 | Executive Summary |
| Top |
| Postgraduate training/teaching activities |
|
|
| ||||||
| Status of implementation of project activities | ||||||||
The aim of the Center is to build capacity and provide know-how and advice in planning, implementing and evaluating programs for Electronic Governance, working in partnership with institutions from developing countries, as well international and UN organizations. Inline with its aim, the Center has four major goals: (1) produce concrete benefits to it stakeholders - primarily governments in developing countries; (2) connect beneficiaries - institutions in developing countries - in sharing experiences and establishing cooperation initiatives; (3) work closely with partners to access complementary capabilities and resources; and (4) continuously develop its internal capacity and capabilities.
To fulfill its mission, the Center is engaged in research, dissemination and a number of development activities - good practice development, human capacity development, institutional development and community development. To carry out such activities, the Center relies on its strong capabilities in e-Government research, education and training, software and organizational development, as well as experience in providing high-level advice to Electronic Governance initiatives worldwide. The Center currently comprises a team of 10 staff: 4 senior staff, 2 junior staff and 4 fellows, including 2 from government. This number is expected to grow to 18 staff before the end of 2008 due to the current project portfolio and international commitments.
The Center is presently engaged in all its activity areas, strategically relying on existing institutional partnerships as well as developing new ones.
The Center maintains its portal at http://www.egov.iist.unu.edu.
The Center has recorded a number of achievements since the commencement of its operations in January 2007, in the areas of: strategic direction and internal workings, organization of events and conferences, research and development, networking and strategic partnerships, fellowships and international outreach. These achievements are briefly described below.
The Center will in the first half of 2008 be completing its first project contributions to the e-Macao Program. The Center will also continue to build its internal capacity and capabilities to cope with the likely increase in project activities and events.
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 to bring together various parties with major stakes in local development of Electronic Governance, (3) a series of schools and courses to build local capacity in addressing various aspects of Electronic Governance, (4) a community-wide practice framework 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, developing and managing Electronic Governance initiatives, (7) research, development and capacity-building projects promoting Public Sector Modernization through Electronic Governance, and (8) a series of International Conferences on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance.
Within this framework, community actions are carried out in the scope of various thematic areas relevant to e-Governance, such as: business process reengineering, free and open-source software, government enterprise architectures, human capacity development, innovation patterns in government, international cooperation, organizational change, public benefits management, public-private partnerships, public services for rural areas, readiness assessment, security and privacy, software infrastructure, stakeholder management, standards and interoperability, strategic planning, technology adoption, and others.
More information about UNeGov.net can be found at http://www.egov.iist.unu.edu/cegov/projects/unegovnet and http://www.unegov.net.
During 2007, UNeGov.net organized 10 workshops and schools:
Besides workshops and schools, the major event organized by the Center in 2007 was ICEGOV2007 - 1st International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, Macao, 10-13 December 2007, www.icegov.org. Taking place under the official patronage of Macao Government, ICEGOV2007 was organized by UNU-IIST-EGOV, jointly with the Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York, USA (CTG); and United Nations Asian and Pacific Training Centre for Information and Communication Technology for Development (APCICT), Incheon, South Korea. The conference brought together practitioners, developers and researchers from government, academia, industry and non-governmental organizations to share the latest findings in the theory and practice of Electronic Governance. By design, the conference created ample opportunities for close interactions between these three categories of participants, so that each could benefit from the interaction with others.
ICEGOV2007 created a rich program comprising invited talks, tutorials, workshops, panel discussions and regular paper sessions, by leading international experts and practitioners in the field. Invited speakers - Sharon S. Dawes, USA; Olu Agunloye, Nigeria and Elia Armstrong on behalf of Guido Bertucci, United Nations - represented academic, government and non-governmental perspectives on Electronic Governance. In addition, a series of six tutorial-workshop events was organized on various aspects of Electronic Governance: (1) Formal Engineering Methods for Electronic Governance; (2) Interoperability in Electronic Government; (3) Knowledge Management in Public Administration; (4) Electronic Governance and Organizational Transformation; (5) Policy Development for Electronic Governance; and (6) Economics for Electronic Governance. Tutorials, held on Monday 10 December, provided the audience with general foundations and basic understanding of the area, while the workshops, held on Thursday 13 December presented state-of-the-art research and applications.
Regular paper sessions comprised presentations of the papers accepted for the conference. Altogether, 159 abstracts and 130 full papers were submitted from 53 countries. A total of 97 papers were received from 27 developing countries: Argentina, Bangladesh, Benin, Brazil, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Russia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia and Vietnam, and 61 from 26 developed countries/economies: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Macao, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK, United Arab Emirates and USA. Among 159 submissions, 63 were research papers, 74 were practice papers and 22 were solutions papers. After review, 33 submissions were accepted as long (10 page) papers, 38 as short (4 page) papers, and 20 as posters (2 pages). Regular paper sessions covered a range of topics from e-Participation, Diffusion and Implementation, through Innovative Applications, Development and Rural e-Government, to Cases, Research and Applications.
