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The project focused on five main activity areas: (1) survey - a detailed survey of the current state of e-Government practice was carried out, both locally and globally; (2) training - a comprehensive training program was organized for government workforce in technical and management skills for e-Government, promoting collaborative, cross-agency development among government trainees; (3) development - a prototype software infrastructure for e-Government was developed, with example Electronic Public Services delivered to citizens, businesses and government built on top of this infrastructure; (4) research - relevant research was conducted in foundational and applied aspects of e-Government; (5) dissemination - the findings were disseminated inside the project, locally among e-Government stakeholders, and internationally.
The e-Macao Project was led by UNU-IIST, funded by the Government of Macao SAR through Macao Foundation, and jointly executed by UNU-IIST, the Government of Macao SAR, University of Macau and INESC-Macau.
More information about e-Macao can be found at http://www.emacao.gov.mo.
During 2006, project activities concentrated on building prototype software infrastructure for e-Government, supporting rapid development and run-time execution of various Electronic Public Services (EPS). Five main infrastructure components were identified, specified and implemented based on the concrete experience building three representative EPS earlier during the project - Social Welfare Service, Business License Service and Government-to-Government Messaging Service. The five components - Front Office Framework, Back Office Framework, Workflow Infrastructure, Messaging Framework and Infrastructure Management Services, jointly span design-time, run-time and maintenance aspects of EPS. A common family of technologies comprising Java, XML, Web Services and the J2EE framework, all based on open standards and open-source software, were applied. To demonstrate the use of the infrastructure, the Business License Service was re-engineered from the standalone to the infrastructure-supported system, with concrete guidelines defined for building new infrastructure-supported EPS. The infrastructure was demonstrated to the Government during two workshops in February and June.
The project produced a set of concrete outputs, including a series of 28 technical reports, software source code, software design models, questionnaires and survey data, seminar and workshop presentations, training courses with evaluations, etc. Besides the outputs, the main outcome of the project is the impact it has made on e-Government adoption across various agencies, in particular it: established a record of the Government's readiness for e-Government, raised human capacity among government workforce in technical and managerial aspects of e-Government, established a learning environment for e-Government, facilitated government-wide adoption of open technologies and standards, and helped establish cross-agency cooperation on e-government development.
The first phase of the project was officially completed on 30 June 2006. The second phase of the project has been approved by the Government, promoted to a program framework, and extended to last for three more years until end of 2009. The multi-annual funding has been approved with UNU-IIST share between 1,125,000USD and 1,350,000USD depending on the annual project portfolios. Besides managing and executing its own portfolio, UNU-IIST's role is to provide advice to the e-Macao Program on e-Government development in Macao and chair its Technical Committee.
The initiative established an activity framework comprising: (1) a community portal to document all activities of the community, coordinate its work and maintain a repository of resources relevant to Electronic Governance, (2) a series of network-building workshops around the world, (3) a series of capacity-building schools and courses on various aspects of Electronic Governance, (4) a community-wide practice in collaborative problem-solving based on the common repository of resources, (5) a series of state-of-the-art and state-of-practice reports about Electronic Governance in various countries, (6) a curriculum for training public officials in planning, development and management for Electronic Governance, (7) projects promoting Good Governance through Electronic Governance, and (8) International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance.
Within this framework, community actions are carried out in the scope of various thematic areas including: legislation, financing, organization, planning, coordination, human capacity development, e-readiness, e-participation, e-procurement, software infrastructure, public services, interoperability, standards for Electronic Governance, and others. Thematic areas are under development.
More information about UNeGov.net can be found at http://www.unegov.net.
UNeGov.net organized four events during 2006:
Five conference presentations and seminars were given by UNeGov.net:
In addition, four thematic areas were developed during 2006:
The specific objectives of the projects are: (1) carry out strategic IT planning exercises in three government agencies in Macao for experience gathering; (2) develop a methodology and supporting toolkits (such as instruments for e-readiness assessment, visioning and strategy development, and a schema for IT audit databases) based on field experience and best practices; (3) develop training manuals and train a few public officers (using train-the-trainer approach) on the use of the methodology with the supporting toolkits; and (4) organize workshops and other dissemination events within Macao and as part of the UNeGov.net workshops on the use of the IT planning toolkits by other governments in different parts of the world.
