Towards Reliable E-Government Systems with the OTS/CafeOBJ Method

System implementation for e-Government initiatives should be reliable. Unreliable system implementation could, on the one hand, be insufficient to fulfill basic system requirements, and more seriously on the other hand, break the trust of citizens on governments. The objective of this paper is to advocate the use of formal methods in general, the OTS/CafeOBJ method in particular in this paper, to help develop reliable system implementation for e-Government initiatives. An experiment with the OTS/CafeOBJ method on an e-Government messaging framework proposed for providing citizens with seamless public services is described to back up our advocation. Two previously not well-clarified problems of the framework and their potential harm realized in this experiment are reported, and possible ways of revisions to the framework are suggested as well. The revisions are proved to be sufficient for making the framework satisfy certain desired properties.