ICEGOV2007 is planned to continue annually at different locations: Africa (2008), America (2009), Europe (2010) and Asia (2011), returning back to Macao in 2012.
Finally, six UNeGov.net thematic areas were developed during 2007 through various projects: human capacity development, semantic interoperability, software infrastructure development, south-south cooperation, standards and best practices, and strategic planning.
This project aims to define a system for the management of standards and good practices for the development, implementation and operation of e-Government services offered by public administrations, and populate this system with an initial set of standards relevant for setting up an e-Government infrastructure (technical, managerial, regulatory).
Specific objectives of the project are: (1) establish a repository of agreed and documented standards and practices for the development, implementation and operations of e-Government services; (2) develop a pool of government employees competent - educated and skilled - to successfully apply these standards when developing, implementing and operating e-Government services; (3) design a management system for the lifecycle of standards; (4) design a support system for the implementation and operations of standards and practices at central government as well as local government levels. Fulfilling these objectives is particulary important for implementing seamless, cross-agency e-government services through government-wide initiatives.
The outcomes of the project will be applied in the context of the e-Macao Program and Macao e-Government initatives in general. Besides creating direct benefits for Macao Government, project results would also be packaged for dissemination in developing countries.
More information about this project can be found at http://www.egov.iist.unu.edu/projects/standards.
During July and August 2007, a Project Initiation Document was developed, serving as a contract between the Project Board (comprising Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau and UNU-IIST-EGOV) and the Project Manager based on the common understanding regarding deliverables, quality, risks, reporting, project organization, and the approach to developing the solution. Since September 2007, the agreed deliverables are being produced. A draft report was produced by the end of December 2007, and will be finalized by the end of March 2008.
By exploiting the experience and outcome of the IT Master Plan Project for Macao Institute for Tourism Studies, carried out during 2006, and international best practice frameworks for IT Governance and Strategic IT Planning, this project aims to develop a methodology and a set of toolkits to support strategic IT planning in public agencies. Specific objectives of the project include: (1) developing a Strategic IT Planning Framework comprising an IT Planning Process and an IT Planning Toolkit to support organizationally and technically the execution of the planning process; (2) carrying out a number of strategic IT planning exercises with selected government agencies in Macao as part of the ongoing e-Macao Program; (3) developing training manuals and training government officials in the application of the developed process and toolkit; and (4) disseminating the IT Planning Framework to developing countries through the UNeGov.net initiative.
More information about this project can be found at http://www.egov.iist.unu.edu/projects/planning.
The Gateway will enable the exchange of information and documents among government agencies and in general facilitate collaboration between them. It will also provide the required organizational and semantic support to such collaborations in selected public sector domains such as social benefits, health care, disaster management and tourism.
In the current phase of the project, two main activities are carried out during 2007 and early 2008: the development of the Messaging Gateway to provide a set of enhanced messaging services suitable for a government environment, and the development of the Semantic Interoperability Extension for the Gateway. Concrete project objectives include: (1) building design models for the Gateway able to provide basic as well as enhanced communication services for seamless delivery of Electronic Public Services; (2) implementing the Gateway based on the design models using robust, open-standards-compliant components and tools; (3) developing a knowledge base to answer queries about the Gateway and provide services to operate and manage this repository; (4) investigating organizational and semantic interoperability requirements for inter-agency collaborations in delivering major government services in Macao; (5) developing specialized ontologies to support inter-agency collaborations in selected domains, including conversations, messages types and allowed message instances; (6) configuring the Gateway to support semantically-sound collaborations among government agencies using the ontologies; and (7) developing a repository and the corresponding services to publish and maintain ontologies and data schemas for inter-agency message exchange.
More information about this project can be found at http://www.egov.iist.unu.edu/projects/infrastructure.
The plans for 2008 are: to complete the development of the Gateway and the Semantic Interoperability extension; to apply the Gateway in support of Electronic Public Services in Macao; and to disseminate project results through UNeGov.net. Later phases of this project will develop the remaining infrastructure elements.
