For delivering seamless services, government agencies need to communicate with one another. These communications take place by exchanging different types of messages. Messages may be written by the staff at one agency and read by the staff at other agencies, much like writing and reading email messages (interactive messaging). They may be also created, posted, retrieved and processed by the applications running in individual agencies (automatic messaging).

XG2G facilitates and regulates the exchange of messages between and within government agencies. Although XG2G supports interactive messaging, it is primarily designed to aid automatic messaging and enable the integration of government applications.

The project is focused on identifying, developing and packaging reusable basic features and business patterns required for the rapid development and deployment of Electronic Public Services (EPS) and making them available as software infrastructure solutions.

The delivery of Electronic Public Services (EPS) is key for measuring Electronic Government efforts in terms of the number, maturity and availability of these services to all key stakeholders. The rapid development and deployment of such services must rely on reusable infrastructure products offering readily accessible solutions to common requirements presented by all these services. For instance, common needs to EPS include authentication and notification services, user profiling, security and auditing procedures, and others. These common requirements, as well as business patterns can be provided as run-time and design-time infrastructure solutions supporting the large-scale and efficient development and deployment of EPS.

Many features can be identified as common needs for developing EPS that should be provided as software infrastructure products. For example, the eMacao project proposed a blueprint infrastructure for delivering EPS comprising some components, services and frameworks as those illustrated in the figure presented below.

In the first stage, this project concentrates on developing a messaging gateway, called XG2G, that will:

1. support the general exchange of information among government agencies,
2. facilitate collaborations between government agencies,
3. provide organizational and semantic support for such collaborations in selected public sector domains.

XG2G is a high-level communication and coordination platform to support multi-organizational processes and applications. It comprises two main components:

1. XG2G-Core is a minimum run-time framework that enables asynchronous exchange of messages between registered members along dynamically created channels; and
2. XG2G-Extend is a repository of various horizontal (process-independent) and vertical (process-dependent) patterns and a mechanism to dynamically enable such patterns on top of the functionality provided by XG2G-Core.

The following horizontal extensions are provided as part of the first release:

The highest maturity level of Electronic Government is known as Seamless Government. Seamless Government is a new paradigm that prescribes the behavior of government agencies, individually and as a whole, in order to best respond to the needs of citizens, businesses and other government customers based on collaboration and networking between government agencies. Seamless Government enables the provision of customer-focused, high-quality public services, accessed through a one-stop contact and grouped according to the needs of customers, such as life events for citizens and business episodes for enterprises. Seamless Government also improves efficiency in government operations by eliminating duplicated efforts and making better use of scarce public resources.

Implementing Seamless Government presents a variety of challenges, such as: legal challenges - recognizing electronic processes as legally equivalent to paper-based processes and establishing regulations related to privacy and security; financial challenges - facilitating flexible funding and accountability for carrying out multi-annual and cross-agency projects; organizational challenges - enabling the execution of processes and collaborative initiatives that seamlessly cross the boundaries of public and private sector organizations; and technical challenges - integrating software applications developed in different environments and executed on different platforms.

This project proposes a technical solution to address some technical and consequently some organizational challenges facing the development of Seamless Government.

A study of the different business processes supporting the delivery of main public services is carried out for identifying existing collaboration patterns between government agencies. Existing messaging solutions are analyzed for defining specific requirements considering the functionality offered by available commercial products. In addition, a study of interoperability frameworks adopted by e-Government leaders as well as technologies of the Semantic Web is conducted for implementing the semantic interoperability services.In addition, research tasks are carried out for providing solutions to the problems posted by the Development activity.

The results achieved through the Research activity enables the specification of the software requirements. Development tasks are carried out for implementing the message gateway, the semantic interoperability extensions and their integration.

For assuring the correct utilization of the project outcomes, training materials are developed and seminars are conducted among civil servants for building human capacity on configuring and exploiting the software artifacts.

Several tasks are carried out for disseminating the project results, such as meetings with government officials; invited talks including software demonstration in workshops, conferences and academic institutions;and maintenance of the project portal.

For assuring the long-term utilization of the software, post-project support is offered to IT staff responsible for using and maintaining the software.

The project will produce the following deliverables:

1. Government Message Gateway – Source and binary codes implementing the functionalities of the Gateway, along with a set of APIs for using the Gateway services.
2. Message Gateway Documentation – The document specifying the requirements, architecture, design, implementation, deployment, and other development artifacts of the Message Gateway.
3. Message Gateway Knowledge Base – Components and services for updating and querying information related to the Gateway.
4. Interoperability Requirements Document – The document capturing organizational and semantic interoperability requirements for the pilot sector.
5. Business Area Ontology – Ontology to support collaborations in a business area specifying interactions, messages and associated data element types.
6. Interoperability Repository – Components and services to publish, discover, use and manage ontologies and data schema stored in the InterOper-KB.
7. Project Website – a portal publishing project-related information, resources and outputs.

The following categories of events will be organized as part of the project:

1. Technical presentations and software demonstration for government agencies – the aim of these events is to explain the functionality offered by the Messaging Gateway as well as to present technical details and possible deployment scenarios. The software demonstration shows the functionality implemented in the current release.
2. Training seminars – the aim of the seminars is to building human-capacity among IT civil servants for configuring and using the Messaging Gateway.
3. Technical presentations and software demonstrations for academic institutions – aiming at presenting the results of the Research and Development activities.

The following outcomes are expected after completion of the project:

1. The business process of at least one e-service re-engineered where collaborations between different government units are supported by the Messaging Gateway.
2. Use of the messaging extensions providing specific functionality for the communicating applications, such as logging, validation, transformation and encryption/decryption of messages.
3. Reduction in delivery time of the re-engineered e-services due to more efficient collaborations between government units.
4. Reduction in costs for delivering the re-engineered e-service due to the automation of steps of the business process
5. Improvements in the feasibility and opportunities of integrating software applications due to the provision of the Messaging Gateway developed based on open-standards and open-source technologies.

The software is provided in binary libraries for the use of government agencies.

A copy of the source files is delivered to Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau for its administration.

The project results will be disseminated through the e-Macao e-Government Events and through the workshops, school and courses organized by the UNeGov.net - Community of Practice for Electronic Governance.

The total duration for the project is 16 months. The project officially commenced on January 1, 2007 and will end by April 30, 2008.

The revised schedule of the project is shown in the figure below.

The partners of the project include:

1. Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau, Macao SAR Government (as IT Coordination Office)
2. Macao Post , Macao SAR Government (as Collaborating Agency)

The project team includes:

1. Vincent Douwe - Software Engineer
2. Elsa Estevez - Leader
3. Tomasz Janowski - Advisor
4. Khoi Nguyen - Software Engineer
5. Alejandro Sanchez - Software Engineer

Project risks - to be written.

Conclusions and lessons learnt - to be written.