Digital Identity into Practice: The Case of UniCam

Identity management is a set of technologies and processes supporting identity information. Its adoption in Public Administration, in particular in the domain of university, maintains organization autonomy giving at the same time students and staff support to access the services that are delivered. In this paper we present a project lead by University of Camerino with the Italian Banking Group UBI and the Namirial Certification Authority. The project consists in the issue of Enjoy my UniCam card allowing users to have, on a single physical card, several functionalities about facilitated banking account, university services and digital signature certificate. First results about the testing phase are presented as well as the next steps of the project

Livelock and Deadlock Detection for PA Inter-organizational Business Processes.

The Public Administration domain is characterized by the dominance of inter-organizational Business Processes. These are a set of interrelated and sequential activities shared and executed by two or more Public Administration officies to achieve a business objective that is of value to citizens or companies in term of services. A Business Process results from the un-trivial integration of internal administration processes, so that structural problems such as livelock or deadlock may easily occur and in reality they are generally solved by involved civil servants. Nevertheless with the shift versus an electronic government this problem becomes particularly relevant. The paper presents a suitable approach for inter-organizational Business Process detection of livelock and deadlock situations. In particular, we introduce an approach to directly verify a Business Process modeled using the BPMN 2.0 semi-formal notation. The verification uses a state evaluation technique with an optimized unfolding algorithm considering specific BPMN 2.0 characteristics. A plug-in for the Eclipse platform has been also developed, which permits to have an integrated environment in which to design Business Process, using the Eclipse BPMN 2.0 Modeler, and to automatically verify it. The approach and the tool prototype have been successfully applied to real scenarios such as family reunion, grant citizenship and buoncer registration

FedCohesion: Federated Identity Management in the Marche Region

Federated identity management is a set of technologies and processes supporting dynamically distribute identity information. Its adoption in Public Administrations maintains organizations autonomy giving at the same time citizens support to access the services that are distributed across security domains. In this paper, we propose the Marche Region experience for what concern federate identity management focusing on the regional authentication framework, named FedCohesion. It is bases on Security Assertion Markup Language standard and it results from Cohesion re-engineering. It is the old style legacy authentication framework. We first present resulting architecture showing supported identification process and pilot applications. Lessons learned and opportunities have been also presented

Modeling and Verification of Business Processes for the Public Administration

A successful aspect in today’s organization is the integration and cooperation among Business Processes (BPs) of heterogeneous and disperse organizations.\ud In such a way different organizations have to logically integrate each others to provide higher value services to users and to improve their efficiency and overall\ud effectiveness. Moving toward an inter-organizational scenarios suitable to strive cooperation in order to provide integrated functionalities is a need. The integration passes thought the coordination of organizations objectives. It is need a clear\ud perspective on local and global views on Business Process in order to contribute to the definition of inter-organizational Business Processes stressing the role of messages exchange. The scenario previously introduced is a typical scenario in Public Administration (PA) where several organizations have to cooperate to provide\ud public service that is the result of inter-administration Business Process. In particular, according to the European Interoperability Framework and its adoptions in the European member states one of the main challenges in PA is to cope with large collections of interconnected Business Processes. According to the Business Process Management life cycle modeling and analysis of inter-organizational BP\ud are critical activities. This is particularly true in e-government domain.\ud For what concern the modeling the thesis introduces a Domain Specific Language, eGAML, based on standards such as BPMN 2.0 and UML 2.0 to support the design of e-government services focusing on process component and enabling the explicit representation of related elements. The main scope is not to build a Domain Specific Language that fit every aspect of the Enterprise Architecture in egovernment,\ud but the thesis aim to define a methodology and a practical approach that drive domain experts to model only specifics views impacting on the Business Process definition, execution and acceptance and to make clear the relations\ud among them. For what concern the analysis phase the thesis discuss an approach for formal verification of PA inter-organizational BPs. The approach uses state evaluation techniques with an optimized unfolding algorithm based on BPMN 2.0 specific semantic. In this way after BP modeling using BPMN 2.0 the analyst can run our algorithm to check if the BP includes bad traces. In such a case he/she can\ud re-engineer the BP in order to remove the bad traces so to derive an improved BP.\ud Result are supported by a user-friendly and web based tool named “HawkEye” that has been successfully applied to real scenarios. It permits to have an integrated environment in which to design and to automatically verify the BP model\ud via the proposed algorithm.\ud The approach and the prototype have been successfully applied to real scenarios thanks to a close collaboration with local PA offices, with encouraging results. In particular, subject of the investigation are three cases studies from the e-government domain: (i) family reunion, (ii) grant citizenship, and (iii) bouncer registration

Elctronic Identitry Management Infrastructure for Trustworthy Services in e-Government and e-Commerce

