Domain models and enterprise application framework for developing electronic public services

This paper presents generic domain models to underpin the development of Electronic Public Services
(EPS) – from conceptual models, through requirements and architecture, to implementation models.
The conceptual model follows the analysis of 25 concrete business licensing and 6 social welfare
services delivered by governments to businesses and citizens respectively. Based on this model, we
characterize generic business licensing and social welfare services and, following the Governance
Enterprise Architecture, synthesize a generic process for delivering Authorization and Certification
classes of public services. From the generic process, requirements are obtained and the architecture is
defined to support these requirements. The architecture comprises three categories of components –
Front-Office, Mid-Office and Back-Office. We present the static and behavioral view of this
architecture and show how it supports the variability in the development of concrete e-Licensing or e-
Welfare EPS through: concrete process specification at the Mid-Office, binding of specialized tasks to
automation support at the Back-Office, and use of configuration files. Finally, we discuss an
Enterprise Application Framework as an implementation of the architecture based on open standards,
and describe the use of the framework for rapid development of EPS based on concrete project
experience. This work was carried out in the context of the e-Macao Project.