Paper 130

TITLE: Document-based Interorganisational Information Exchange

AUTHORS(s) & AFFILIATION(s): Reinhard Riedl, Systems Architecture & Software, Department of Information Technology, University of Zurich

KEYWORD(s): interorganisational workflows, universal usability, interstate e-government, XML, virtual ontology, trust & confidence

PRESENTER / CONTACT PERSON: Reinhard Riedl

CONTACT EMAIL: riedl@ifi.unizh.ch

ABSTRACT:

This paper presents our experiences in the European research and development project FASME on interstate e-government. In FASME, we have investigated the requirements for a European-wide digital service for the registration of a new living place plus affiliated tasks, which does no longer require citizens to obtain, transport, and deliver hard copies of personal documents. These investigations have shown that any solution will have to be highly heterogeneous with respect to business processes, user expectations, and legacy systems. Based on the detailed findings, we have built a prototype for three cities. Successful evaluations with expert and non-expert users have demonstrated the feasibility of such an interstate e-government service, but they equally exhibited the risks for such an undertaking. In the paper we discuss the central role of a document-based interorganisational information exchange, which relies on a sound concept of digital identity and which uses XML-documents with well-defined context specifications. Local workflows require that documents are created and delivered ad hoc at remote servers belonging to foreign authorities in such a way that they can be automatically processed by the local application. We present the system architecture of our prototypical solution as well as results from user evaluations. Although part of the requirements for our application scenario are quite specific, the architectural solution generalises to a great variety of inter-organisational cooperations. We explain, how such a document service may be used as an information exchange infrastructure for dynamic virtual enterprises and for the strategic cooperation in supply chains.

Last modified October 28, 2001 by Scott Tilley.