gCitizen: A Grid Middleware for a Transparent Management of the Information about Citizens in the Public Administration

This paper proposes the Grid technology as an integration method of information, existing procedures and resources in the Public Administration. The exposed work supposes, from the point of view of the electronic government, an advance of future trends by means of the usage of Grid technology. On the other hand, from the perspective of Grid technology, the electronic government opens a non-evident field of application for this emergent paradigm of distributed computing. This paper explains gCitizen, which is a Grid middleware based on the GT4 components and WSRF implementation (which are the state-of-the-art in middleware for Grid computing), incorporating new protocols and services which cover the requirements for the integration purposes in the eGovernment frameworks. The system architecture has been designed to enable using the services deployed without a specific a priori knowledge of them. The gCitizen middleware also defines a data model to provide interoperability in the exchange of the information among the different gCitizen services.