03 July 2007

A Common Portal Integration Model

Posted in Public Sector at 8:40 pm by kkj

The Danish Government has launched a large scale initiative to modernize and digitize the Danish Public Sector and is channeling information about the details via the website modernisering.dk. One important goal of this exercise is to increase the level of service provided to citizens, while at the same time reducing the cost of delivering it.

Government Agencies, Ministries, Counties, and Regions, all flock (some more than others) to the Internet to provide self-service to it-literate citizens. Such a flurry of service provider activity is bound to become slightly chaotic lest something be done, so enter the portals: Sundhed.dk for health care services, Borger.dk for citizen services, Virk.dk for company services, and The Danish Nature and Environment Portal for … well you guessed it.

Virk.dk and borger.dk are currently having makeover and will be launching new versions within the not-so-distant future. The remake will focus on bringing new services to citizens and companies thru leverage of the enabling infrastructure that we are so fortunate to have here, including (but not limited to) a national address register of all citizens (CPR), and a national digital certificate initiative (OCES). The vision is to provide two very thin portals whose primary functions are to expose (web based) services from other public entities. In other words, the portals will not implement any business logic, but delegate actual service implementations to other servers, elsewhere.

Many service providers will be exposing services on more than portal. Thus, in order to reduce the cost of implementation and the time to market, it becomes imperative that the portals agree on integration mechanisms …

For the past months I have been working intensely for the Digital Task Force with a few colleagues to provide a common service provider integration model (OIM) for borger.dk and virk.dk. Our efforts were initially restricted by the vision of thin portals, and by a Gartner report, which pointed to 4 different integration technologies: simple linking, embedded frames, web services remote portlets (WSRP), and the Java Portlet Specification (JSR-168). As we dug into it, however, JSR-168 disappeared from the radar because portlets written with this technology will have to be installed into the portal server, hence violating the “thinness” principle (and introducing loads of other issues).

The Digital Taskforce has bravely decided to expose the OIM to the public on a project WIKI - while it is constructed. At the time of writing, however, you will find only the main document for which we’re not responsible, and not the 3 appendices for which we, are as they are currently thru an internal hearing.

On the horizon there will be a public conference on September 5th 2007 where 1.0 of the OIM will be presented. By then, if not sooner, everything should be publicly available.

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