Sri Lanka to an era of eGovernance – The Lanka Gate Initiative
Vision
With the vision of “eSriLanka” in mind, ICTA initiated plethora of projects and programs which are envisioned to take Sri Lanka to an era of eGovernance. Thus the service offerings from Government organizations would be reviewed and re-engineered to enhance the quality of service provided to citizen via electronic media. As a result, citizens would be able to use many “eServices” provided by different government and private organizations, while these eServices are linked via a massive collaborative framework of hardware, software and information.
This would require implementing a framework comprises of hardware, to enable interoperability between different government organizations, this wide collection of software infrastructure and systems which is envisioned to be the gateway for electronic information and electronic interactions in Sri Lanka, is generally referred to as the ‘Lanka Gate’ initiative.
Lanka Gate would include a comprehensive collection of infrastructural mechanisms to easily ‘plug-in’ eServices and to provide wide range of citizen centric services with more dynamicity and accessibility.
Many eServices will be generated as a result of various projects done at the ICT Agency, such as the Population Registry project, the ePensions project and the Samurdhi Services project. In addition, many other eServices could be generated by government, public and private sector organizations as well as by community groups.
Figure 1- Lanka Gate Vision
Architectural overview
collection of software systems that comprise Lanka Gate would collectively provide an enabling infrastructure for rapid integration and delivery of eServices. The loosely-coupled architecture based on SOA principles enables creation of innovative applications. Lanka Gate infrastructure facilitates various business models, communication models, payment mechanisms by adhering to open standards.
Lanka Gate encapsulates a web portal, referred as Country Portal, integration and communication hub, referred as Lanka Interoperability Exchange, and set of common services which includes Mobile Payment service, Credit card payment service and a Mobile messaging service.
Figure 2 – Lanka Gate Architecture
LIX (Lanka Interoperability Exchange)
The Lanka Interoperability Exchange would serve as the backbone integration/mediation platform for back end applications and the front ending eServices . It includes core infrastructure services such as a collection of authentication & authorization related eServices as well as an eServices registry & repository. The Lanka Interoperability Exchange (LIX) delivers all the inter connectivity, security and discovery capabilities that services implemented by the various projects need, by facilitating message routing, transport management, transaction management, mediation, transformation, policy enforcement and service discovery. As an example, considering the eGovernment domain, the LIX would provide the fundamental capabilities necessary for government-wide services to efficiently achieve the vision of re-engineering government in Sri Lanka. Likewise, considering the eCommerce domain, the LIX would enable businesses to create revenue-generating models that would be able to innovatively utilize the infrastructural interconnection capabilities of the LIX to consume the eServices.
Figure 3 – LIX Overview
LIX would adhere to open standards and rely on web services to enhance the interoperability and the plug and play capability. Thus the service provisioning and addition can easily be accomplished regardless of the platform, language or other differentiators. The Lanka Interoperability Exchange (LIX) is built on top of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). It therefore harnesses ESB capabilities such as routing, mediation, messaging, service orchestration and management of eServices and allows the use of a wide range of open protocols and open standards such as JMS, SMTP, XMPP, CORBA, REST and SOAP to connect existing and new systems/services.
In addition to providing message transport related services, the LIX also provides service discovery capabilities and features a collection of important authentication and authorization related eServices that would facilitate business & e-government transactions which require higher levels of security.
Thus the LIX and its associated protocols create an enabling framework that provides a secure, trusted channel through which government, public and private sector organizations may communicate and transfer information amongst each other. The LIX enables organizations to offload common functions such as authentication, authorization and payment, thereby allowing them to focus on business or domain specific functions. By providing such a shared infrastructure reduces the cost of implementation, enabling organizations to rapidly innovate and implement eServices that they otherwise may not even have considered.
Country Portal
The Country Portal serves as a primary interface that connects users to the eServices provided within the Lanka Gate concept. Thus the Country Portal is a fundamental access point for citizens, non-citizens, businesses, agents and government employees to various government organizations and businesses in Sri Lanka. The Country Portal features multiple service delivery channels to accommodate various end user realities.
The Country Portal project basically contains a set of portlets which are self-contained front-end interfaces to either a single eService, several eServices from a specific project, or a transactional/mashup combination of eServices across several projects. As indicated above, users can access these portlets through various access channels such as WWW, email, SMS, WAP, etc.
The web browser based delivery channel of the Country Portal features a highly user-friendly, dynamic interface, providing the end-user with the capability to design their own interactive user experience based on their particular needs and preferences. Most of the Web 2.0 capabilities available in Lanka Gate will be delivered through the web browser based delivery channel.
It features a unique approach in contrast to the traditional notions of portals and integrated applications, by intentionally supporting even informal Web 2.0 concepts such as RSS, folksonomies, recommendation, sharing, ‘pay-per-click’ and social networking, in addition to supporting somewhat formal Web 2.0 and SOA concepts such as usability, participation, collaboration, decentralization, standardization, convergence and remixability.
The Country Portal features multiple service delivery channels to accommodate various end user realities. Country portal enables government and private sector organizations to offer some useful services to citizens as eServices with a minimum effort. These eServices can be easily added to Country portal as service portlets. For example services such as online exam certificates issuance, EPF / ETF services, driving license verification services, election commission information services, immigration department services and motor traffic department services.
Common services
The Common eServices categorization identifies a set of projects that provide a set of common services required by most of the portlets and eServices. These common eServices would be provided by projects such as the credit card payment gateway project and the mobile payment gateway project.
- Online Payment Services
- Mobile Payment Services
- SMS Services
eServices
The eServices enable access to the services provided by back end systems. For example, a single re-engineering government project would provide several eServices, whilst consuming several eServices from other re-engineering government projects as well as common eServices provided by infrastructural projects within Lanka Gate.
The eServices portlets will compliant with open standards and open protocols such as SOAP 1.2 or REST and the WS-* based LIX protocols (details of which will be published in the future). The open specification of each eService interface will be a requirement for incorporation into the general Lanka Gate initiative. Other requirements that eService providers should adhere to, will be dependent on the overall Governance Model of the Lanka Gate initiative, and these details will be published in the future.
All the portlets will comply with the leading open standard related to portlets, which is the JSR-168 portlet specification. The Country Portal will host the portlets and provide necessary services as defined in JSR-168 specification including a unified user friendly interface and searching capability to locate available portlets.
Virtual business transformation
eServices will be targeted, initially for government organizations with considerable software and hardware readiness. The identified organizations will work with ICTA to virtualize their business process and optimizing the information and service flow between citizen and organization. A business process mapping language will be used to generalize and to enhance the maintainability of the systems, where it allows future business process changes and enhancements. Thus the provision of eServices would add services to the services stack provided by a specific department as well as it will help to re-engineer their business process too.
By S T Jayasooriya