Three government agencies will be identified for the pilot exercises. The first exercise is a three-month project for the Institute for Tourism Studies Macao (IT Master Plan Project for IFT). The remaining two agencies will be identified by March 2007.
The IT Master Plan Project for IFT was successfully carried out between September and December 2006. Based on a detailed implementation plan, survey and fact-finding instruments were designed in September 2006, while information gathering and discussions with all departments and units of IFT were conducted in October 2006. A Visioning Workshop was organized in late November 2006 to present the findings of the e-readiness assessment, articulate the Corporate Plan for IFT - vision, goals and strategies, and provide initial inputs to the corresponding Strategic IT Plan to support the Corporate Plan. The planning document was developed late November through December 2006, resulting in a two-volume report "IT Master Plan for IFT" with Volume 1 - Plan describing the plan and Volume 2 - Reference describing the results of e-readiness assessment for all units of IFT.
Similar exercises are planned for two other agencies based on IFT's experience within the framework of the e-Macao Program in 2007.
The objectives are as follows: (1) mapping SSC-ST activities in the areas related to policy development, human resource development, education, research, software production, information system transfer and knowledge sharing; (2) identifying countries in the South that could serve as pivotal entities within regions and sub-regions for SSC-ST based on their e-profiles and track-record for SSC; (3) providing a list of research institutions, centers of excellence and other organizations with strong focus on Software Technology; (4) revealing development trends for SSC-ST over time between 2001 and 2006, identifying major challenges and opportunities in regional and inter-regional cooperation in the area of Software Technology; (5) investigating the extent to which SSC-ST features in regional and sub-regional integration efforts within the larger Science and Technology cooperation framework or other specific applications areas such as public administration; (6) investigating opportunities provided by Open Source Software for SSC-ST; and (7) providing recommendations on how SSC-ST could be further developed.
Semantic Web and the underling family of web technologies, from XML, through RDF to various ontology-description languages like OWL, can considerably reduce system integration time and effort. They can also provide a level of independence from environmental changes that would otherwise require extensive re-engineering of software systems. A case in point are systems supporting the working of government organizations, particularly the production and delivery of public services to citizens, businesses and other arms of the government, and their dependence on changing administrative rules and regulations. The aim of this project is to develop foundational and technical solutions to the problem of semantic interoperability, particularly for public organizations, and disseminate the findings among e-Government experts and practitioners.
In line with this aim, the objectives of the project are: establish the current state of research and practice in Semantic Interoperability for e-Government; build precise models to capture requirements for Semantic Interoperability particularly for public organizations; specify and implement prototype middleware software to meet such requirements; illustrate how new applications can be built on top of this middleware; and build a Community of Practice to disseminate the findings of the project and further advance the area.
A set of five tasks is planned to realize these objectives: Survey - document the state-of-the-art and current challenges in the area; Foundation - build a foundation from Domain Model, through Enterprise Architecture, to Semantic Interoperability Middleware specification; Software - build reference implementations of Semantic Interoperability Middleware using Microsoft and open source technologies; Process - define a rigorous process for applications development on top of Semantic Interoperability Middleware, with examples; Community - develop a UNeGov.net thematic area on Semantic Interoperability and e-Government.
The project is a collaboration between UNU-IIST and Microsoft. It takes place within the framework of the UNeGov.net initiative, as described in Section *.
A project plan has been discussed and agreed upon with Microsoft. The project is to commence in January 2007 and last until December 2007.
The Global Desktop Project is a major effort to increase the number of open source software programmers in developing countries.
Developing countries are using more and more Linux and open source software in their technological infrastructure. However, these same countries are almost totally absent in the creation of open source software. Through the Global Desktop Project, UNU-IIST seeks to assist developing countries to shift from being consumers of imported open source technology to become creators of these same open source technologies, acting as peers in the global open source programming community.
By focusing efforts on the computer desktop, an interface that every computer user interacts with and understands, the Global Desktop Project is generating a huge amount of interest from groups involved in everything from application development to localization. This in turn will help further a developing nation's human infrastructure and accessibility to information technology.
The Global Desktop Project has three key components: an international engineering program; a partner program with Institutes of Higher Learning; and an outreach program for IT organizations in government and the private sector that are using, or considering, open source solutions.
