[IEEE 11th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'06) - Cagliari, Italy ()] 11th IEEE...

Abstract— This paper proposes the use of grid computing plat-forms as an enabling infrastructure for e-democracy applications. The paper identifies a set of infrastructures and services that can be provided by grid computing platforms which are fundamental for distributed e-democracy applications. A scenario of an e-Democracy application in the field of policy formulation is described and some details of an ongoing implementation are discussed.

I. INTRODUCTION

Governments worldwide are investing towards the intensive use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the electronic service delivery to citizens and enterprises. Electronic services begin to dominate since the provision of legal support to electronic signatures, digital identities, and other techniques of security. Today, citizens can access much government information online such as tax filling, applications for licenses, permissions, etc. Therefore, it is also expected that ICT will support the improvement of political communication among citizens (or their interest groups), administrations, politicians and government.

With the facilities provided by ICT, citizens, businesses and other organizations have increasing expectations about e-democracy in general. Within a few years to come, it is expected that several phases of the so-called policy cycle will be supported by an integrated, collaborative and efficient platform over the Internet. In this sense, this paper proposes the adoption of a grid computing platform as an enabling infrastructure for e-democracy applications.

Grid platforms can be used to overcome challenging problems that arise with emerging e-democracy applications. For instance, no existing ICT scales accordingly to provide satisfactory levels of online collaboration among millions of citizens and policy makers. Also, the online provision of information is an essential precondition for citizen engagement. For this purpose, grid technologies can be used to access and to integrate inherently distributed, heterogeneous resources (e.g. reports, government agencies’ public databases, discussion forums, legacy applications, etc) at different levels, as in the case of large e-democracy applications. In such a scenario, citizens and administrations at several levels (e.g. municipalities, states) have to interact.

As grid computing has demonstrated to empower human

capabilities in several areas of science and industry [6], it becomes a potential candidate for enhancing the engagement and active participation of citizens in the policy-making process.

The paper is organized as follows: section II discusses the main concepts and current experiences on e-democracy; section III introduces the main characteristics of a grid platform; section IV discusses how e-democracy applications can benefit from a grid infrastructure; section V presents an overview of an e-democracy application under development using grid infrastructure; section VI illustrates some implementation aspects; finally, section VII presents our final considerations.

II. E-DEMOCRACY

It is highly expected that ICT will improve communication among citizens, their elected representatives, and public servants. Electronic democracy (e-democracy) can be defined as the use of ICT to improve the participation of citizens in the democratic process, as well as to support the collaboration between actors for policy-making purposes without the limits of time, space, and other physical conditions [9].

E-democracy can be realized through collaborative interactions between elected representatives and their voters, on-line available legislation, and legislative processes which encourage citizens’ participation instead of only disseminating information after a decision has been made.

The relationships between government and citizens can be classified according to the nature and direction of the interactions established during the so-called police cycle [9]. Three types of relationships are commonly identified [11]: • information, which is a one-way relationship where

government produces and delivers information for use by its citizens;

• consultation, which is a two-way relationship where citizens provide feedback to government upon consultation on specific issues;

• active participation, which is a two-way relationship based on a partnership with government where citizens actively participate in policy-making, by, for example, setting the agenda, proposing policy options and shaping the policy dialogue.

No single electronic tool can be used to effectively support

Grid Platforms for e-Democracy Applications H. Senger1, F. A. B. Silva1, M. de J. Mendes1, R. Rondini1, C. R. G. de Farias1,2

1Programa de Pós-Graduação em Informática, Universidade Católica de Santos (UniSantos) R. Dr. Carvalho de Mendonça, 144 – 11070-906 – Santos (SP) – Brazil {senger, fabricio, mendes}@unisantos.br, [email protected]

2Departamento de Física e Matemática, Universidade de São Paulo (FFCLRP/USP) Av. Bandeirantes, 3900 – 14040-901 – Ribeirão Preto (SP) – Brazil

[email protected]

Proceedings of the 11th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'06) 0-7695-2588-1/06 $20.00 © 2006 IEEE

these different types of relationships. On the contrary, it is expected the use of a combination of tools.

Information delivery is mainly accomplished by the use of websites and government portals. However, most of government portals fail on providing adequate support for non-specialized users to find the desired information or service, especially considering the increasing amount of information and services available. In many cases, search engines and frequently asked questions (FAQ’s) facilities are provided by these portals to facilitate information retrieval and accessing the appropriate services.

