Experiencesand issues in the realization of e-government services (Extended Abstract) F.Arcieri G.Melideo E.Nardelli M.Talamo 1. Consultant to AIPA - “Autorit` a per l’Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione” & Univ. of Roma 2 “Tor Vergata”, Roma, Italia. talamo@aipa.it 2. Dipartimento di Informatica, Univ. of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italia, & Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi ed Informatica, C.N.R., Roma, Italia. nardelli@univaq.it Abstract Certification of the executed service is a critical issue for an e-government infrastructure. In fact, given the le- gal value that is often attached to data managed and ex- changed by public administrations,being able to document the actual execution of e-services is of the utmost impor- tance. Thisismademorecomplexincases,likeitoftenhap- pens in the public administration sector, where e-services are based on legacy systems managed by autonomous and independent organizations. In this paper we discuss, start- ing from real-life e-government systems developed in Italy, theintroduction,withinthe standardthree tiersarchitecture fore-services, ofnew controlcomponents,basedonefficient algorithmictechniques, providingsolutionsfor this issue. Keywords: digital government support, legacy application integration, interoperabilitysupport. 1 Introduction The pervasive spreading of the WWW has created a tremendous opportunity for providing services over Inter- net. The whole area of e-services is becoming a very hot research field (e.g., see [9] or the special issue [17]), with a wide technological and economical impact. In this context, the digital government sector is quicklygaining importance, given its “potential to profoundly transform citizens’ con- ceptions of civil and political interactions with their gov- ernments” [10]. E-government services are defined and developed in a com- plex architectural and technological scenario. In fact, the various public administrations and agencies that are in- volved are usually autonomously and independently man- aged. Therefore, even if they have to cooperate to reach a common overall goal, they have developed and run their own computer-based information systems in a completely independent way. Supporting intragovernmental processes is therefore a main critical component of any Information Technology (IT) infrastructure for digital government and certification is a very important function of this component. In this paper we first recall the development of real-life e- government services where we have addressed the certifica- tion issue and then present and discuss our solutions, which have led to a successfull realization of the e-services. These systems have all been developed within an overall initiative, coordinated by AIPA, the Italian Authority for Informa- tion Technology in Public Administration (PA), aiming at developing inter-organization cooperative information sys- tems supporting e-government actions [13]. It is not the focus of this paper a discussion on security issues, which are another very important aspect of digital government. For a detailed discussion of, e.g., authoriza- tion and access control functions in the context of an IT infrastructure for e-government see [11]. The paper is structured as follows. Firstly, in section 2, we present context and motivations at the root of our re- search and application areas where we have tested and re- fined our solutions. Then, section 3 discusses the reference architecture we adopt in our discussion. Next, in section 4, we present the fundamental technique supporting certifica- tion in intragovernmental processes supporting digital gov- ernment. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper. Proceedings of the 12th Intl Wrkshp on Research Issues in Data Engineering: Engineering e-Commerce/ e-Business Systems (RIDE02) 1066-1395/02 $17.00 ' 2002 IEEE