Customized geospatial workflows for E-government services

The past decade has experienced a phenomenal growth in the electronic delivery of business services. This has led to an elevation in the expectations of citizens for fast and efficient delivery of governmental services. Recently, workflow systems have gained importance as an effective infrastructure for automating the business processes within and across government agencies. Government services, such as permit processing for the development or preservation of land, can be modeled as workflow. They must consider geographic locations and the geodata that include location-specific data, documents and information. We call such workflows dependent upon locations and their geodata Geospatial workflows. We argue that geospatial workflows vary widely from one case to another, and therefore cannot be represented as a generic workflow. We demonstrate, with concrete examples, that there is a compelling need for customized geospatial workflows and propose a system that is capable of generating such customized workflows by capturing the user requirements and extracting the relevant governmental regulations. Our system also provides users with decision support functionalities comprising of various GIS layers, by which users can evaluate and identify a suitable workflow among various possible scenarios. Geospatial workflows can be used by government agencies to automate the delivery of their services. We present the features of a preliminary prototype.