Citizen feedback and consultation can be achieved in a number of ways. Government websites and portals usually provide e-mail addresses to which comments and suggestions can be sent. Interactive reply forms can also be used to collect feedback from portal visitors. Additionally, e-mail lists allow circulating documents among interested parties for comments.

Online discussion forums, chats and newsgroups are commonly used for consultation. These tools provide convenient means to gather and deliver policy proposals generated by citizens or representative organizations to policy-makers. Online surveys and opinion polls are frequently applied to collect citizen feedback on specific issues.

Finally, active participation provides the highest level of citizen involvement and influence on policy making. Tool support for this kind of interaction includes not only online discussion forums for the deliberation and development of policy options but also online referenda and e-petitions to government and/or parliament.

In general, e-democracy is a challenging field for ICT applications for a number of reasons: • R1: scale. Until now there are no practical solutions in

which millions of citizens can be heard in mass debates and policy makers can respond to them;

• R2: reaching online active citizenship participation on deliberative debates;

• R3: displaying the information generated at several stages of the process;

• R4: evaluation of real benefits from the use of tools. • R5: diversity of access channels and platform

technologies, as well due to the heterogeneity of existing government legacies;

• R6: existence of multiple administrative domains, due to the participation of a large number of agencies.

III. GRID PLATFORMS

Over the years grid platforms have evolved to enable the sharing, selection aggregation, and coordination of a variety of resources including supercomputers, servers, workstations, storage systems, software tools, data sources, documents, and specialized devices that are geographically distributed and owned by different organizations [5]. The grid is characterized by four main aspects which are described below [1]. While describing those aspects, we illustrate how each one of those characteristics can be beneficial to large, grid-enabled e-democracy applications which encompass a large number of administrations at different levels. We also relate (between

parenthesis) the aspects described with the set of requirements listed in the previous section. • multiple administrative domains and autonomy (R6). Grid

resources are geographically distributed across multiple administrative domains and owned by different organizations. Citizens, policy makers and other organizations may interact through several grid-enabled e-democracy applications;

• heterogeneity (R5). A grid involves a multiplicity of resources that are heterogeneous in nature and will encompass a vast range of technologies. Different administrations should not be obliged to agree on systems suppliers in order to make integration possible.

• scalability (R1). A grid may grow from few integrated resources to millions. For instance, only in the state of São Paulo (Brazil) there are 645 municipalities, each having thousands or even millions of citizens that are potential users of grid-enabled e-democracy applications. A large, distributed e-democracy application will need to integrate resources at different levels, and a grid is the platform of choice for performing this integration.

• dynamicity or adaptability (R2, R3). In a large, geographically distributed, environment, resource failure is the rule rather than the exception. Resource managers and applications should adapt themselves in order to use the available resources efficiently. Grids devoted to large e-democracy applications will be able to discover, bind, and use a great number of geographically distributed resources [13]. To cope with failures, applications must be able to recover automatically from malfunction. All of these capabilities can only be implemented if pervasive and robust information services are supported. A grid can provide detailed information about resources and their current status, and provide automated reconfiguration capabilities for e-democracy applications.

Other important aspects of the evolution of grid technologies include the widespread adoption of open standards and service orientation. These changes have attracted a growing interest from business and industry communities. A joint effort involving the research and industry communities has been delivered under the coordination of the Global Grid Forum [20], aiming to promote the interoperability and integration of grid applications. An important result of such effort is the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) specification [7]. OGSA defines a set of service interfaces and associated semantics that can be used by virtual organisations for building grid applications. OGSA provides standard mechanisms for creation, naming, discovering, and destruction of persistent and transient services implemented with the support of Web Services technology. Furthermore, OGSA aligns Grid technologies with Web Services technologies by adopting Web Services properties, standards and tools, and proposing the concept of Grid Services as grid enabled specializations of Web Services.

Currently, OGSA compliant services are implemented by new standards such as the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) [17]. WSRF defines mechanisms and interfaces for the manipulation of stateful, transient services. Aiming to


allow higher integration between Grid and Web Service technologies, WSRF exploits existing XML standards and also Web Service standards [17]. WSRF is implemented in the current version of Globus Toolkit (namely, the GT4).

IV. GRID AS A PLATFORM FOR E-DEMOCRACY

A grid platform can be used to provide several infrastructures and functionalities that are necessary for e-democracy applications. In this section, we generically discuss some important characteristics of the e-democracy applications, as well as how grid technologies can facilitate their execution and integration.

