J. Service Science & Management, 2010, 3, 298-308
doi:10.4236/jssm.2010.33037 Published Online September 2010 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jssm)
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. JSSM
A New Framework for Designing E-Government
Procurement in China Based on Ontology and
Business Component*
Nan Lin1, Daifeng Li2, Tianxi Dong3, Zheng Qin2
1School of International Business Administration, Shanghai University of Finance & Economic, Shanghai, China; 2School of Infor-
mation Management & Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance & Economic, Shanghai, China; 3Rawls College of Business,
Texas Tech University, TX, USA.
Email: linn@mail.shufe.edu.cn, *ldf3824@yahoo.com.cn, dongtianxi@hotmail.com, qinzheng@mail.shufe.edu.cn
Received April 26th, 2010; revised June 5th, 2010; accepted July 8th, 2010.
ABSTRACT
Electronic government (e-government) procurement is one of the most important activities in China. The paper consists
of three parts. First, the paper introduces current situation of China’s e-government procurement system which in-
cludes the overall technical level, application level, and the existing problems. Based on the problem brought forward
from the first part, the paper considers that a better solution is to apply business component theory and business com-
ponent framework in the construction of e-government procurement, as it can solve the problems that block the develop-
ment of e-government procurement in a more convenient way. The paper constructs the Business Component (BC)
framework for the e-government procurement, analyzes the superiority of BC framework and describes a methodology
for the application of BCs in e-government procurement. The paper utilizes semantic model for workflow by using on-
tology modeling tool Protégé, uses ontology model database to store and manage workflow model, and builds a per-
mission-based and user-involved workflow. At last, the paper takes public bidding, a main e-procurement method in
China as an example and uses Appfuse and Osworkflow to prove the validity of the framework and methodology.
Keywords: Business Component, E-Government Procurement, Appfuse, Osworkflow, Ontology, Protégé
1. Introduction
E-government procurement is gaining more attention in
the research field recently. Government administration
is a kind of knowledge-intensive process from the view
of service type [1,2]. Participants in the process must
possess some professional knowledge of different in-
dustry fields, which makes the process more flexible
and changeable. These features are more remarkable in
the e-government procurement.
In China, government procurement refers to state
organs, institutions and organizations at all levels that
use fiscal funds to centrally purchase goods, works and
services within a procurement directory or procurement
standards noted above. The process of procurement is
limited in a strict way. The most complex, important
and representative method is public bidding (a main
e-procurement method in China). It helps the govern-
ment to obtain better working equipment or service in a
relative low price, improve the working efficiency and
reduce financial expense [3]. In China, The standard
structure of government procurement can be seen in
Figure 1.
In general, a municipal level of government procure-
China government procurement Center
Figure 1. Structure of government procurement in China.
*This paper is a thorough extension of a paper of ICDS 2008 (Li, et al.,
2008).
Provincial level of government
procurement Centers
Municipal level of government
procurement Centers
Dept 1 Dept 2 Dept 3
Provincial Fi-
nance office
Municipal Fi-
nance office
A New Framework for Designing E-Government Procurement in China Based on Ontology and Business Component 299
ment Center usually contains three departments. As is
seen in Figure 1, Dept1 represents the marketing office,
whose main function is responsible for commodity pro-
curement; Dept2 represents the procurement office, whi-
ch is responsible for procurement of large-scale projects.
Dept3 represents the integrated office, which is mainly
responsible for coordinating the relationship among other
departments.
Government procurement has gradually become more
standardized and large-scale in recent years. The scale
of government procurement is more than 590 billion,
up 27%, and capital saving rate of 11.3% [4]. In 2006,
China issued the standards of e-government procure-
ment, including standards of architecture, security, and
selection of software components, plug-in software, and
the functional requirements which should be achieved.
Different with other government office automation
(OA) system and e-government citizens-oriented service
system, e-government procurement is a special system
that is a process of transaction between governments and
enterprises. The e-government procurement has its uni-
que characteristics.
According to the analysis above, the system of gov-
ernment procurement requires high level of flexibility,
agility and adaptability because it is knowledge-intensive
and its process should be changed frequently. The pa-
per considers that Business Component (BC) theory and
its framework can fit the demands of e-government pro-
curement commendably.
