1. Interoperability and Web Applications: Opening the Door to Access and Sharing   Interoperability across the web and applications requires standardization, thought, and planning. The presentation will discuss legacy and other challenges, provide insight into the available standards and processes which exist to aid movement forward and review the benefits of interoperability.
Kevin Novak, Chair
W3C Electronic Government Interest Group
April 17, 2009

2. Overview of W3C Electronic Government Work
Formed/Chartered in June of 2008
Participation open to W3C members and Invited Experts
Public and others can join the list to watch and learn about activities and discussions
Promoting openness and contribution across diverse bodies and interests
The W3C eGovernment Interest Group was chartered in June of 2008 recognizing that governments throughout the World needed assistance and guidance in achieving the promises of electronic government through technology and the Web.
The group and its efforts fills a distinct gap in the web and technology standards space focusing on the unique and diverse needs and issues that governments throughout the developed and developing World face in enabling electronic service and information delivery and providing opportunities for discovery, interaction and participation.

3. Overview of Charter
The Charter of the group sets forth three areas of focus:
Usage of Web Standards (Government Websites and use of best practices and standards)
Transparency and Participation (Enabling discovery, communications, and interaction)
Seamless Integration of Data (Use of data standards, Semantic Web, XML)

4. Year 1 Work
Collaborating and partnering with governments and other organizations (The World Bank, EC, OECD, OAS, ICA, CEN, OASIS).
Identifying, validating, and documenting existing applicable standards.
Identifying gaps in the open standards that currently exist.
Working collaboratively on having open standards developed, validated, and tested.
Creating, evaluating, and testing use cases.
Compiling and communicating issues papers (called Group Notes) that will offer governments the opportunity to learn what exists to aid them in their endeavors.
Creating the outline and work plan for year 2 and year 3 of the eGovernment activities at W3C.

5. First Draft of Issues Paper Published
Paper available for comment
Focus on:
Participation and Citizen Engagement
Open Government Data
Interoperability
Multi-channel delivery
Identification and Authentication
Long term data management

6. Use Cases Semantic Interoperability (eg. Judicial) Persistent URIs
Performance Data + Citizen Choice
Data Sharing Policy Expression
Digital Preservation + Authenticity + Temporal Degradation
IPR Expression
Identification + Authentication
Data Aggregation
Your Web Site is your API (eg. RDFa, sitemaps?)
What Data? How does the government decide?
Participation in Social Media; what are the rules ?
Temporal Data Legislation/Legal (Law Reports)
Geospatial
Multi channel delivery (back/front)

7. What is Interoperability in Government?
Interoperability is the ability of organizations, individuals, and agencies to share and exchange information via electronic means.
Focus is in W3C Electronic Government terms:
Ability for government agencies to share and exchange information
Ability for different levels of government to share and exchange information
Ability to share, make available, and exchange information with organizations and individuals
FROM WIKIPEDIA: Speaking from an eGovernment perspective, interoperability refers to the collaboration ability of cross-border services for citizens, businesses and public administrations. Exchanging data can be a challenge due to language barriers, different specifications of formats and varieties of categorisations. Many more hindrances can be identified.
If data is interpreted differently, collaboration is limited, takes longer and is not efficient. For instance if a citizen of country A wants to purchase land in country B, the person will be asked to submit the proper address data. Address data in both countries include: Full name details, street name and number as well as a post code. The order of the address details might vary. In the same language it is not an obstacle to order the provided address data; but across language barriers it becomes more and more difficult. If the language requires other characters it is almost impossible, if no translation tools are available.
Hence eGovernment applications need to exchange data in a semantically interoperable manner. This saves time and money and reduces sources of errors. Fields of practical use are found in every policy area, be it justice, trade or participation etc. Clear concepts of interpretation patterns are required.
Many organisations are dedicated to interoperability. All have in common that they want to push the development of the world wide web towards the semantic web. Some concentrate on eGovernment, eBusiness or data exchange in general. In Europe, for instance, the European Commission and its IDABC programme issue the European Interoperability Framework. They also initiated the Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe (SEMIC.EU). A European Land Information Service (EULIS) was established in 2006, as a consortium of European National Land Registers. The aim of the service is to establish a single portal through which customers are provided with access to information about individual properties, about land and property registration services, and about the associated legal environment[2]. In the United States, the government's CORE.gov service provides a collaboration environment for component development, sharing, registration, and reuse.

8. Why is Interoperability a Challenge?
Proprietary Systems
Stove Piped Focus/implementation
Lack of understanding on intended audiences and uses
Consideration of open and other standards that allow systems and applications to communicate, share, and exchange.
Organizational coherence and integration: Interoperability is a means towards more coherent and integrated operation for the overall public administration domain. The current stovepipe organization of public institutions prevents the horizontal movement of information and allows only vertical flows according to the bureaucratic paradigm (command-report). Cross-agency interoperability makes the horizontal flow of information feasible and allows better communication and coordination amongst separate agencies.

