Extending a Distributed System Architecture with E-Government Modelling Concepts

Information systems are slowly, but steadily, affecting every aspect of our life. For the last few years, their application and penetration in the e-government sector has been constantly increasing. Governmental organisations and citizens alike place a great amount of expectations concerning improved, quality and secure enterprise services in e-government platforms. This effort, however, needs coordinated support from all the different stakeholders in the domain, which in turn requires that a common vehicle of communication must be developed and used. This vehicle is the information system´s architecture. In this paper, we present a framework for modelling distributed systems architectures which has been standardised by ISO and we apply it to the design of the enterprise specification of an e-government platform, which is under development. We analyse the process of modelling a system and continue by proposing an extension to the modelling concepts of the framework with terminology specifically tailored for and inspired by the e-government domain. Several open research issues are identified and analyzed.