A. Diversity of Information E-democracy information applications include a wide range

of applications such as web sites of governments, local communities and politicians providing textual information (e.g. legal, parliamentary, party agendas, announcements, etc.), and illustrative (e.g., GIS) information; systems for information or knowledge management; search function for information access; online-glossaries; FAQ; instant messaging; and newsletters. Somehow, all of these applications refer to information manipulation, such as storage, publishing, advertising, searching, selecting, aggregating, and accessing. WSRF provides uniform support for the manipulation of such a myriad of resources.

B. Metadata Orientation To deal with the automated discovery of the functionality

and availability of a great number of heterogeneous and geographically distributed resources, emerging grid technologies and standards [5] are metadata-oriented [4]. In the context of e-democracy information applications, a problem arises when searching for a specific piece of information. Even when citizens do have access to ICTs, this is rarely a simple and straightforward task. To overcome this difficulty, the support to metadata can be used for enhancing the accessibility to information. In this sense, Grid Information Services [3] and Metadata services [4] can facilitate the manipulation and integration of the vast amounts of information held by government institutions, as well as NGOs.

To cope with the increasing information overload, metadata can be associated to the information pieces (e.g., texts, documents, chats, discussion forum, newsletters, etc) in order to improve the accessibility. In this scenario, metadata can be produced by the information producers, or even by trusted “information mediators” (whether within the government, or independent of) [10]. Mediators play an important role to improve the accessibility, by means of identifying, aggregating and explaining relevant information on specific policy issues of concern to citizens. Thus, the support of metadata and grid information services can contribute to increase the quality of the information available online, in terms of its accessibility, relevance and utility to citizens. In this case, metadata-oriented Grid Information Services could provide them with the support necessary for expressing the results their work, as well as facilitating the citizens’ exercise of finding the right in-formation, document, forum, and so on.

C. Virtual Access to Government databases According to [10], access to information constitutes a basic

precondition for online engagement of citizens. In this sense, government agencies’ databases (whether critical, or public, such as administration reports, projects, etc) could provide valuable information to subsidize the discussion within a specific community or even open to the public. One service of major importance for information applications is a virtual, uniform access to a set of heterogeneous, geographically dispersed databases. The fundamental value proposition for a Grid in general, and a database access service in particular, is virtualization , or transparent access to dispersed data sources. For this case, the following transparencies are relevant [8]:

• Heterogeneity transparency. An application accessing a data source should be independent of the actual implementation of that source, so that both can evolve independent of each other;

• Name transparency. Within grid sources, applications should not even specify data objects explicitly. Instead, data access should be via logical domains, qualified by constraints on attributes of the desired object;

• Ownership and costing transparency. As far as possible, applications should be spared from separately negotiating for access to individual sources located on different domains, whether in terms of access authorization, or in terms of resource usage costs;

• Parallelism transparency. An application processing data on a grid should automatically get the benefits of parallel execution over grid nodes;

• Distribution transparency. Applications should be able to maintain distributed data in a unified fashion;

The level of transparency described above is far beyond the capabilities of the current data management technologies. Recently several sets of services for integrating databases into the grid have been proposed [8]. The objective is to provide at least a subset of the level of transparency just described. The nature of the Grid offers interesting new possibilities for areas such as distributed query processing. Once a query has been compiled, distributed grid resources can be acquired on demand for running the distributed query.

D. Security Another major benefit provided by grid technologies

regards to security. The security provided by the GT4 [12] relies upon a security architecture called Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) which is based on PKI and Transport Layer Security (TLS) communication protocol. The focus is on authentication, message privacy, and single sign-on and identity delegation through proxy credentials. In the context of e-democracy applications, an important characteristic of grid security is that shared resources are still owned by its respective organizations, and subject to its policies. Globus security infrastructure provides robust security protocols and enforces access control by supporting the creation of fine grained control access policies, allowing the different involved actors (e.g., resource owners, other government employees, citizens, politicians, mediators, etc.) to be granted differentiated levels of access to each resource [12]. Another important concern is the ability to integrate and interoperate


with multiple security infrastructures. OGSA compliant infrastructures allow for the integration with the variety of existing security infrastructures within the organizations of resource owners (e.g., Kerberos, UNIX). Currently, no other ICT can provide such functionality.

V. E-DEMOCRACY SCENARIO

A possible scenario of use of a grid infrastructure in e-democracy is a nationwide application devoted to the formulation of new policies. In this application, citizens and lawmakers will be able to interact in order to formulate new policies in themes of widespread interest. Examples of such themes are domestic violence, public security, etc. Normally, in those themes, people from different parts of a country (or a state) can have very different views and opinions. A grid-enabled application devoted to the formulation of new policies would then allow for local discussions and then politicians in both state and federal levels can take the opinions of the citizens into account during the formulation of a new policy. This scenario has three main actors: citizens, mediators andpoliticians, as described in the following paragraphs.

