=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3360/p02
|storemode=property
|title="SAVIO": Benefits and Issues of Cloud Computing for
Public Government
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3360/p02.pdf
|volume=Vol-3360
|authors=Ernesto W. De Luca,Francesca Fallucchi,Marco Gerardi,Graziano Paesani
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/system/LucaFGP22
}}
=="SAVIO": Benefits and Issues of Cloud Computing for
Public Government==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3360/p02.pdf
"SAVIO": Benefits and Issues of Cloud Computing for
Public Government
Ernesto W. De Luca1 , Francesca Fallucchi2 , Marco Gerardi2,* and Graziano Paesani2
1
Digital Information and Research Infrastructures, Georg Eckert Institute, Braunschweig, Germany
2
Department of Engineering Sciences, Guglielmo Marconi University, Rome, Italy
Abstract
There is a growing global awareness that harnessing the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs)
can foster innovation, progress, and economic development. Through this process, a transformation takes place that aims
at country growth, employment, improved life quality as well as simplification, and greater active democratic citizen partic-
ipation. In this rapidly evolving scenario, cloud services for Public Administration seem to be one of the most cost-effective
means to overcome system limitations, providing those features of effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, participation, shar-
ing, cooperation, interoperability, and security needed for today’s challenges. In this research, we present an approach based
on distributed systems and ontologies for creating virtual assistants that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning
to save time and public money by providing better services, increasing effectiveness, efficiency and transparency. We devel-
oped a framework to guide cloud consumers in selecting cloud technologies through opportunity and risk analysis to reach
this objective. The results demonstrated reduced support costs, improved tracking of provided services, and simplified work
for public officials with the goal of re-balancing bargaining power between the small organization and the cloud service
provider.
Keywords
ChatBot, Cloud Computing, Ontology, Public Government
1. Introduction relevant in our lives in the future.
With this in mind, the giants of technology have devel-
Today, technologies related to cloud systems and artifi- oped platforms capable of interpreting expressions in nat-
cial intelligence (A.I.) are areas of considerable interest ural language and offer virtual assistants such as Google
and subject to huge investment and development. With Assistant; Amazon Alexa; Siri; Cortana, and IBM Watson.
the progressive development of new ways to produce Such platforms are capable of performing human dia-
knowledge, these technologies define new approaches logue, answering questions on topics of different nature,
to business activities [1] and new systems of relation- and performing complex tasks. With this technology, it is
ships in the value creation processes. All this translates possible to guarantee to e-Government characteristics of
into competitive and economic advantages for compa- effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, participation, shar-
nies and regional systems. Governments and political ing, cooperation, interoperability, and security. While it
institutions, as well as private organizations, must do is reasonable to assume that cloud computing could be
their part by investing in strategic capabilities that en- a solution for the public government to many localized
able the development and use of digital solutions [2, 3]. problems, it is also true that this choice raises a debate
They must aim for interoperability in digital infrastruc- about the technical and legal aspects. Arise security is-
ture such as, for instance, Super computing [4], Quantum sues that are not only technical and IT-related, but rather
Computing [5], Big Data [6, 7, 8], Blockchain [9], Cloud linked to the negotiation and contractual aspect, related
technologies [10, 11, 12, 13, 14], Artificial Intelligence to the ability, the necessary skills and the strength of the
[15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20], and next generation networks client to impose on the cloud service provider: binding
[21], ensuring security[22], effectiveness and efficiency. directives, limits, service levels and compliance with data
These are all technologies that will become increasingly protection legislation. In addition, it is necessary to pre-
cisely establish the contractual liability of the provider
SYSYEM 2022: 8th Scholar’s Yearly Symposium of Technology, Engi-
neering and Mathematics, Brunek, July 23, 2022 in the event of non-compliance or non-conformity of
*
Corresponding author. All the authors contributed equally. services. A.I. can work alongside public government to
" deluca@gei.de (E. W. D. Luca); f.fallucchi@unimarconi.it improve services to citizens and businesses, to improve
(F. Fallucchi); m.gerardi@studenti.unimarconi.it (M. Gerardi); the relationship between citizens and public government,
graziano.paesani@ingte.it (G. Paesani)
between public government and its employees. In 2020,
0000-0003-3621-4118 (E. W. D. Luca); 0000-0002-3288-044X
(F. Fallucchi); 0000-0002-1784-7334 (M. Gerardi); the university Polytechnic of Milan conducted a census of
0000-0002-6365-2298 (G. Paesani) the main international initiatives in the field of A.I. to sur-
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). vey the ecosystem of artificial intelligence applications
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
11
Ernesto W. De Luca et al. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 11–18
developed in the public context. This survey shows that they do, their use is oriented to provide simple first-level
virtual assistants and chatbots gain a share of attention support, without collecting valuable information on the
equal to 16% of total A.I. solutions. governance of supplies. Therefore, such systems are of
However, despite this growth of interest, the level of little support in decision-making and in monitoring the
maturity of these solutions, in many cases, has stopped whole procedure.
