CONSIDERATION TO IMPROVE E-GOVERNMENT INFRASTRUCTURE Flavio Corradini, Francesco De Angelis, Chiara Ercoli, Alberto Polzonetti and Barbara Re Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Camerino Via Madonna delle Carceri 9, 62032 Camerino MC, Italy ABSTRACT Several Italian Regions develop e-Government solutions with the aim to increase interactions between Public Administrations (PAs) and users through the use of infrastructures builded around citizens needs. In order to reach a flexible system we take into consideration basic functionalities to solve key questions in e-Government domain. Aspects as authentication and authorization, service publishing and discovery as well as composition are fundamental to build efficient and effective architectures. We present a case study about shared and standardize services that integrates them into a Web portal for Italian citizens and firms. In particular, ‘Marche Region’ provides an interesting benchmark in e- Government solution development. KEYWORDS e-Government, authentication, authorization, subscribing, discovery, composition. 1. INTRODUCTION Nowadays there are several e-Government definitions in literature. In this paper e-Government refers to the “use of information and communication technologies in Public Administrations combined with organizational change and new skills in order to improve public services and democratic processes and strengthen support to public policies” [Commission of the European Communities 2003]. Moreover, the definition of e-Government is a large opportunity to [Bolici 2003, Dittrich 2003, Friis 2002]:  transform organizations of public sector reaching innovative and user-centered PAs;  provide high quality services with low cost promoting economic development;  improve governance allowing an effective access to information through flexible and transparent institutions. Our studies suggest that the best model for e-Government reflects a vision based on the abstraction of service concept and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) [Hao 2003]. In particular, SOA maintains aligned the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) functionalities with strategic demand of PAs: when a process is created, or changed, it is sufficient modifies workflow that combines services supplied by organizations to reorganize their interactions. Indeed, SOA approach permits: (i) integration among software resources; (ii) availability of public software interfaces that are universally accessible; (iii) possibility of services realization through composition of functionalities that implements PAs business logic, (iv) reuse of already existing software previously developed. This increases efficiency in terms of cost and PAs productivity perceived by users [Huhns 2005]. The needs just analyzed finds their natural application in the domain of interest. In this paper, we present an architecture to solve common problems in e-Government domain [Corradini 2005 (c)]. For example, the sharing of activities, processes and services to reduce citizens’ time dedicated to bureaucracy, to increase quality of services and to allow knowledge sharing. For the realization of efficient and effective framework we need important functionalities: authentication and authorization of users, publishing and discovery of services, and last but not least services composition [Dawes 2003, Kràl 2001, Mecella 2001]. The portal TECUT (‘TECnologia Utile’) is realized by Marche Region taken advantage of ‘Choesion’ [R.T.I. Neta 2003, Corradini2005 (c)] infrastructure. This is a framework used to implement infrastructural IADIS International Conference e-Society 2006 217