A number of potential initiatives are being considered including the creation of a international electronic identity management infrastructure for trustworthy services in e-government and e-commerce. A lot of work has been done in recent years in the field of electronic identity management, including through a series of research programs and pilot projects. While each of these projects contributes new elements to the field of electronic identity management, it is also clear that the results will need to be developed further, refined and integrated. This paper would open the discussion on the need for a “multi-faceted electronic Identification (eID) system for all citizens", as a key enabler for trustworthy interactions between public authorities, businesses, citizens, and within the large spectrum of social networks and communities. This concept, which is also referred to as an ubiquitous eID infrastructure for digital life, is envisaged to offer a wide range of functionalities, including the provision of multiple identity instances, from government-accredited to commercially accepted, and ranging from near-anonymity to strong and unambiguous identification. Furthermore, the system should be user-controlled and privacy-protective, providing the basis for accountability and innovative applications in an open and competitive market

Direct Verification of BPMN Processes through an Optimized Unfolding Technique

Business process analysis is one of the most important and complex activities of Business Process Management. Business processes are typically defined by business experts which ask for graphical and user-friendly notations. Nevertheless most notations used typically lack precisely defined semantics limiting the possibility of analysis to informal approaches such as observation techniques. To support formal verification techniques it is necessary to define a precise mapping between the adopted user-friendly notation and a formal language. In this paper we propose a Java based verification approach for Business Processes modeled using the BPMN 2.0 standard. In particular, we defined a precise Java mapping for the main elements of the BPMN 2.0 notation. The relations among the different elements of a BPMN 2.0 specification are supported by the inclusion of specific attributes and methods in the created Java objects. The behavior of a set of interrelated objects, corresponding to a BPMN 2.0 specification, can be explored using an algorithm we defined for the purpose. Such an algorithm permits to avoid the state explosion phenomenon using an ad-hoc unfolding technique. A plug-in for the Eclipse IDE platform has been developed. It permits to have an integrated environment in which to design a business process, to verify it, and to check the result of the verification in order to improve the business process itself. This iterative approach can continue until all the issues highlighted by the verifier are solved. The approach and the prototype have been successfully applied to real scenarios within the Public Administration domain, with encouraging results

An ECLIPSE Plug-in for Formal Verification of BPMN Processes

The Business Process concept represents an important view in the Informative Systems in different application domains. Tools and modeling languages can be used by domain experts to contribute in the Business Process design of the systems. In most of the cases, specifications of Business Process is done without a formal semantic. Resulting systems do not match functional and non-functional requirements due to the communication problems between domain experts and IT-developers. To solve such issues we propose a novel approach enriching the design with a formal semantic and a systematic integration of formal verification. The approach has been implemented as user friendly tool able to design and verify Business Process. The tool is an ECLIPSE plug-in that uses BPMN notation for Business Process specification, implements a mapping from BPMN to the CSP formal language and supports CSP verification via model checking. It is named BP4PA. The proposed approach and tool have been applied on real scenarios

Innovation on Public Services using Business Process Management

Abstract. Innovation in Public Administration is an important way for stimulating and inspiring governments in their reform efforts toward more inclusive development. For public sector organizational complexity is a big challenge to solve in order to strive innovation. Business Process Management can be considered as a suitable tool to resolve such complexity and continuously improve quality in public services. At the same time is critical to close the gap between business and IT prospective. In the paper we present an experience regarding the application of Business Process Management in the modelling and analysis of egovernment services with reference to a case study

A collaborative approach to public administrations inter-organizational business processes modelling

The paper presents a collaborative approach to the definition of interorganizational Business Processes. Applying the proposed modeling approach multiple organizations can easily reconcile local and global views. In particular, the modeling phase is based on BPMN 2.0 standard notation and it proceeds according to the following steps: (i) all organizations collaboratively derive a communication view of the process, (ii) a local communication view is automatically deduced for each organization, and (iii) each organization models its own private process taking into account foreseen local communications. The approach is supported by a user-friendly and web based tool named HawkEye that has been successfully applied to real scenarios in the e-government domain

Improving PA Business Processes through Modeling, Analysis, and Reengineering

Inter-organizational Business Processes (BPs) are a set of interrelated and sequential activities that are collaboratively executed by two or more Public Administrations (PAs) to achieve a common business objective related to the provisioning of a service to citizens and enterprises. Too often PAs BPs implemented by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are derived from ``old style'' intra- and inter-administration BPs without taking in due account the potentiality and inherent characteristics of adopted technologies. In this paper we present our experience in modeling, analysis and reengineering of PA BPs in order to make them more effective and efficient. In particular we used semi-formal notations to model three complex BPs involving many different PA offices. We directly involved domain experts and civil servants in the various BP management activities. Thanks to the adopted notation so to have a clear specification of BPs structural characteristics, we identified several pitfalls and opportunities for improvements. As a result we were able both to derive ameliorated versions for the analysed BPs, and to identify common ``bad habits'' in the specification of BPs for the PA, permitting to define a general quality framework for BP analysis