The Italian e-Government enterprise architecture: A comprehensive introduction with focus on the SLA issue

The paper describes the currently ongoing effort for defining and developing a nationwide e-Government Enterprise architecture in order to guarantee a flexible approach for integrated application services, respecting local and central administrations' autonomy. An appropriate mixture of organizational initiatives, together with the promulgation of appropriate laws, and the development of innovative technical rules, seems to be the success factor of the approach. From a more technical point of view, the definition (i) of semantically-rich service agreements, (ii) of a repository more complex than a simple UDDI registry, and (iii) of complementary components for dealing with QoS and security, represent the core elements of the infrastructure. Finally the paper discusses the problem related to the monitoring of QoS at the level of the service execution. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.