Definition: Business component (BC) represents a
kind of software implementation of an “autonomous”
business concept or business process. It is composed of
all software components necessary to express, imple-
ment, and deploy a business component as an autono-
mous, reusable element of an information system [5].
BC theory’s main idea is “to build on-demand”. In
this paper, to apply BC framework and ontology theory
in e-government procurement, we should have an in-
depth understanding on that area and a mature method
to build concept model. We use FODA (Feature-Oriented
Domain Analysis) [6] to make analysis on the function
and process of e-government procurement and use en-
tity-append [7] approach to design BCs.
The structure of the paper is as follows: in Subsec-
tion 2.1, we use FODA to analyze the function and
logic process of government procurement, build do-
main BC to identify index system and utilize cluster
algorithm [8-11] to abstract and design BCs that can be
reused in e-government procurement. In this section,
the paper summarizes the superiority of each business
component framework and designs a unique framework
for e-government procurement by consulting Compo-
nent-Based Software Development (CBSD) [12] for
BCs to deploy. In Subsection 2.2, the paper introduces
the structure of a typical BC. In Subsection 2.3, the
paper discusses how to use J2EE light weight architec-
ture to develop the system under BC framework. In
Subsection 2.4, a user participation workflow based on
ontology is introduced to enhance the flexibility of the
framework. In Section 3, an instance is introduced to
describe how to use the framework to develop public
bidding (a main procurement process approach) to vali-
date feasibility and superiority of the system.
2. Business Component Framework Based
on Light Weight J2EE Architecture
2.1. Business Component Framework
In this paper, based on traditional BC framework, we
make some improvement and innovation on it. The re-
search on BC framework is mature, but there is no re-
lated research on the application of BC framework in
government procurement in China, so the main purpose
of this paper is to analyze the domain characteristics of
government procurement in China and build up a domain
BC framework that can support government procurement
in China more efficiently. The main innovation is listed
below:
1) Use FODA to analyze the particular domain of go-
vernment procurement in China.
2) Consider the advantages of several main BC frame-
work [6,8,9,13,14] that can be used in the government
procurement, reconstruct them to meet the requirement
of government procurement and research on how to inte-
grate them into J2EE light weight architecture.
3) Research on how to make use of those advantages
to construct BC framework, abstract and design BCs that
is based on government procurement in China.
4) Adopt several evaluation approaches to estimate the
effect of the BC framework that is built for government
procurement.
First, we make domain classification from a strategic
level. We consider that the research object cannot be li-
mited to existing procurement but we also need some
forward-looking about the development of government
procurement. The organization structure should be mean-
ingful in strategic level, and thus we adopt a coordination
mechanism among decision-making, implementation, and
supervision [4]. We can use that mechanism to guide the
construct of government procurement system.
According to the analysis above, the domain can be
divided into four main categories: decision categories,
implementation categories, supervision categories and
finance categories. The main function of decision cate-
gories is to decide the evaluation index system of bidding
for a project, use qualitative and quantitative methods to
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A New Framework for Designing E-Government Procurement in China Based on Ontology and Business Component
300
analyze each bidder and judge which bidder can be suc-
cessful in the bidding. Implementation categories imple-
ment the decision made by decision-makers, mainly in-
cluding examining, approving and generating basic index
table, product or project information table, user require-
ment table and etc. Finance categories add finance in-
formation to the basic table in accordance with the in-
formation the table has offered.
Each category has a BC database which contains a col-
lection of standard reusable BCs, and the BC database
consults Jun Ginbayashi and Rieko Yamamoto’s Com-
ponent AA mechanism [13], builds a detailed data model,
and maps the model to the object. By using that approach
and entity-append mechanism, we divide BCs into entity
components (ECs), process components (PCs), abstract
domain business components (ADBCs), business-level
core business components (BCBCs), abstract core busi-
ness components (ACBCs), customer core business com-
ponents (CCBCs).
ADBCs are the proper characteristics in e-government
procurement, which encapsulates the process and func-
tions that is regulated by law and cannot be modified.
