Use of Service Patterns as an Approach to Modelling of Electronic Government Services

The government appears to be a high potential scenario for the deployment of service-oriented applications. The business processes in the service-oriented computational model are modelled and implemented as services. Interoperable service is a major goal of service orientation. Government organizations are adopting service use in order to achieve interoperability of government systems, but there is still a lack of technical support to reuse already conceived service concepts, as well as the efforts and experience of the experts who conceive services. Accordingly, this paper proposes a Service Specification Method for Electronic Government (SSMe-Gov) to support the development of systems of government. The method supports the specification of e-government services from service patterns. A lifecycle of services is also proposed for the specification of new services from service patterns. The lifecycle of services includes the activity of finding patterns of candidate services. The conception of services combined with the concept of patterns can help software architects to identify recurrent functional elements and reduce redundant efforts in the conception of services with the same purposes. Previous case studies show that it is feasible to set service patterns from the analysis of existing services in government.