IAIS: A methodology to enable inter-agency information sharing in eGovernment

Recently, there has been increased interest in information sharing among government agencies, with a view toward improving security, reducing costs and offering better quality service to users of government services. In this work, the authors complement earlier work by proposing a comprehensive methodology called IAIS (Inter Agency Information Sharing) that uses XML to facilitate the definition of information that needs to be shared, the storage of such information, the access to this information and finally the maintenance of shared information. The authors compare IAIS with two alternate methodologies to share information among agencies, and analyze the pros and cons of each. They also show how IAIS leverages the recently proposed XML (extensible markup language) standard to allow for inclusion of various groups' viewpoints when determining what information should be shared and how it should be structured.