Formal support for e-government system design with transparency consideration

In this paper, we introduce formal methods into the field of e-Government (or public administration) for formalizing e-Government system design, trying to extract a formal definition of transparency in public administration from former studies on transparency, and analyzing if the design of e-Government systems satisfies transparency related properties.

Another contribution made in this paper is that we propose a digital right management license language (Public Administration License Language, called PALL as well) for e-Government systems, especially for using it to guarantee the transparency related properties in e-Government system design. Classical digital right license languages are applied to electronic "downloading", payment and rendering of artistic works, while we extend the concept of license to cover work authorization in public government. The digital works are public government documents in this context. As digital right license for artistic works seeks to safeguard against privacy and to ensure proper payment for the rights to render these works, PALL seeks to ensure transparent and professional "good governance".