| Abstract |
The impact of social networking platforms, nowadays, is huge and has been monitored by
several scientific sectors. On the other hand, eGovernment, a sector that is mainly
focusing on bringing the government closer to the citizens, is being affected by neglect
and Informaticsilliteracy. As a result, an innovative idea would be to use a social
networking platform and transform it into a wide citizen network, where the citizens
would be able to communicate and interact with their social environment. However, the
basic concept of the implemented social network would be to enable the citizens after
proper authentication mechanisms provided by local legislate, to consume eGovernment
services provided by this framework. For this purpose, we used an open source social
network to implement an open citizen network which can perform every required
functionality of a social network. For the implementation and adaption of the citizen
network, we used web based programming and we also implemented an interaction plugin that
enables the communication of the citizen network with the government framework. This
plugin is also using REST Web Services for authentication and communication. Provided the
user has authenticated his account, using the plugin he is able to connect to the
government framework and start interacting with it. An important feature of the proposed
framework is also the ability to provide an eGovernment service by simply uploading the
wsdl file of this service and by dynamically creating a client that enables the citizens
to consume the service. This dynamic creation is based on an algorithm we implemented and
does not require any further programming knowledge from the service provider. Each
migrated service gets a unique package id which contains all required files and has a
unique web client for the online requests and a backend which handles the provided data.
In order to demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework three different web
services were implemented.These include digital signing and verification based on a
private-public key infrastructure and the creation of events and provision of digital
tickets based on digital ticket specification. Another web service involves making a
request / complaint supported by the longitude and latitude variables of geocoding, which
are unique for every place worldwide. Upon a test period where randomly chosen users
tested our system and evaluated the results in an online survey, the potential and
interest of the citizens in eGovernment services was evident. This thesis demonstrates
one of the first tries worldwide to correlate social networking platforms with
eGovernment service consumption and provision. We strongly believe that this approach can
trigger many citizens to start using eGovernment services and can also enable local or
global government entities to provide proper eGovernment Services using the web service
provision algorithm.
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Creation and development of an eGovernment services framework through social networking platforms
