Collaborative Cyberinfrastructure for Transnational Digital Government

This chapter discusses issues faced when both the IT infrastructure of the government agencies of different countries and existing software applications must be reused without modification to develop a cyberinfrastructure for transnational digital government. The sources of heterogeneity across IT infrastructures and software applications are identified and the impact of these sources on interoperability and compatibility of hardware, software, communication, data and security mechanisms are analyzed. Virtualization technologies are introduced as a means for coping with infrastructure heterogeneity and enabling the deployment of unmodified applications on existing infrastructures. A concrete case of digital government that entails the sharing of immigration information between Belize and the Dominican Republic is described. This example is also used to validate and evaluate the benefits of virtualization technologies in developing and deploying the cyberinfrastructure needed to implement a transnational information system for border control.