at the simple Proof of Concept, while in other cases there The “Sàvio” model overcomes all these limitations, as
were only theoretical developments never put into oper- the proposed solution guides the buyer to choose the
ation. This research aims to analyze cloud-related issues best solution for its needs by analyzing risks and op-
for public government, developing a prototype model portunities, through a process and control model that
that supports the public government in the wise approach is adequate and adapted to the context of the specific
to the cloud services market. Hence, the name "Sàvio" public government. Sàvio Agent is based on IBM Wat-
(from the Latin sapius "to be wise"), a cloud supply man- son, the same technology used in the City of Markham –
agement model that integrates not only best practices Canada’s high-tech capital – where are using the artificial
and proven strategies but also artificial intelligence, to intelligence-driven virtual agent "IBM Watson Assistant
obtain a system adapted to the reality of public admin- for Citizens" to offer 24-hour customer service for resi-
istration. Sàvio proposes a scheme for governability of dents looking for COVID-19 information. The solution
cloud services for the public government through: use machine learning to deliver reliable, consistent, and
accurate information via online text chat and voice calls
• the development of a back-end web app that takes – anywhere, anytime. This article discusses a combined
into account specific contractual indicators and and innovative approach to the use of cloud and A.I. sys-
supports the public government in their detailed tems for the public government. Moreover, the model
detection and tracking; presented is easily expandable and applicable to different
• the development of a virtual assistant/chatbot to domains, both public and private.
intelligently govern the conversation scenarios The document is structured as follows: in section II,
envisaged as part of a cloud provider for the pub- we explain the state of the art and the reasons why we
lic government, and also offer a targeted help chose the technologies used in the project; in section
system; III, we introduce the Sàvio project, describing the model,
• the tracking of Service Level Agreements (SLA). the case study, and the application. At last, in section IV
we summarize our work, draw conclusions, and outline
The Sàvio model allows:
possible future works.
• reduce support costs;
• trace the details of cloud services/products sup- 2. Related work
ply simplifying the work of public government
officials; Cloud computing provides opportunities for government
• re-balance the bargaining power between transformation. As defined by the National Institute of
small organizations and cloud service/solution Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing is
providers by setting up an automated reputa- a pool of computing resources such as servers, storage,
tional center that allows any consumer, through networks, applications, and services (NIST, 2012). These
cooperation, to report issues concerning their resources are available on-demand with little or no inter-
cloud service provision and assess the risk action with the cloud service provider. Cloud computing
parameters resulting from the adoption of a is growing rapidly as it can be used in any industry with-
specific cloud solution. out many obstacles [23], some of which involve contrac-
tual implications.