9. Examples Local Government Public Safety Challenge
7 proprietary systems
40 interfaces to different levels of government
Lack of standards to allow communication
No opportunity to share, exchange or make information available
Federal Legislative Information
Proprietary and old systems/architecture
Lack of standards agreement or implementation
Confusing and challenging data/information structure
Cultural/Political Aspects In general and historically, public agencies have developed a culture that does not promote cross-agency sharing. In many cases, agencies are reluctant to change existing processes, open data and services to external parties and re-negotiate their way of operation with external parties, who owns and controls what.
The environment and focus was not to share or exchange information. The intent was to simply create a system that allowed for the agency, in its stove pipe, to operation. The history of information technology including adoption, have led to the situation that agencies and others find themselves in today. Who thought there would be a need to exchange and share information? Wasn’t the need simply to automate and collect what was needed in the transition from paper? Why would we need to share? We need to meet our own needs first…
An additional challenge is the lack of identification on who actually needs the information and how and why it should be shared. Much information is viewed as proprietary and secure and which should only be available via FOIA request or for archiving later. Only recently (and the current systems arent prepared) has there been a movement to expose, make avialable, and exchange information. Recovery.gov and Data.gov are two examples of promising projects and initiatives that will be confounded by the inability to actually retrieve, share, make available, and exchange data given the structure of the systems and the lack of open standard usage to allow communications and understanding of the data.
General examples: citizens cannot conduct government business and interaction at one place or in one application. Data cannot be shared that allows citizens to manage their needed services, update their address, view and manage identity cards or services. The impact transends the agencies and governments ability to communicate and share and directly impacts citizens who are requiring services and information. Can I pay my property tax by logging on with my government ID from other services? Do you know my address? I have it submitted and saved in the drivers license system?
After 9-11 public safety agencies found they needed to communicate and share and exchange information to ensure the safety of the public. Seven agencies in the local government were responsible for different levels and focuses comprising the overall public safety program. Each had a proprietary system that focused on serving the specific needs of the agency including all related internal operating processes. In addition to the inability to share information across internal agencies, there was also no way to interchange and share data across the different levels of Federal, State, and local government. The systems were not built with the requirements or understanding that data would need to be shared or exchange. Given the proprietary nature of the systems any work for sharing and exchanging was complex and costly.
Thomas, the legislative information system providing information to the public about the daily and historical activities of the Congress was as well a proprietary system requiring complex work and management to ensure information was being received and published to the Public. Given the diversity of contributors to the system (GPO, House, Senate), there was a lack of agreement on standards that would allow interoperability among systems. In addition, the semantics (taxonomy) of the information was and is very focused to the legislative process and presents challenges for coherency to those who would benefit from the information.

10. How Can Interoperability be Achieved?
Use or Develop common standards
Develop a common structure/framework (Government Interoperability Framework or GIF)shared by government organizations and agencies that promotes sharing
Technical interoperability standards including:
Data transport
Data representation
Semantic or other interoperability
How Can Interoperability Be Achieved?
Interoperability is by its own nature a joint effort. Sharing information requires sharing a set of common principles among all participants. Therefore, a set of common standards is key to interoperability.
Government Interoperability Frameworks
Though it is possible to start peer-to-peer data interchange programs, greater value usually lies in multi-lateral solutions. This principle sets the ground for the creation of a Government Interoperability Framework (GIF).
Though a universal definition for this term is still under discussion, a GIF is a common structure shared by different Governmental Organizations that enables them to share information and business processes. At a minimum, a GIF should define a set of technical interoperability principles (i.e. data transport, data representation, etc), though it may include as well:
Legal status.
Organizational Interoperability
Semantic interoperability
This is therefore a standardization effort. Several standards can be applied to each area, though it is strongly advised that open standards are chosen when available.

11. Main Issues and Limitations
Privacy
Security
Semantics
Legal Aspects
Open Standards
Open Source
Culture
Desire to Change
Struggle for Openness and transparency
Privacy
It is important that personal data is used only within limits allowed by individuals. This requires setting some sort of personal data protection standards that should be respected in any situation. Depending on the country, explicit authorization from the citizen may be required in order to perform any data interchange.
Security
Being a quite difficult issue, it is important that required levels of security are in place in the different areas: data access, communications, etc. providing equivalent safeguards to non-interoperable scenarios.
Semantics
The semantics of the information must be agreed beforehand, so all exchanging parties have a common understanding of the meaning of the data exchanged. At the international level, this can be a complex topic since some legal concepts may differ from one country to the other. The final goal is to be able to interpret data consistently across the different organizations and platforms involved in the data exchange.
Legal Aspects
Interoperability may require changes in current legislation, so this needs to be addressed as well.
Open Standards
It is of paramount importance to use open standards where available – for instance, use the X.509 technology stack when digital certificates are required.
Open Source
Whenever possible, Open Source Solutions should be evaluated and considered an option along with proprietary alternatives.

12. What are the Benefits? Easier for the Citizen Less Documentation
Faster Exchange and Communication
Greater automation
Increased multi-channel delivery
Interoperability presents many important benefits for both citizens and public organizations. The way this data interchange happens has a great impact on the perception by end user of the service, and in several areas.
Easier for the Citizen
Before digital exchange of data, citizens were requested to present many documents that were issued by other governmental departments. The task of requesting the different documents from other administrations was sometimes left to the citizen. In an interoperable scenario, data exchange happens behind the scenes.
Less Documentation
Since data is exchanged automatically, the citizen needs to present less and less documentation.
Faster
Data transmission by digital means is usually much faster than paper-based exchange, thus reducing service time.
Greater automation
Since data is already in digital formats, it is possible to have increasing automation at the business process level. New or existing applications can be plugged in to share that information.
Increased multi-channel delivery
Processes where paper-based documents are required are not easily ported to internet or mobile channels. When these documents in paper format are not required anymore, internet or mobile delivery becomes feasible.

13. Available and In Process Standards

15. Next Steps W3C Electronic Government Group will:
Continue to work with W3C groups and others standards bodies to address current and needed open standards.
Focus on further maturing and developing issues and solutions identified in the egov draft issues paper.
Vet, validate existing use cases and identify or develop new use cases that provide realistic and successful examples of interoperability.
Listen to the community (government and stakeholders) on what is needed and attempt to match need with relative standards and practices.

16. Questions?