To date the Global Desktop Project has partnered with 17 organizations in Macau and China including government agencies, universities, industry consortia and commercial companies. In addition to the 17 signed partnerships, the project has pending partnerships with several notable universities in China including Tsinghua University, Peking University, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Jilin University, South China University of Technology, and Zhonshan University. In addition to universities in China, the project has a pending partnership with the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and is in talks with other universities in East Asia. All pending partnerships will be finalized upon the full funding of the project.
Addendum: The Global Desktop Project was brought to UNU-IIST by Scott McNeil in 2005. Mr McNeil was given support until January, 2007, with the agreement that he had to bring in outside funds to extend the project beyond that date. To his credit, he brought in funds for preparation of course materials and other activities, and a MOU for significant funds from Intel. However, the Intel funds became conditional on matching support from the Chinese or Macau governments. Despite initial encouragement and considerable effort, including meetings with the Chief Executive in Macao and the Minister of Science and Technology in China, UNU-IIST was unable to obtain such matching support. Hence, due to budgetary constraints, Mr McNeil decided in January, 2007, to leave UNU-IIST and seek another home for his project. UNU-IIST remains committed to open source software development in developing countries. It is our plan to develop courses in this area and put them online. Our project with Microsoft on interoperability between open source and proprietary software is going well, and we will continue to look for further opportunities.
We will also cooperate with University of Macau on development of a UML tool for requirements analysis and design. Together with Tata Consultancy Services (India), we will be developing an integrated toolset towards Automated Correct Software Construction by Verified Design Transformations.
The driving motivation of the research project on methods for development of component software is the increasing awareness of the fact that it is today's growing complexity of software systems that forces us to turn the fundamental engineering idea to exploit and reuse components to build and maintain a system into practice of software development. The dominant goal of this idea is fast and correct software production to meet the growing demands on quantity and quality of software systems. It is hoped that component-based development methods and tools will lead to a higher degree of automation in the software production process, and a great increase in software productivity, improvement in quality and reliability of computer systems for safety critical applications. The research and development in computer science and software engineering and technology now encourage a worldwide collaboration to achieve this goal. Indeed, an international collaborating project on Verified Software, Theories, Tools and Experiences (VSTTE) is now being called by IFIP, for which the investigation in component-based development will play an important role.
In the year 2006 we closely positioned our research of this project in Worldwide Collaborative Research on the Grand Challenge: "Verified Software: Theories, Tools and Experiments" (VSTTE). The research topics include
We have started the collaboration project with the University of Macau on Integrating Methods and Tools for High Quality Software Development (HighQD) funded by the Macao Science and Technology Development Fund, and the project on Tool Support to Formal Engineering Methods with Tata Research and Design Development Centre (India). We have continued the project on MDA with Nanjing University (China), Prof. Anders Ravn from Aalborg University (Denmark) visited us for three weeks and he is now closely collaborating with us on the project. We have submitted a joint grant application with East China University to the Chinese Natural Science Foundation.
Our main achievements include
We add to the specification of a method a time constraint which is a relation between the resource availability and the amount of time spent to perform the method. We define a contract to include method specification, and define a component as an implementation of a contract. We enhanced this model with the concurrency and the schedulability analysis of component methods and showed that the proposed model enables the schedulability analysis. We developed a methodology to support this approach.
Our model supports the separation between functional and non-functional requirements, and the formal compositional verification of component-based real-time systems, and the schedulability analysis on the basis of resource availability [13].
CREDO (http://www.cwi.nl/projects/credo/) is an EU-funded project on "Modeling and analysis of evolutionary structures for distributed services". It has been accepted within the fifth call of the 6th Framework Programme - Priority 2 "Information Society Technologies", activity IST-2005-2.5.5- Software and Services. Total EU funding is Euro 2786000. It started September 1, 2006, and it will last for 36 months. CWI, the Netherlands, is the coordinator of the project involving 9 partners.
UNU-IIST's funding is Euro 200000 over 3 years, which will pay for a post-doctoral researcher, who will collaborate in particular with our Associate Research Fellow Dr. Bernhard Aichernig at the Graz University of Technology, Austria.
The objective of this project is the development and application of an integrated suite of tools for compositional modelling, testing, and validation of software for evolving networks of dynamically reconfigurable components.