They build the system frame to integrate other BCs. PCs
is the set of meta-process which can describe concrete
section of business process, while ECs is the set of
meta-function which can realize some function of the
system. ACBCs and BCBCs is the organic combination
of ECs and PCs. The difference is that ACBCs is a kind
of general BC, that means the attributes and functions it
provides are common and can be reused not only in
e-government procurement domain but also in other do-
main such as OA or distribution system, and inherit
[15,16] mechanism is used to realize that general BC, but
BCBC considers the reusable in the same domain, it ab-
stracts the common properties of several similar proc-
esses in the same domain and encapsulates those proper-
ties into a BCBC, it has several parameters, and it can
switch to different process by re-configuring the pa-
rameters. By using IoC [16,17] mechanism, the parame-
ters can directly point out which template model should
be applied. So when changes happen, we just modify the
parameters in service layer, then the rest work can be
done automatically by using IoC mechanism. CCBMs
emphasize the requirement of customers and design the
business components that can satisfy the specific de-
mands of customers.
Papers [9-11] introduce the clustering methods to iden-
tify and design business component from the set of meta-
process and meta-function. According to the study of those
articles, we summarize their principles and use their me-
thods to cluster meta-function and meta-process:
What’s more, each category contains four modules in
the BC framework, which are mathematic base, knowl-
edge base, organization management module and tem-
plate module. Mathematic base provides many kinds of
mathematic tools and decision algorithms to support data
analysis and make decision. Knowledge base provides an
expert system for users to realize knowledge manage-
ment and sharing. Organization management module de-
fines the roles and authority of the system, and use user
authentication mechanism to realize the dynamic banding
between user and role [17]. Template module considers
that one BC may choose different actions when confront-
ing different situations, so it builds many templates to
deal with changes. The structure of the framework can be
seen in Figure 3.
The framework is divided into four layers that are user
interface (UI) layer, business process layer, service layer,
data operation layer and data layer. UI layer contains
User Interface Business Components (UIBCs) which can
make various UI interfaces for users to communicate
with computers and many kinds of tables. Business pro-
cess layer describes the logic of real business process and
builds model for it by using Osworkflow (a kind of open
source workflow software which is developed by Java).
It divides the whole process into several stages, each
stage is further divided into several activities, and each
activity is a concrete task that is assigned to certain per-
son. It needs BCs from service layer to implement re-
sponse work. The main management tools of service
layer are Application Context Affairs. All BCs should
register in service layer, provide their addresses, func-
tions and interfaces to Application Context Affairs so
that it can find and use them, which are included in BC
management.
2.2. Structure of Business Component
According to Subsection 2.1, BCs are divided into sev-
eral types including ADBCs, BCBCs, ACBCs, CCBCs,
ECs and PCs. Each business components should contain
at least one of the two parts: PCs and ECs. Take ADBCs
as an example, whose process is composed of several
groups of meta-processes and entity is also consisted of
several groups of meta-functions [11-13]. There is an
organic link between meta-process and meta-function.
We consider the meta-process and related meta-function
as an individual object, and the object can exhibit typical
structure of Business Component. The construct of the
objects can be seen in Figure 2.
The structure has two layers that are meta-process
layer and meta-function layer. Meta-process layer uses
business interface to obtain the external information and
service requirement, then sends them to the business
proxy, and business proxy uses IoC mechanism [16-19]
to select specify business service to realize service re-
quirement.
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A New Framework for Designing E-Government Procurement in China Based on Ontology and Business Component
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. JSSM
301
Meta-Process Layer
Business Interface
Business Proxy
Business Service
Business Handle
Meta-Function Layer
Business Interface
Business Proxy
Business Service
Business Handle
Data Access Model
Figure 2. Structure of object.
The services in meta-process layer should be sup-
ported by the meta-function layer, which provides func-
tions to realize the services that are brought by meta-
process layer in the same way as the meta-process does,
but the different is that meta-function layer need to han-
dle the database. As shown in Figure 3, the ADBCs need
to encapsulate the operation of database too.
In this paper, we adopt Hibernate to obtain data object,
and deal with the database just like invoking a general
programming but does not need to insert into specify
SQL language.