In line with this aim, the objectives of the project are: (1) establish the current state of research and practice in Semantic Interoperability for e-Government; (2) build precise models to capture requirements for Semantic Interoperability particularly for public organizations; (3) specify and implement prototype middleware software (SIM) to meet such requirements; (4) illustrate how new applications can be built on top of this middleware; and (5) 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: (1) Survey - document the state-of-the-art and current challenges in the areas of Electronic Government, Interoperability, Enterprise Architectures, and Semantic Web Technologies; (2) Foundation - build a foundation for SIM, from Domain Models, through Enterprise Architectures, to SIM specifications; (3) Software - build a pair of reference implementations for the SIM using Microsoft and Open Source technologies; (4) Process - define a process to build applications on top of the SIM with concrete examples of its use; and (5) Community - develop a UNeGov.net thematic area on Semantic Interoperability and e-Government.
More information about the project can be found at http://www.egov.iist.unu.edu/projects/interoperability.
Three project meetings have taken place in 2007. The first took place in Macao on 24 January 2007 with the aim to discuss the design - aim, objectives, deliverables, schedule, and framework of the project. It was organized by UNU-IIST-EGOV, and was attended by 12 participants - 3 from Microsoft and 9 from UNU-IIST. The second took place in Redmond, USA on 30 March 2007 with the aim to present the progress on the first two tasks of the project, and discuss future tasks. It was organized by Microsoft, and was attended by 10 participants - 2 from UNU-IIST-EGOV and 8 from Microsoft. The third took place during ICEGOV2007 in Macao to demonstrate initial outcomes of the project.
The project has made progress on all its tasks as described below. Survey Task - A report summarizing the findings of the survey on state-of-the-art in Electronic Government, Interoperability, Enterprise Architectures and Semantic Web Technologies was completed in early 2007 and presented during the workshop in March. A paper has been written to describe the findings of the survey [3]. Foundation Task - Based on the survey, models and requirements for the SIM were identified and documented in a report completed in late June. Software Task - A platform-independent design, architecture and detailed design for the SIM were defined and documented. Furthermore, a concrete need for a flexible solution to semantic interoperability was identified, and two technologies were chosen: the semantic reasoner - Pellet and the knowledge representation language - OWL. Three main components of the SIM - Semantic Validation, Mediation and Discovery - are currently implemented. Process Task - A process describing how to build new applications on top of the SIM implementation is also under development, with concrete applications to illustrate its use. Community Task - A thematic area on Semantic Interoperability for Electronic Government was initiated as part of UNeGov.net. Upon finalizing these tasks, a report will be written to consolidate all findings and outcomes of the project.
In collaboration with other RTC/Ps, the project is to achieve the following objectives: (1) setting up a UNU-OCW website; (2) developing at least 10 courses to be hosted on the website and made available under the Creative Commons License for use and adaptation by educators and learners; (3) increasing the awareness of OCW and its benefits to RTC/Ps beyond initial participants of the project; and (4) creating a network of UNU staff willing and capable to add new courses to the UNU-OCW website.
More information about this project can be found at http://www.egov.iist.unu.edu/projects/courseware.
A major challenge in carrying out studies on South-South collaboration is lack of data on the state of cooperation. Therefore, a major objective of the project is to continuously collect and analyze data on existing and emerging cooperation in the areas of Software Technology and Electronic Governance. Other specific objectives include: (1) facilitating and enabling cooperation in the area of Electronic Governance through the UNeGov.net platform - events and communities; (2) making available capacity development and training programs to regional cooperation initiatives in the area of Electronic Governance; (3) identifying and establishing partnerships with centers of excellence in Electronic Governance to jointly support countries in the South.
More information about this project is provided at http://www.egov.iist.unu.edu/projects/southsouth.
In addition, an event on "Developing Electronic Governance in the South - New Models for South-South Cooperation" was organized at the UN Headquarters on 18 October 2007, with support from the UNU Office in New York (UNU-ONY). This event brought together the stakeholders from academia, government, non-governmental and UN organizations in order to: (1) discuss the limitations of traditional North-South cooperation to develop Electronic Governance in the South; (2) present the state of South-South cooperation in this area; (3) highlight the challenges in developing effective South-South cooperation frameworks in the area of Electronic Governance; (4) recommend new models for effective South-South cooperation to build Electronic Governance in the South; and (5) review the roles of stakeholders, particularly the UN system, in the new models. Three government speakers represented national experiences from: Colombia - Connectivity Agenda, Ministry of Communications; Kenya - e-Government Directorate, Office of the President; and Mongolia - ICT Authority. Three more speakers represented regional and global experiences in facilitating effective cooperation in the South: Academy for Educational Development (AED); Canada School for Public Service (CSPS); United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UNDEA); and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), South-South Collaboration Unit.
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 interaction protocols that can express concurrency. We developed a technique to reason about the quality of servises with the model.
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 [18][19].