The project will develop a new high-level modelling language Credo for the dynamic composition of highly reconfigurable component-based software systems, and light-weight and automated verification techniques and tools supporting this language. Credo integrates a formal component model based on concurrent objects which support run-time updates with a new model of component connectors based on mobile channels. Credo supports rapid prototyping and automated validation of networks of distributed services implemented by components, focusing on analyzing the effect of dynamic reconfiguration. The kernel of the Credo tool suite is an abstract interpreter for the language. The abstract interpreter forms the basis for the development and integration of simulation, testing and validation tools for the compositional analysis of functional, timing, and resource requirements.
Two case studies are included:
The high level safety analysis of the Air Traffic Control System, which started in 2005 with a publication at SEFM 2005, showed that model-checking techniques can yield fresh insights into how failures may arise in interactive systems. This work was further developed in 2006 and led to the submission of a journal paper currently under review.
The low-level security analysis of the Web-based Conference System showed how model-checking can be used to drive the design of interactive systems. The outcome of this work are technical report 342, a presentation at an international event (FMIS 2006, Macau SAR China, October) and a journal paper in preparation.
A workshop on "Formal Methods for Interactive Systems" (FMIS 2006) has been organised in October in Macau.
A course on "Formal HCI" is currently under development and will be first presented in February-March 2007 in Pisa within the joint PhD Programme between UNU and the University of Pisa. The course will provide the background knowledge to work in the project as well as advanced topics related to the project results.
The project has completed the high-level qualitative analysis of the air traffic control case study. The project is currently focusing on the generalisation of the formal framework for the high-level analysis of patterns of behaviours.
This work will continue in 2007 aiming at:
The low-level security analysis will be extended to other groupware application and through a cross-fertilisation with the project on "Formal Models for Security" aims at concrete applications to e-voting and group authentication protocols.
Many collaborations have been started within the project and have contributed to the success of publications and organisation of events. The project has also benefited from the cross-fertilisation with the project on "Formal Models for Security", which has provided new objectives and an injection of new ideas. The teaching of the courses "Formal HCI" at the PhD School of the University of Pisa will strongly contribute to the implementation of the joint PhD Programme between UNU and the University of Pisa. It also aims to provide dissemination of the outcomes of the project as well as to attract PhD students to spend research time at UNU-IIST as defined in the joint PhD Programme.
A postdoc was hired to work on the project starting from October. His work focuses on formal aspects of secure distributed systems, investigating the integration of different verification approaches and social and HCI aspects of information security. The outcome of this work has been an accepted chapter to contribute to the book "Social and Human Elements of Information Security".
In the second half of 2006 the security and quality aspects of Open Source Software (OSS) have been analysed and an initial quality model for OSS has been developed. The outcome of this work has been a conference paper submitted to OpenCert 2007.
A course on "Security: From Basic Concepts and Techniques to Formal Models and Methods" was taught in April in Iaşi, Romania. A course on "Network Security" will be taught in August 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique.
Within the scope of the project a Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages (QAPL 2006) has been organised in March in Vienna in collaboration with the University of Pisa and the Imperial College London.
The project has completed the preliminary study of different approaches to security and has developed a framework for the analysis of security properties of workflow systems using model-checking and temporal logic.
The project is currently focusing on:
In addition to the course on "Network Security" to be taught in August in Maputo, Mozambique, other courses on security are planned for 2007 in Malaysia and Pakistan.
One of the fellows working within the project will start PhD in January 2007.
Many collaborations have been started within the project and have contributed to the success of publications and organisation of events. The project has also benefited from the cross-fertilisation with the project on "Formal Analysis of Human Behaviour in Interactive Systems", which has provided new objectives and an injection of new ideas. The teaching of security courses has provided dissemination of the outcomes of the project as well as successfully attracted new fellows to work on the project.
Quantitative analysis and the integration of the model-checking and theorem-proving approaches is an objective to be achieved by the end of 2007.
This project (a) maintains and extends the tools for the RAISE formal method and (b) uses RAISE on application projects by fellows.
There were several activities in 2006:
Juan's report on his work was successful in that he was awarded his MSc. He then started a PhD at the University of York, UK. This is a joint York/UNU-IIST PhD, jointly supervised by Jim Woodcock and Chris George. Juan will spend the second year of his PhD at UNU-IIST.
A meeting in December in Dublin attended by Tony Hoare, Jim Woodcock and a number of the Mondex project team, including Chris George, identified some possible projects to be specified and verified during 2007-8:
UNU-IIST will probably work on electronic voting, which we see as having a relevance to the UN
The SAL translator still needs work to correct the "confidence conditions" version and to produce the user guide.