2.3. Application of Appfuse and Osworkflow
The main tools applied in the component based frame-
work are EJB, web service and COM. Considering the
feature of e-government procurement that is introduced
in Section 1, we decide to choose a more agile architec-
ture which integrates much technical superiority, possess
nicer architecture support that can make flexible con-
figuration. Light weight J2EE architecture is a good op-
tion, and Appfuse is one of the most excellent products in
light weight J2EE architecture. It integrates the main
software design frameworks of java such as Struts, Sp-
ring and Hibernate so we can use their respective spe-
cialties to construct three layers architecture that is inhe-
rited and abstracted from business component based me-
thodology. It uses templates and configuration files to
support fast development. Strong configuration function
is a main characteristic in business component based
framework that is described in literature [18].
In this paper, considering frameworks’ respective ad-
vantages, we use Osworkflow to design the process of
e-government procurement and utilize Appfuse to build
the business component based architecture and design the
management mechanism of business components [20,21].
We use Osworkflow to design the meta-process models
and assemble them to form an integrate e-government
procurement process, use JSP and Servlet to design UI
and transfer information to Osworkflow, use Spring to
implement and manage business components, and use
Hibernate to implement database CRUD operation.
2.4. User Participation Workflow Model Based
on Ontology
The e-government procurement is an interaction process
among different enterprises, government departments and
organizations, which involves different auditing proc-
esses, The processes are different and changed frequently,
thus, the functions of the roles are also changed, so does
the structures of the organizations. It is hard to define all
the process and obtain the meta-process by usual method.
Therefore, it is difficult to satisfy user’s requirement. For
example, in the past, government used inquiry approach
for purchasing products and projects, the total value of
which are less than 50 million Yuan. Now, in order to
improve work efficiency, the government adopts fixed
procurement method for different products. It is very
difficult for us to update existing system to satisfy the
changes. Redevelopment is considered as a waste of
money and time and we also cannot be certain that the
new system could be competent in the future.
So one method to solve that problem is to give users
the capability to define their own workflow and organi-
zations based on the models we provide. Of course, users
can only define and modify a certain part of the work-
flow according to their authorities.
One of the main problems is how to use a more con-
venient way to help the users (without computer science
background) to describe their ideas, and let computers
know and implement them. The paper brings forward a
solution, and applies that solution in the construction of
e-government procurement primarily. We use ontology
to build up a domain database. Ontology is a kind of
knowledge which can be formalized [22,23]. Therefore,
we can use that knowledge to manage knowledge in dif-
ferent domain, and then realize the expression and reuse
of knowledge.
We define domain individuals, attributes, operations of
objects, and the relation between individuals by using
Protégé. Protégé is an ontology model developed by
A New Framework for Designing E-Government Procurement in China Based on Ontology and Business Component
302
Figure 3. Business component based framework.
Stanford University. It provides a good graphical user
interface, and a whole process to compile the figure ex-
pression of ontology model, mark and integrate the com-
piled file, deploy the model and realize application on it
at last. It uses OWL as its ontology language by OWL
Plug-in component. The Jena [24] component provides
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. JSSM
A New Framework for Designing E-Government Procurement in China Based on Ontology and Business Component 303
Java API for Protégé.
In this paper, we use Protégé and Osworkflow to do a
series of research to realize a prototype of ontology based
workflow model.
First of all, ontology of workflow should be described
by OWL [23-25]. We take OSworkflow as reference ob-
ject and design three layers to describe the whole con-
cepts of workflow:
In the first layer, we use OWL to define the concepts
of workflow process model and the objects involved, and
the Framework of OSworkflow can be seen in Table 1
[20].
In the second layer, we build extended semantic model
for workflow ontology to describe the characteristics of
each class [23,25]. OSworkflow provides a comprehen-
sive grammatical structure for each main class [20]; for
example, Activity is a sub-class of workflow process,
whose attribute set includes activity number, description,
user and roles, information and function resource, pre-
and post-conditions, rollback attribute, etc. We take
ADBCs, ACBCs, BCBCs as prototype to define basic
activities and sub-processes. Transition has the attribute
set of predecessor and successor link, the transfer type
and condition. We use OWL to describe those gram-
matical structures [22,24].