The citizens should be able to post an opinion about a subject anonymously, and the discussion should be held locally (e.g. in a municipal or county level). Identification would not be required, but the system would ask for some non-identifying information (age, gender, ZIP code, etc) in order to classify and group the opinions of citizens. In order to help citizens to substantiate his or her opinion, the system would make available several documents and data of interest. A citizen may decide if he wants to identify himself and if he wants to make his opinion public. The system would be responsible for storing the opinions received and for associating the non-identifying information to the respective opinion.

The mediators would be responsible for identifying documents relevant for discussion and for mediating the discussion. They would also be responsible for sorting and summarizing the opinions posted according to the non-identifying information supplied by citizens, and making available to politicians the resulting summary. Mediators would have access to all opinions and data posted by citizens. In such scenario, mediators and politicians will produce metadata. With the support of metadata services, mediators can play an important role to improve the information accessibility and services accessibility, by means of identifying, aggregating and explaining relevant information on specific policy issues of concern to citizens. Thus, the support of metadata and grid information services can contribute to increase the quality of the information available online, in terms of its accessibility, relevance and utility to citizens.

The politicians would have access to all opinions and information posted by mediators and citizens, having the responsibility of taking them into account when formulating policies. They could also propose new themes for discussion. A prototype implementation of the grid-enabled application described in this section is under construction, for a scenario based on the State of Sao Paulo (Brazil). In this test bed the 645 municipalities were divided into 60 major metropolitan

areas (MA) as depicted in Fig. 1. In this project, each metropolitan area (MA) is coped with one or more dedicated servers where the GT4 and associated tools (application server, databases, etc) are installed. Servers are, for example, physically located at the biggest city in each defined area. As shown in Fig. 1, each server hosts a portal that local citizens can access and post their opinions about a predefined subject. Citizens access the portal through a regular web browser, and the services of the grid are made available to the portal. A set of e-Democracy services is being implemented at the Policy Formulation Layer, using OGSA and WSRF services [17].

Fig. 1. Implementation aspects of the e-democracy scenario. When accessing the portal, the user has available a set of

related information (defined by the mediators) gathered from several databases maintained by the state. The access for such resources is supported by Grid Data Services provided by the OGSA-DAI module included in GT4, and Xindice 1.1b4 database. When accessing the portal the citizen must supply some non-identifying information that is associated with the opinion posted and stored by a resource management Grid service specialized in the domain of e-Democracy (named DRMS, e-Democracy Resource Management Service) which is described in section VI. The opinion itself is stored as a file which is given a logical name (as defined by the Replica Location Service, RLS), and at least two physical replicas of that file are stored in different servers on the same administrative domain in the grid.

Each mediator will be responsible for managing a geographical region composed of at least two major metropolitan areas. As described previously in this section, a mediator is responsible for sorting and summarizing the opinions posted. In order to do so mediators have access to all posted opinions through the DRMS service and can query a metadata management grid service named DMMS, e-Democracy Metadata management Service (see section VI) in order to gather opinions related to a particular characteristic (age, gender, ZIP code, etc). It is also a responsibility of the mediator to make accessible to citizens information related to the subject under discussion. In order to do so a mediator can use both the DRMS and DMMS services. The summarized information generated by mediators is also stored using DRMS and a short description of each summary is stored at metadata repositories maintained by the DMMS.

Politicians have access to all information posted by citizens at all areas, and all summaries and information posted by all

Government available Information Sources and services

Citizens Mediators Politicians

MA2

MA4

MA1

MA3

e-Democracy Server Access Layer

Policy Formulation Layer

DRMS DMMS

Grid Infrastructure

RLS OGSA-

DAIDRS GSI


mediators. Only politicians can propose new themes for discussion, and suggest the information to be made available to citizens by mediators. They also have the ultimate responsibility of making good use of the set of opinions brought to their attention.

VI. ASPECTS OF IMPLEMENTATION

The Access Layer (depicted in Fig.1) provides session management and interaction with different types of users. The core e-democracy functionalities are implemented at the Policy Formulation Layer, by means, at the present time, of several Grid services which provide the necessary support for the execution of e-democracy applications on grid platforms. Such set of services include:

• e-Democracy Resource Management Service (DRMS). The resource management provides basic mechanisms for the manipulation of e-democracy resources.

• e-Democracy Metadata Management Service (DMMS). The metadata management service provides the necessary support for the manipulation of e-democracy specific metadata and their binding to resources.

