architectural Proposal
• UDDI Overview
• OWL-S for Service Description
• OWL-S Servers: new approach
• Dealing with UDDI Server
• Conclusions
Luis Álvarez Sabucedo eGov Interop'05 - Feb 23-24, 2005 - Geneva (Switzerland) 19
Dealing with UDDI Servers
• Working UDDI servers should be available
also under the presented conditions.
• To make this possible: encapsulate the
full UDDI server under a similar interface.
• In this context we must assume the more
restrictive criterion for searches.
• We must include it into the information to
be submitted to the client in OWL-S
format.
– We can compose in some way data for the layers Service
Profile and Service Model
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Agenda
• Architectural Proposal
• UDDI Overview
• OWL-S for Service Description
• OWL-S Servers: new approach
• Dealing with UDDI Server
• Conclusions
Luis Álvarez Sabucedo eGov Interop'05 - Feb 23-24, 2005 - Geneva (Switzerland) 21
Conclusions
• eGovernment projects are experiencing a huge
impulse towards more mature projects.
– knowledge data management and ontology-driven
frameworks will play a main role.
• Benefits from semantic services: security
enhancements, support for additional services
and advanced features to support advanced
features in a broker-fashion way.
• A final goal: user may develop their own clients in
order to operate in a network to interact with
governments.
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The authors
Luis A. Sabucedo and Luis Anido
University of Vigo, SPAIN
Luis.Sabucedo@det.uvigo.es
VIGO
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