In the third layer, we design domain ontology of gov-
ernment procurement to describe the abstract classes that
are expressed by OWL. The abstract classes are mainly
used to describe common characteristics of the domain,
which can be used as instances to build up Workflow
[26,27]. The domain can be divided into several classes
including Roles, Functions, Projects/Products Tables and
so on [15,28]. For example, Roles has some common
abstract class including suppliers, directors, experts, offi-
cials and etc [17]. Different kinds of tables and their
characteristics are also described by OWL. The classes
contain their basic or common attributes and operations.
Detailed information should be provided in the database;
for example, we should use ontology to describe the user’s
Table 1. Framework of OSworkflow.
Template
Sub-process(Step)
Activity
Connector
Transition
Process of work-
flow
Rules
Information
Organization
Function
Concept of Work-
flow
Object of workflow
Resource
attributes, the classification of his status, and what kind
of operations he should do according to his attributes and
status. It is a complicated process.
After building up the ontology of OSworkflow and e-
government procurement, we can export the models from
Protégé to MySQL to construct ontology database and
thus change ontology-based logical relations into rela-
tional database [23].
The main purpose to do that is to build the semantic
association between OSworkflow, e-government procure-
ment and their Ontology model. Therefore, two aspects
of the work should be finished.
First, translate the ontology model into XML expres-
sion which can be implemented by OSworkflow. When
we import the elements of ontology database into Protégé,
the users can use those elements to define, design and
modify the existing workflow model in a graphical inter-
face. After they finish their jobs, the protégé will compile
the model, and use RMI to output all the information to a
java program [23,24]. The java program acts as a trans-
lator. First, it identifies the user’s role to see if his/her
operation is legal, after that, the programs translate the
OWL language into XML format and deploy the related
file into OSworkflow architecture.
Second, translate the XML format file into OWL lan-
guage. A typical XML format for OSworkflow to describe
the action “apply for procurement” is listed below [20]:
<step id = “1” name = “Apply for Procurement”>
<external-permissions>
<restrict-to>
……
</restrict-to>
</external-permissions>
<actions>
<action id = “1” name = “Send Applying”>
<restrict-to>
<conditions>
<condition type = “class”>
<arg name = “class.name”>
com.opensymphony.workflow.util.StatusCondition
</arg>
<arg name = “status”>Queued</arg>
……
</condition>
</conditions>
</restrict-to>
<results>
<unconditional-result
old-status = “Finished”status = “Underway”
step = “1” owner = “${caller}”/>
</results>
</action>……
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A New Framework for Designing E-Government Procurement in China Based on Ontology and Business Component
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. JSSM
304
Therefore, to translate the XML is first to find the tags
of structure, steps and activities; and then find user, func-
tion, condition and others. According to the pre-mapping
mechanism, the program can find the related ontology
objects in the ontology database to match them, and gen-
erate workflow graph by Protégé. The structure of user
participation workflow model can be seen in Figure 4.
below:
First, a demand will be produced such as project con-
struction, government service or a large amount of prod-
uct procurement.
Second, the government procurement center (GPC)
whose work is to help government administrators in dif-
ferent hierarchies to implement their procurement plan
would make public bidding file (PBF) according to the
demand.
3. Instance
3.1. Domain Analysis of Public Bidding Third, the qualified suppliers would quote price and
make bidding file (BF) according to the PBF in finite
time.
The most representative approach in e-government pro-
curement is public bidding whose steps can be described
Figure 4. Structure of user participation workflow model.
A New Framework for Designing E-Government Procurement in China Based on Ontology and Business Component 305
Fourth, when the bidding is over, the GPC will invite
participants and experts together to hold a conference to
decide which company or supplier is the most suitable
one to charge of the project or procurement plan.
Based on the domain analysis which is studied from
FODA, we summarize the main participants and their
activities, divide the activities into meta-process and
meta-function, at the same time, use DOA method to
build data model, and map the data model into informa-
tion object such as order table [18,19].
