Census Web Service Architecture for e-Governance Applications

Abstract

Citizen information needs depend on central data warehouse integrated with state level and central level e-Governance applications. Data integration presents core issues like interoperability, technical heterogeneity and flexibility. Census Web Service is an open standard based Web application that interacts with other web applications for the purpose of sharing citizen data. This will help in using uniform and consistent census data across various e-Governance applications. This paper presents a census data integration mechanism based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with various e-Governance applications. The proposed architecture consists of three layers; Web Service Provider, Service Broker and Web Service Consumers. Web Service providers publish services to a service broker. Web Service Consumers find required services using a service broker and bind to them. These layers are implemented based on a set of standards including EXtensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) to deal with technical heterogeneity. A prototype of the framework is implemented and validated with e-Governance applications for issuing Caste Certificate and Rural Area Certificate. It is concluded that census web service can be effective and efficient in all types of e-Governance applications as it can provide accurate and timely information within reasonable amount of time.