Web services: an e-government perspective

Web Services” have been gathering a great interest from various communities. In the Web Services philosophy, every different system or provider offers some “services” for certain user groups. Any user does its job by just calling proper services over Internet. In general, Web Services seems to have a great potential for wherever there is a need for cooperation or “interoperability”. This need has long been felt in spatial data management communities and in traditional governments. This is what has brought the notion e-government into the scene. It has been envisioned that the e-government will solve the interoperability problems of the governments. The motivation of this work was to determine the potentials of the new Web services technology for an interoperability infrastructure for e-government. For this aim, we have first investigated the activities of the municipality of Trabzon, Turkey and determined the problems of the traditional system. Then we have determined, developed, and implemented a number of these services. We have concluded that Web services are very promising for the e-municipality infrastructure. Since e-government and e-municipality share similar structures and problems, the findings of this work would also be valid within the context of e-government. To our knowledge, this work is one of the very first of its kind