3.2. Designing BC Framework and BCs
First, we re-analyze the whole process of public bidding
that is executed in twelve different cities in China, ab-
stract common process of public bidding, and compare
them with government procurement law in China to find
the core processes and functions that can not be modified.
Of course, the different parts are also considered as spe-
cial circumstances to analyze. We use top-down decom-
position method to obtain meta-process and metafunction.
In order to obtain accurate information to guide the follow
work, we consult several university experts and govern-
ment officials to amend our model.
Second, we divide the model into four parts: decision
part, implementation part, supervision part and finance
part according to the analysis of their functions and at-
tributes in Section 2. We can design different BCs in
different parts. In this paper, we take implementation part
as an example to illustrate how to design BCs for gov-
ernment procurement in China.
ADBCs should be designed first, which is the basic
procurement process of it. Since it is a process compo-
nent, it can be divided into many children processes such
as applying (P1), auditing application (P2), auditing the
authority of suppliers (P3), inviting public bidding (P4),
biding (P5), holding the opening bidding meeting (P6),
evaluating and publicizing (P7). Each children process
can be described as the combination of several meta-
process. Furthermore, each meta-process is required by
law and has strict regulation of the process. But they are
just framework, the concrete realization of process and
function should need other BCs’ participation.
The paper uses UML activity diagram to describe the
business process of public bidding [28], and translates
the diagram into XML format that can be identified by
Osworkflow.
When we design BCs, we meet the problem that how
to confirm the granularity of BCs. In this paper, we learn
from reference [7] to build an index system and use en-
tity-append mechanism to evaluate the performance of
the BC when adding or reducing a meta-process or me-
ta-function on it. By that method, we can optimize the
structure of BCs which are specified by clustering algo-
rithm.
ACBCs can be reused by inherit mechanism, since any
new instance of BC can reuse the attributes and functions
of ACBCs by extending it. We list representative ACBCs
below:
The CRUD of Quotation:
All e-government procurement approaches should have
the CRUD operations on quotations, and there are high
similarity in the content of all quotations in different
procurement approaches, such as price, type, amount and
date. The quotation can be shown in many different types,
so we use crystal report forms to design an abstract class
which contains several different templates of table format
that involve all the main government procurement ap-
proaches. We can select different types of tables by con-
figuring the parameters in the abstract class. The struc-
ture of Quotation BC can be seen in Figure 5.
We use Osworkflow to create the model of ADBCs,
which uses WorkflowNum [20] to specify serial numbers
for each process components and the status management
mechanism and trigger mechanism to realize the control
of all process. The process can be written in XML format
in OSworkflow.
3.3. Integration of Business Component
The design of ACBCs and BCBCs is supported by
Spring [19] architecture. First, set unscramble and man-
agement tools of configuration file, then initialize Appli-
cationContext, whose function is to invoke relevant BC
according to the information which ServiceBeanFactory
supplies. We should also define the event mechanism of
the whole architecture that can provide standard such as
commit, roll back, throw exception and so on for all the
activities. Use IoC to define BC in the configuration file,
including the definition, operations, attributes, interface
of BC and the Data transmit object [18,19] (DTO) is one
of the most important tools in BC architecture, it maps
the data into data object in XML format, and transmit
them to related BCs which need to handle them.
It can be used in different protocol, language and plat-
form which is suitable for system integration. DTO can
be designed by reflection mechanism [18,19], and use
public package BeanUtil of apache to transfer data object
to java object.
ACBCs encapsulate the common functions or proc-
esses that can be reused by all the e-government pro-
curement approach in the domain. Therefore the paper
adopts Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) [16,28]
technology and Inherit mechanism to allow other BCs
use these ACBCs. The most distinct advantage is that it
can reduce coupling degree of the system. If we want to
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A New Framework for Designing E-Government Procurement in China Based on Ontology and Business Component
306
Figure 5. Structure of quotation BC.
modify some common function that is applied in many
places of the system, we just need to modify the related
ACBC and deploy it and then the modification will be
identified and implemented by the whole system.
3.4. Evaluation of System Based on BC
Methodology
The system is developed based on an existing open
tender system. We redesign the structure of system
under the guidance of our framework, decompose the
code fragment, and re-integrate them to produce dif-
ferent kinds of BCs, which realize the reuse of existing
system.