Currently, the most widespread solutions available focus
According to Gartner [24], the utilization of cloud com-
on the development of systems or products for interpret-
puting is growing and governments have started to cap-
ing natural language expressions based on supervised
italize on the cloud. Worldwide end-user spending on
learning techniques, without further benefits. In addi-
public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021 to
tion, the systems proposed to the public administration
total $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020. The
are limited almost exclusively to offering Software as
large adoption of Cloud technologies has demonstrated
Service (Saas) solutions-oriented mainly to electronic
the effectiveness of this new paradigm to simplify data
procurement (eProcurement) and therefore limited to the
centers management. The Public Administration will use
simple management of the assignment of works, services,
multi-tenant services, shared and managed by different
and supplies (these are simple management systems tai-
organizations. Cloud computing for the public govern-
lored to customer needs). Such systems seldom integrate
ment is enabled through Government Application Stores
virtual assistants/chatbots and in the few cases where
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Ernesto W. De Luca et al. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 11–18
(e.g. Fedramp marketplace in the U.S.A., AgID in Italy; paper (Sàvio BO). This survey led to the identification of
Gov.uk in the U.K.) where services can be purchased, SaaS solutions mainly oriented towards e-Procurement,
used, reviewed, and reused across the public sector. The understood as a service composed of integrated functions
objective of the Government Application Store is to: pro- to support the public government in the computerized
vide an open and transparent market in terms of costs for and telematic management of the entire process that
the public sector; allow the public government to have goes from the collection of requirements, programming,
information on the accreditation status of the service and awarding, and testing of a service/work.
the characteristics of the service; allows public govern- Although these solutions have been announced as in-
ment users to easily find, compare, purchase, deactivate teroperable, they do not include architectural compo-
and change services. nents such as those found in Sàvio. The Supervisor allows
Cloud consumers are confused when they choose to se- interacting in real-time with other deployments of the
lect a cloud service provider (CSP) to build cloud services. same product in the Back Office, offering to the commu-
The Cloud Services Broker (CSB) is an entity capable nity of consumers useful information about the service
of solving choice problems. The market surveys clearly provider, while the Agent communicates with end-users
show which are the main CSP players: in 2020 according through a database-driven chatbot, to offer them a tool
to Gartner, we have Amazon Web Services (AWS), Mi- to support, guide and facilitate access to services.
crosoft, Google, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, IBM. Using the The study also analyzed the development of chatbots
search engine www.mendeley.com and setting different for public government, based on the Osservatorio Agenda
keywords for the search such as "Cloud Broker", "Cloud Digitale [31] of the Polytechnic of Milan. In particu-
Service Broker", "Cloud quality problems Service Broker", lar, it emerged that most chatbots and virtual assistants
"Cloud Services Broker for Cloud Services Provider Se- designed for a public government offer first-level only
lections" etc. It appears that a lot of research is based on information to users without actually interacting with
the selection of cloud service providers based on quality back-office systems.
and cloud brokering. The contractual relationship be- An example of a chatbot for public government is the
tween Cloud service providers (CSPs), their customers, Roma Capitale project called ’Romolo’. This virtual assis-
and, above all their customer’s end users, are generally tant, managed with artificial intelligence tools, based on
defined in a standard. Within cloud computing contracts, NLP (Natural Language Processing), conveys information
there may be conditions such as free vs paid services; and FAQs to accompany citizens in their use of services
US versus EU jurisdictions; IaaS vs Software-as-a-Service in the territory. The Municipality of Milan launched its
(SaaS). information chatbot on WhatsApp. A more advanced
Because cloud computing is a distributed model, data experience is represented by the Municipality of Siena
may be stored and processed on multiple data centers and [32], which allows users to make requests in addition
in multiple jurisdictions. The general principle is that in- to having immediate and advanced information (such as
formation risk owners will remain responsible for the in- certificates).
formation risks that the department owns or guards. The Other chatbots are used in the City of Markham [33]
only resources the public government owns are the in- (Canada’s city) to answer COVID-19 questions. The Mari-
formation in the service, the information assurance, and copa County Clerk’s Office deployed the virtual assistant
the associated reputational risks. Risk management, the to improve efficiency for its employees and residents [34].
