A service-oriented city portal framework and collaborative development platform

Abstract

Cities are being equipped with multiple information systems to provide public services for city officials, officers, citizens, and tourists. There have been concerns with efficient service implementation and provision, e.g., data islands and function overlaps between systems and applications. Service-oriented portals are efficient at facilitating information sharing and collaborative work between city systems and users. The goal of this research is to make cities responsive, agile and to provide composite services efficiently and cost efficiently. A service-oriented framework for city portals is proposed to design, integrate and streamline city systems and applications. A model driven collaborative development platform of the proposed framework was developed for service-oriented digital portals. The architecture and implementation issues of the platform are discussed. The service identification policies are discussed within the framework. A case study has been developed and evaluated on the platform to provide a composite service, i.e., a traffic search service on a city portal.