These services rely upon the functionalities implemented by the underlying grid services and functionalities provided by the GT4, and WSRF. In the following, we describe in details the implementation of DRMS and DMMS.

A. DRMS The e-Democracy Resource Management Service (DRMS)

provides the necessary support for the manipulation of e-democracy resources, such as discussion forums on specific topics, messages, documents; and on-line opinion polls.

For instance, with the support provided by the DRMS, mediators can open and close discussion topics and post documents for public access. With the support of DRMS, citizens can browse a discussion, read messages, access documents and post messages. Also, with the DRMS support, mediators can approve or reject messages sent by the citizens, and route messages from citizens to appropriate persons of the public administration. In summary, DRMS provides the support for the manipulation of those e-democracy resources.

Replication With the aim of improving the availability, e-democracy

resources can be replicated in available servers within the local metropolitan area (MA). Resource replication is supported by the Replica Location Service (RLS) and the Data Replication Service (DRS) [2]. RLS and DRS are components of data grid services architecture which support the replication of data sets on grid platforms implemented in GT4. RLS is used since it provides mechanisms for the registration and discovery of e-democracy resource replicas within the Grid. The publication of an e-democracy resource consists in: (i)uniquely identifying each new resource by means of a logical file name [2] which is represented as an Universal Resource Identifier (URI) [14]; (ii) making one or more copies of its contents in the storage system; and (iii) registering a given number of mappings from the resource (i.e., its logical name) to a collection of replicas. Every e-democracy resource replica is stored as a single file so that the creation of replicas can be implemented with the support of DRS, while RLS instances

maintain registries of the resources and their physical locations. The control of replica locations is implemented by the following two elements of the RLS framework: the Local Replica Catalog (LRC), which contain mappings from logical file names to physical file names, and the Replica Location Index (RLI), which aggregate information about the state of one or more LRC instances.

When a LRC instance is deployed, it registers with a set of local or remote RLIs (i.e., those located at remote metropolitan areas). Such registration is necessary since each LRC periodically updates its current state to the set of known RLIs by means of soft state mechanisms. The information maintained by RLIs is timed out, so that they are periodically refreshed by the information sent by the LRCs. In the current implementation, at least one RLS server must be deployed at every MA to keep track of existing mappings regarding to the local and remote MAs.

B. DMMS Every single e-democracy resource is associated to

metadata that fully describe its relevant characteristics during its creation. For instance, the creation of a discussion forum on a specific topic requires its binding to metadata (e.g. the owner, subject, region, government agency). The e-Democracy Metadata Management Service (DMMS) provides the necessary support for the storage and retrieval of metadata that is associated to e-democracy resources. DMMS provides a mechanism for the management and processing of e-democracy specialized metadata which supports information storage, search, classification and aggregation. With the support of DMMS, mediators can contribute to increase the quality of the information available online, and improve the communication among citizens, lawmakers, and public servants.

Several initiatives have been launched by governments to promote the developing and adoption of interoperable metadata standards in several areas of government. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [15] is such an example of initiative which aims at producing specialized metadata vocabularies for describing resources that allows the implementation or intelligent information discovery systems. As result, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) [16] became an IETF standard (RFC 2413 and RFC 2731) which can be used for cross-domain information resource description. The DCMES describes the semantic meaning of 15 data elements, which can be represented several methods such as HTML, XML, RDF [14] and relational databases. As an evolution of Dublin Core, e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS) [18] defines elements, refinements and encoding schemes for government metadata. It is part of the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) [19], an initiative supported by the UK government. E-GIF is not limited to defining the syntax and semantics of a set of metadata. Instead, it also includes government’s technical policies and specifications for achieving interoperability and ICT systems coherence across the public sector. The DMMS implements a set of metadata compliant with e-GMS, and adopts the v-Card [21] element set, an electronic business card specification. A metamodel of DDMS is shown in Fig. 2.


Fig. 2. A metamodel of the DDMS.

VII. FINAL REMARKS

In this paper we propose the adoption of a grid computing platform as an enabling infrastructure for the development of large, distributed, e-democracy applications. We showed how one can use core grid infrastructures in the deployment of geographically distributed e-democracy applications. In this scenario, grid computing infrastructures contributes for enhancing the accessibility to information, improving the quantity and quality of information being manipulated and enhancing the collaboration among e-democracy actors in large scales. We believe that, as standards evolve, the grid will be the platform of choice for deployment of largely distributed e-democracy applications in the near future.

REFERENCES

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[IEEE 11th IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'06) - Cagliari, Italy ()] 11th IEEE...

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