Part of Yesser e-Gov program an interoperability framework called YEFI. The framework concern any entity that exchange data and integrate services for the consumption and benefit of the public.
From yesser website, YEFI is defined as “a unified framework to implement e-government. It includes cross – governmental specifications and policies, to enable cross – governmental integration and facilitate G2G transactions and data sharing.”
While reading deeply about YEFI, I noticed that the framework cover almost everything we need – for integration purpose at least – between different government institutions. The common part of the schemas between different ministries is almost the same : Address, ID number, place & date of birth, Last and first name, while they keep different names.
The creation of data catalog is the first step to get these data defined, where every entry should include as fields : Name, Business information, Format, Validation, Verification, XML Schema IDs, Values, Default value, Owner, Version and Acceptance date. The data schema will be in this case the collection of all these elements defined in data catalog.
The schema should include meta data; if we are sending person’s data for example the schema should start with meta data as : Business object created, Business object updated, owner, data schema ID, Global unique object ID; then followed by person data as : Person birth place & date, First & Last name … etc.
A central repository for the standardized schemas is required to handle persistent data of oudated schemas. As every institution data might evolve over the years, and data schema will be updated; a repository should be available to document schemas versions and conversion rules.
The recommended integration technologies standards are : WebServices for middleware, UTF-16 for character sets, XML/XSL and XML schema, and finally RDF as resource description framework.
More details on YEFI program and technical documentation are available at http://www.yesser.gov.sa/english/YEFI.asp