Evaluating Interoperability Artifacts for the Exchange of Public Service Information: Outline of a Conceptual Framework

Drivers to improve the interoperability of information systems in public authorities are initiatives for simplifying the access to public authorities and their services for citizens and enterprises. The spectrum of such initiatives reaches from initiatives on the regional and national level up to global initiatives. All these initiatives have in common, that they are related in some way or the other to public services. i.e., they have to deal with the challenge of describing public services either as a base for exchange information about these public services within the public administration or between public authorities and citizens and enterprises or as a base for developing information systems to support the provision of public services. As a result of these initiatives numerous artifacts have been developed, including languages and methods for modeling public services, ontologies and taxonomies for public services, etc. Although, this multitude of artifacts has the positive effect, that there is a high chance, that every aspect of the complex concept "public service" is covered by at least one of these artifacts, it is difficult to keep track on all these artifacts and how are these artifacts are related to each other, in particular what interoperability issue they address in detail, on which foundations and assumption these artifacts are based on, etc. In this paper a conceptual framework for evaluating such artifacts is proposed, which shall allow an evaluation of these artifacts with respect to the question given above. But this conceptual framework can be also useful for support of an artifact to solve a particular description problem regarding public services on the one hand, and on the other hand, it can be useful for the integration of these artifacts.