relationship between small public government and large The Government Technology Agency of Singapore (Gov-
cloud service providers, and the governance of service Tech) and Smart Nation and Digital Government Office
delivery are certainly the biggest issues to be addressed. (SNDGO) [35] have been exploring the use of virtual as-
At present, the following research areas exist about sistants (VA) and A.I. to improve government services.
cloud aspects, application interoperability, and chatbots: The chatbots, just listed, do not allow contributing to the
governance of the provision and/or service. Our solution
• Systems that analyze and aggregate web services
fulfills these prerogatives by providing valuable support
[25];
for internal users within the organization. The analysis of
• Chat-bot for Public Government [26]
the Sàvio model was conducted based on the AGID guide-
• Tender documents for public government- lines [36]. In particular, the tenders issued by Consip [37]
oriented cloud services [27]. were analyzed, from which, in addition to the details of
We proceeded to verify the design of calls suitable the cloud services, regulatory ideas emerged that led
for the chatbot implementation after conducting a pre- the study towards the definition of a detailed technical-
liminary analysis of the documents published and peer- regulatory scenario. Concerning the Sàvio model, na-
reviewed [28] [29] [30]. Further investigation was car- tional and international regulations were contextualized,
ried out with the help of the AGID Italian marketplace to paying attention to the issue of the responsibility of all
identify solutions similar to our solution illustrated in the actors in the field of cloud services between PA-Supplier-
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Ernesto W. De Luca et al. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 11–18
Professional. The study also emphasized the importance (QoS) metrics, and the mechanisms for auditing service
of academic and post-academic training of the resources delivery and QoS, and compensating clients for under
needed to carry out tender/contracting activities. This performance. The AUP, sometimes called a ’fair use pol-
aspect is often ignored in the tender process. icy’, is a policy to protect CSPs from the actions of clients,
In the following paragraphs, we will describe the ap- and in the case of enterprise clients, their end users, by
proach used to manage the cloud services provisioning detailing prohibited uses of the contracted cloud service.
integrated with database-driven virtual agents. We will Privacy Policy details the CSP’s policy for handling and
also present the service created to support public admin- protecting personal data, in line with data protection law
istration in managing shared risk. More specifically, we requirements. The migration phase to a cloud infrastruc-
are going to describe the approach used for building a ture can be greater than the cost of managing an existing
database-driven virtual assistant in IBM Watson. In ad- infrastructure. The consumer or the public administra-
dition, we will introduce the additional service created tion calculates whether the migration costs and the fully
to support the Public Administration in the adoption of operational costs in the cloud environment will be able to
cloud solutions that can integrate the functions of digital offset the costs of the existing infrastructure. The return
marketplace services. on investment (ROI) of cloud infrastructure adoption can
be calculated through the formula ROI=
3. Sàvio 𝐵𝑡 + 𝐵𝑖 − 𝑇 𝐶𝑂
𝑇 𝐶𝑂
Sàvio is a framework that guides the cloud consumer in
the adoption of cloud technologies through opportunities Bt are the tangible benefits, Bi are the intangible ben-
and risks. Our solution offers the following advantages: efits and TCO is total cost of ownership (TCO) that is
decrease assistance cost; track the cloud services deliv- obtained from the sum of initial costs (Ci), recurring costs
ery, simplifying the work of government officials and (Cr) and termination costs (Ct). If the On-Permise solu-
re-balance the bargaining power between small organiza- tion is used, the TCO can be converted into production
tion and cloud service provider by creating an automated cost considering the following factors: cost and average
reputational center. local hardware duration; current costs for servers and
The key cloud players are: networks; total invested capital; structural costs (costs of
electricity, rent and management of the premises); cost
• cloud consumer (CSC): who uses cloud computing of human resources for infrastructure management; cost
and signs a contract with the cloud provider; of application migration; cost of staff training; cost of
• cloud provider (CSP): subject responsible for mak- partners and third party tools; costs not mentioned but
ing the service usable to interested third parties; resulting from monthly invoices. It is possible to esti-
CSP provide cloud services; mate the effort in moving software solutions to the cloud
• cloud broker: intervenes between Cloud Con- through the WideBand Delphi Techniques [39].