What’s more, ontology is also introduced to design
user participation workflow. We mainly make compari-
sons between the existing system and the new system
which is developed under the guidance of our BC frame-
work.
Considering the possible visiting amount of the system,
we set the simulative peak visiting amount as 1000 times
per minutes, and utilize Equation (1) to calculate the res
pond speed of the server under different visiting amount
[22,26, 27].
1
TP
(1)
T: The minimal time unit
P: CPU main frequency
The contents of system test include: the data amount
that is stored in the database during the required time (I1),
the jump speed between two different processes (I2), the
transfer speed of attachment (I3), the refresh speed of the
web pages (I4). After hundreds of tests, we find that
when the rate of visiting amount and peak visiting
amount reaches (PVA) 35%, the speed rate of each index
can keep a high value compared with ideal speed. When
the rate of visiting amount and peak visiting amount
reaches 100%, the speed rate of each index can also keep
a good value. The data can be seen in Table 2.
Besides, we introduce another two indicators to evalu-
ate the complexity and maturity of the system [22]. The
complexity formula can be seen in Equation (2) and the
maturity formula can be seen in Equation (3).
100 ()
rrri uu
ru
NNN
CNN


 (2)
(
ucad
p
MMMM
SM

)
(3)
r means the number of classes in the system;
means the number of web pages in the system; rr
Nu
N
N
means the number of relations among different classes,
the relationships include inherit and instance; ri
N
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. JSSM
A New Framework for Designing E-Government Procurement in China Based on Ontology and Business Component 307
Table 2. System test results.
PVA I 1 I 2 I 3 I 4
35% 4200 98% 85% 90%
100% 5200 91% 71% 80%
means the number of the instance relations between class
files and web pages. u means the internal relation-
ships among Web pages.
u
N
p
M
means the final numbers of units that is publish-
ed and deployed. c
means the number of new units
compared with original design. a
M
means the number
of the combined or deleted units compared with original
design. d
M
means the number that is changed or modi-
fied compared with original design.
According to [22], we know that if the value of S is
larger, the system is more mature; if the value of C is
smaller, the system is less complexity. The value of C in
public bidding system is 43.38% and S is 73.69%. Com-
pared with the referred existing system, whose value is
around 50%, the public bidding system based on BC
framework is more superior.
4. Conclusions
First, the paper introduces the development of e-gov-
ernment procurement in China and summarizes both the
advantages and deficiencies in recent period. Considering
the particulars of e-government, the paper introduces
business component theory, and constructs an e-govern-
ment procurement system framework based on business
component. The framework emphasizes process control
and provides approach to identify process business com-
ponents. What’s more, we utilize user-participation work-
flow model based on ontology to realize the flexible de-
sign, use Protégé to build ontology model for OSwork-
flow and e-government procurement, establish semantic
association between them and their ontology model.
Meanwhile, the paper also illustrates center manage-
ment mechanism to manage all the BCs. In order to make
the framework more flexible and easy to develop, the
framework is divided into 5 layers. Each layer has its
BCs. To enhance the reusability of system, the paper
introduced 6 different kinds of BCs, and each BC is suit
for a particular domain. J2EE light weight development
tool is introduced to design the technology architecture
of business component framework. At last, the paper
takes public bidding as an example to describe how to con-
struct a real system by the knowledge introduced above.
An evaluation test is also exhibited to observe the effi-
ciency of system. The test indicates that enterprise sys-
tem which is developed by BCs can exhibit more superi-
ority than traditional development method. It is more
suitable to be applied in a given domain. The paper also
constructs a primary domain BCs library based on on-
tology for BC management. By those BCs, it realizes the
automatic management of the procurement and provides
a higher security mechanism to ensure the impartiality,
publicity and equity of e-government procurement.
5. Acknowledgements
This research is supported by China National Natural
Science Foundation (70971083) and SHUFE Graduate
Innovation Foundation (CXJJ-2008-330), Leading Aca-
demic Discipline Program, 211 Project for SHUFE (the
3rd phase, 211-5-1), Doctoral Foundation of Ministry of
Education (20090078110001).
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