Jong Hyo Jin mad slow progress initially in a new environment and because of his limited English language skills. But he made good progress by the end of the year.
Environmental modelling to support water management has a proven success record but is very expensive: so expensive that it cannot be afforded in most places in developing countries. At the same time watersheds, rivers and lakes are under increasing stress from growing populations, industries, and agriculture which both consume water and pollute water resources. The aim of the WaterBase project is to create a generic model of water resources together with a decision support system intended for use in developing countries that is cheap to instantiate while being effective in operation. The system will support the modelling of existing situations as well as the generation and comparison of results for possible alternative scenarios. Thus it will support such activities as development planning, the exploration of ways to counteract environmental degradation, and the mitigation of events such as global warming, storms, or polluting accidents.
The system will be free, open source, and instantiable using GIS data freely available on the internet.
One researcher left the project at the end of 2007 (as he was taking up full-time employment); the other, Luis Leon, who provides the hydrology expertise to the project, will continue at least until mid-2007.
Progress was slower than hoped, partly because of problems with some required components of MapWindow being delayed and defective. So the original intention to have a working version of the interface by the end of 2006 slipped by perhaps a month. The aim to have some demonstration scenarios for two watersheds by May 2007, for a presentation at the UN, is still on track.
An in-house course on "How to Build Digital Libraries" was taught in March by George Buchanan, Swansea University, UK.
A course on "Formal HCI" is currently under development and will include background knowledge on the usability of digital libraries. The course will be first presented in February-March 2007 in Pisa within the joint PhD Programme between UNU and the University of Pisa.
All data is held on a web server maintained by UNU-IIST and located in Macao. This centralised implementation will allow the repository to act as an archive for long-term protection of the data and provide robust and efficient access for users. Each collection can now be managed separately, with the data extended and edited remotely using on-line forms by the organisation that owns it.
We have recently
The UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UNESA) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), have recently shown interest in joining the repository.
For 2007 we aim to further populate the repository with research materials from more Research and Training Centres, involve more UN agencies, such as UNESCO, UNIDO, FAO, etc., and present the repository at international conferences on digital library and at UN meetings. Moreover, the internet address of the repository is expected to be changed from the current UNU website to the UN domain http://research.un.org. Finally, we will explore the possibility of including UNU e-learning materials in the repository.
The centres who joined the repository are now autonomous managing their collection and in entering new reports in the RUN database using on-line forms This is the achievement of an important objective of the project.
This project aims to strengthen all aspects of computer science teaching in universities in developing countries.
Under the project, we are trying to arrange for (generally young) computer science lecturers or professors from universities in developing countries to learn new courses at partner universities in industrialised countries for one semester as a fellow, at the same time providing them with the supporting course materials. Then when they return to their own universities they use the knowledge they gain, together with the supporting course materials, as the basis for improving and updating existing courses or introducing new courses into the teaching curriculum of their own university. With our arrangement, the partner universities provide the use of their facilities free of charge and in particular without payment of tuition fees. UNU-IIST provides recommended text books for each of the courses the fellows study, and these text books become the property of the fellows' home department when they return.
We also continued to support one PhD candidate from Pakistan in her second year at Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and started to support a PhD candidate from Argentina at the University of York, UK.
Under the project IT Training Courses and Schools in Developing Countries, UNU-IIST aims to disseminate sound modern approaches to software development in developing countries. IT Schools and Courses are organised jointly with host institutions. The courses are in two categories: formal methods and software engineering and system development.
The aim of the courses is to propagate research into and application of formal software development techniques, with the hope that developing countries can accelerate their progress in being self sufficient in software technology, and even become providers of services and products elsewhere.
The courses on software engineering and system development aim to introduce the advanced methods, techniques and tools that are widely used in industries for software development. They cover Project Management, Object-Oriented Software Development with UML and the Rational Unified Development Process, Component-Based Software Development, and Software Testing. These topics are often taught together with the those on formal methods so that the participants can integrate formal methods and practical software engineering in their further study and practice.
IT Schools, however, have a wide range of topics in computer science not just in software technology, and consist of several courses. Courses in a school are taught by experts invited from universities and industries as well, not just by UNU-IIST staff.
UNU-IIST organised the following schools in 2006:
UNU-IIST staff presented the following courses:
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