sumer (Public Administration) and CSP by offer-
ing brokerage services, aggregation of necessary 3.1. Sàvio Model
cloud services with existing resources and arbi-
trage; Organizations need to approach the cloud with responsi-
• cloud auditor: perform audits about privacy, per- bility. The cloud consumer or the Public Administration
formance, security, regarding the services pro- must consider and negotiate Service Level Agreements
vided by the CSP expressing opinion on the mer- (SLAs) to avoid the worst scenarios such as: increase in
its; costs upon renewal of the contract; interruption of com-
• cloud carrier: cloud broker that provides con- mercial operations by the service provider or supplier
nectivity, transport and interconnection tools be- without any migration plan to other, more economically
tween the cloud consumer (PA) and CSP. advantageous platforms; commercial disputes between
the service provider and the cloud service provider; dras-
The contractual relationship between CSPs and other tic reduction in the quality of services. The present re-
actors, including the public administration, is typically search analyzes the governance aspects of the provision
defined in a standard form which includes the following of cloud services and builds a model of process and con-
components: Terms of Service (TOS); Acceptable Use trol of the supply: the Sàvio model. This model requires
Policy (AUP); Privacy Policy; Service Level Agreement that SLAs are described by measuring a set of target
(SLA). The TOS set out the provisions that define and values (SLO: service-level objective) and performance,
regulate the overall relationship between a CSP and the reliability and result indicators (SLI: Service Level Indica-
client. The SLA [38] details the level of service to be tor).
provided, often in the form of specific quality of service
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Ernesto W. De Luca et al. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 11–18
The Sàvio process designs the following phases of
the provision of cloud services: pre-contractual anal-
ysis and initialization of the Sàvio model; onboarding,
pre-production and production; contractual termination.
In the initialization phase of the model, Sàvio analyzes
the contract and identifies the SLA indicators. The pre-
production, on-boarding and production phase includes
constant monitoring of the SLA indicators. In this phase,
failure to comply with the SLA determines contractual
actions consisting of: application of contractual remarks
(R), application of contractual penalties (P), suspension
of contractual effect (S) additional actions (request for
damages, early termination of the contract, etc.) In the
Sàvio model, any action is promoted by the cloud con-
sumer, or by the Public Administration, in relation to a
single objective (for deadlines not met).
Common metrics for SLAs are the mean time be-
tween/to failures (MTBF), the mean time to repair/re-
covery (MTR), and Mean Time to Failure (MTTF: average
time to failure that measures the average time of oc-
currence of a system failure or malfunction or the time
average uptime). MTBF = MTTF + MTR. Assuming that
the first fault occurs at time t1, it will take a time t = MTR
for the repair to take place and a further time t = MTTF Figure 1: Sàvio architecture.
for the second fault to occur at time t2, therefore: MTBF
= t2 - t1 = MTR + MTTF. We will therefore have that:
the establishment of an automated reputational center.
∑︀ (𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑛 +1 −𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑛 )
𝑀 𝑇 𝐵𝐹 = 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑜 𝑑𝑖 𝑓 𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑢𝑟𝑒𝑠
In this context of application cooperation, the good per-
In a Sàvio model MTBF just gives a yardstick by which formance of the single cloud service supply becomes
a given company’s SLA can be compared against another very important for any service provider. Sàvio identify
in the Sàvio supervisor. The probability that the cloud critical Shop Identification - Unit Time: Average Num-
system is in an operable and usable state when the service ber of Failures (ANF) - Shows an average of failures oc-
is requested at a random time is the availability: curred in a given time period in numbers; Number of
𝐴𝑣𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 = 𝑀 𝑇 𝐵𝐹 𝑀 𝑇 𝐵𝐹 supplier errors - number of contractual reports small
+𝑀 𝑇 𝑇 𝐹
customer supply index (SCSI): it is an index imposed by
After the study of the Sàvio model, the architecture of Sàvio which compares the number of small customers
the software system was designed through interoperabil- supplied with the number of large customers. This in-
ity schemes. Sàvio software is a system that manages an dex obliges suppliers to serve a predefined number of
application and a chatbot with user-generated content small public government based on the number of large
as well as an advisor system for monitoring the risks, organizations served. Sàvio also identify of critical soft-
quality of services, costs of cloud services adopted by ware modules - Units of time: Availability; MTBF; MTTR;
the Public Government. The chatbot guides users to the Failure rate (FR):1/MTBF. Sàvio applies decision-making
correct representation of the problems that affect the techniques to execute identification of critical solutions
significant parameters for the consulting system. Three based on the attributes identified above and calculates a
Sàvio software modules have been built: Sàvio supervisor, cloud service provider ranking based on user feedback
Sàvio back office (BO), and Sàvio agent (figure 1). Sàvio using the PROMETHEE method[40].