Furthermore we have completed our general theory of mutation testing including three test-case generation techniques: (1) an algebraic characterization of mutation tests via refinement, (2) mutation testing for pre- postcondition contracts and (3) for a simple, but nontrivial, programming language via normal-form transformation.
The work described by the last two bulletpoints has been carried out together with Shaikh Ahmed Siraj, Postdoc at UNU-IIST until September 2007.
In total 3 conference papers and 1 technical report have been published, 1 book chapter published, 1 book chapter accepted (shared with the project "Formal Models for Security"), 1 journal paper accepted, 2 workshop proceedings edited, and 2 journal special issues edited to appear in 2008.
Two workshops on "Formal Methods for Interactive Systems" (FMIS) have been organised in October 2006 in Macau and in September 2007 in Lancaster, UK. A course on "Formal Methods for Interactive Systems" has been presented in February-March 2007 in Pisa within the joint PhD Programme between UNU and the University of Pisa. The "1st International School on Methodologies and Tools for Human-computer Interaction" was organised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in September 2007, and included a course on "Methodologies for the Formal Analysis of Human-computer Interaction". Both courses provided the background knowledge to work in the project as well as advanced topics related to the project results.
The teaching of the courses on "Formal Methods for Interactive Systems" at the PhD School of the University of Pisa has strongly contributed to the implementation of the joint PhD Programme between UNU and the University of Pisa. Together with the course on "Methodologies for the Formal Analysis of Human-computer Interaction" it has also provided dissemination of the outcoms of the project.
The work carried out together with Shaikh Ahmed Siraj, Postdoc at UNU-IIST until September 2007, includes:
1 conference paper and 1 technical report have been published, 2 book chapters accepted (1 shared with the project "Formal Analysis of Human Behaviour in Interactive Systems") and 1 conference paper presented.
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 2007:
The SAL translator still needs a user guide so that it can be released as part of the RAISE tools. We expect this to be complete early in 2008.
The work on translating part of RSL to CSP and hence using FDR has identified and resolved many of the technical issues.
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, has continued during 2007: he works one day a week as a postdoc.
During 2007 our first aim was a working prototype by May to be presented at a UNU event at the UN in New York. The prototype was ready but the event had, unfortunately, to be postponed. We intend to organise a similar event later.
New requirements for the prototype system were identified at the SWAT Conference in July 2007, and were implemented by mid-September. There was a slight delay caused by some problems in mapWindow, but the release of MWSWAT was made in December 2007. It is available from the WaterBase web site http://www.waterbase.org, along with global data sets for soil, landuse, river basins, and climate. There is substantial documentation and example data sets for two river basins, San Juan in Mexico and Linthipe in Malawi.
UNU-IIST has been invited as a partner in a proposed EU collaborative project eWaterAbility.
The prototype MWSWAT tool was presented at the SWAT Conference in the Netherlands in July, and was very well received. One paper was presented at the ISESS conference in Prague in May, and another was published in the online Open Hydrology Journal. Other presentations were made at a workshop on hydrology in Cameroon and the WITFOR conference in Ethiopia, both in August. Reactions were very positive.
The WaterBase web site was established.
Preliminary progress has been made for FDR2 Diamond mining, Rule-based system verification, and the Java Memory Model. We are actively working on these topics while also looking at the possiblity of external funding.
Thomas Anung Basuki and Dian Andriana, two Fellows from Indonesia, have been working at the formal specification of digital libraries using RAISE. After Dian's departure, the work has been continued by Thomas Anung by converting the RAISE model into B and performing analysis on it, and by exploring the use of CSP in defining usability and security properties aiming at quality assurance in digital libraries.
A collaboration has been established with the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, aiming at research and development in e-learning.
An in-house course on "How to Build Digital Libraries" was taught in March 2006 by George Buchanan, Swansea University, UK.
Digital libraries technologies have been transferred to developing countries through the course taught by George Buchanan in 2006.
The collaboration with the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, is a first step for the transfer of e-learning technologies to developing countries.
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 one PhD candidate from Argentina at the University of York, UK.
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. Typically an IT School lasts a fortnight and consists of four courses.
An Electronic Governance School typically lasts three days and comprises seven roughly half-day modules. For instance, a school on Foundations of Electronic Governance comprises the following modules: (1) Introducing Electronic Government; (2) Strategic Planning for Electronic Government; (3) Developing Technical Solutions for Electronic Government; (4) Engineering Structures and Processes for Electronic Government; (5) Aligning Technological and Organizational Development; (6) Sharing Best Practices in Electronic Governance; and (7) Building a Community of Practice for Electronic Governance.
See Section * for details.
UNU-IIST organised the following courses in 2007.
| Status of implementation of project activities | ||||||||
|
|
| ||||||