Design and Specification
Following the organizational planning, the design phase begins by creating the technical blueprint for interoperable services. This phase covers the high-level conceptual model, the specific definitions for data exchange, and the underlying technical architecture.
The Conceptual Model for Integrated Services
This section introduces a conceptual model to guide Ministries and Public Agencies as they plan, develop, operate, and maintain their digital public services. This model promotes a "loosely coupled" architecture, which allows each institution to maintain its independence while still facilitating data sharing through a common infrastructure.
At the heart of this conceptual model lies the principle of "interoperability by design". This is a fundamental approach that mandates all public services be constructed with seamless interaction and data exchange as core tenets. From the initial stages of development, services must be engineered to comply with specific interoperability and reusability requirements. To facilitate this reuse, information and services must be made readily discoverable and available in standardized, interoperable formats.
The model’s coordination function identifies needs and orchestrates the appropriate services to deliver a digital public service. This involves:
- Identifying requirements.
- Planning the services and information sources needed using internal resources, external resources, and catalogues.
- Executing the plan.
- Evaluating the service delivery through a user feedback mechanism.
Internal resources consist of (1) information sources and (2) services. Both of these resources should be made available not only within a single administrative system but also to the external environment, where they can be used as building blocks to create new integrated public services. This must be done with careful consideration for the privacy and confidentiality of the resources. To enable this, building blocks should make their data or functionality accessible using service-oriented approaches.
Ministries and Public Agencies should promote policies for sharing services and information sources in three main ways: (1) Reuse, (2) Publish, and (3) Aggregate. To enhance public services, public agencies should also utilize external resources when appropriate. These can include third-party services (e.g., from the financial or telecommunication sectors), open data, international data sources, IoT sensors, and social web applications, always with careful consideration and a preference for open standards and interoperability.
Semantic Design: Defining Common Data and Meaning
Once the high-level model is understood, the next step is to define the data itself. This is the domain of semantic interoperability, which “ensures that the precise format and meaning of exchanged data and information is preserved and understood throughout exchanges between parties which may have different systems; in other words, ‘what is sent is what is understood’”.
Achieving semantic interoperability can be complicated, as different Ministries and Public Agencies often have their own definitions and formats for representing information. The way data is submitted, encoded, and interpreted often varies because software systems are used for different aims and in different contexts. Due to this complexity, achieving semantic interoperability by establishing identical requirements and standards for all information systems is neither realistic nor reasonable.
Instead, existing documentation for agencies’ digital services and processes can be used as a foundation for establishing semantic agreements with other agencies. The structure of this documentation should be enhanced to contain two focal points: semantic assets and syntactic assets. Semantic assets refer to the meaning and interpretation of data. These typically include data dictionaries, thesauruses, nomenclatures, taxonomies, mapping tables, and service registries. In contrast, syntactic assets deal with the structure and organization of data, defining how information is formatted and arranged, often in a machine-readable structure like XML. These assets, when properly documented, help streamline the creation of a "semantic adaptor"—a component that translates data between systems.
This process of defining assets and agreements should be a collaborative effort involving key stakeholders such as subject matter experts, government administrators, and IT specialists. Ministries and Public Agencies shall consider participate in formal discussions that aim to establishing a national knowledge base and a governing body to facilitate overall semantic interoperability. This initiative will support future semantic agreements and potentially lay the groundwork for developing Cambodia’s own advanced semantic adaptor system.
Technical Design: Architectures and Specifications
Finally, the design phase specifies the technical means of connection. Technical interoperability covers the applications and infrastructures that link systems and services. This includes interface specifications, interconnection services, data aggregation services, and secure communication protocols. In simpler terms, it describes how different digital systems can be physically interconnected and communicate.
Each Ministry or Public Agency has developed or procured its own digital systems to address specific organizational challenges. The primary obstacle to connecting these systems is often a lack of knowledge about their internal processes and uncertainty about their behavior when subjected to new external requirements. In addition, the software lifecycle of these systems is often unclear, and they may be built using outdated technology (legacy systems). Consequently, integrating such systems can be difficult, costly, and time-consuming. Furthermore, since programming languages, tools, and frameworks continually evolve, it is unrealistic to mandate a single technology stack for all of government.