End-User Development of e-Government Services through Meta-modeling

This paper describes an approach to the end-user development of online services for citizens of a government agency. With reference to a typical government-to-citizen service, the paper discusses how such services are currently structured and provided to citizens, and how their implementation can be transferred from software professionals to administrative personnel, who do not generally possess any programming expertise. The analysis of e-government services is carried out according to different perspectives pertaining to the citizen, the employee, the software engineer and the human-computer interaction expert. This analysis leads to define an abstract service model (a meta-model) and constitutes the first phase of the end-user development approach here proposed. The meta-model can then be used to design an environment for service creation suitable to the competencies and background of the target end-user developers. This design activity constitutes the second phase of the proposed approach.