Supervisor is the external interoperability application Sàvio back office is a web app that allows to govern
component that allows you to automatically establish, service/product provision, also tracing the events of the
by means of information flows from the N deployments supply in a knowledge base. Sàvio Back Office (BO) con-
of Saviò back office, the reputation of the cloud service / sists of: Sàvio Back Office Core that contains the business
product provider according to predetermined parameters. logic of the application and implements all the functional
The prerogatives of Sàvio Supervisor are: to moni- and interface services of the solution; interacts in an au-
tor supplies; re-balancing the bargaining strength be- thenticated and protected manner with Sàvio Supervisor
tween cloud consumer or Public Administration, espe- and Sàvio Agent; Sàvio Back Office Web User Interface
cially small ones, and service / product suppliers through
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Ernesto W. De Luca et al. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 11–18
(WUI) that designs the user interface and manages the in the UK www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk, in
interaction with it by exploiting the interface services Italy https://cloud.italia.it/marketplace/, and in the USA
of the core component; Sàvio Back Office Archive, the https://www.fedramp.gov/. The open data available in
database with which the Core component interacts to the marketplaces have been analyzed and then imported
store and consult information. Sàvio Back Office core into Sàvio’s database, after classifying possible anomalies.
is based on Spring Model-View-Controller (MVC), one Specific entities have been built in the Sàvio archive for:
of the most popular open source frameworks for devel- recurring themes (thematic areas) such as Taxes, Citizen-
oping high quality java applications. The heart of the ship, Commerce, Culture, Elections, Family, Public Works,
framework consists of an Inversion of Control container Work, School, Social Services, Sport, Public Construction;
that manages the entire life cycle of the objects in the management of defects, problems or failures that could
application context, from configuration, to finding depen- compromise the correct functioning of cloud products or
dencies and creating individual instances, all through De- services. The user of any system can identify a defect,
pendency Injection. Sàvio Back Office Core implements have a doubt and report it to request help or a solution.
REpresentational State Transfer (REST) ful Application The user forwards the reports by telephone or forwards
Programming Interface (API) based on the OAuth2 secu- them to Sàvio Agent. The Sàvio BO implementation
rity protocol. An OAuth token is required for any REST made it possible to define all the management functions
API call. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are relating to the governance of supply and reporting. The
foundational to a modern digital ecosystem. These stan- deployment of Sàvio BO was done on IBM BlueMix using
dards govern how APIs are to be developed across the the Bluemix CLI and Cloud Foundry CLI. The Application
Government of Canada (GC) to better support integrated cooperation between Sàvio BO Core architectural com-
digital processes across departments and agencies. Sàvio ponents was implemented through RESTful API authen-
Back Office WUI is based on the Vaadin framework inte- ticated with OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework. An
grated into the Spring (MVC) pattern. Vaadin Framework OAuth token is required for any REST API method made
is a tool to build good-looking Web apps without work- available by Sàvio BO Core. The Sàvio Agent chatbot
ing with low-level Web technologies. The framework was implemented on the IBM cloud platform where we
itself contains all the logic to create the modern Web app defined: intents, entity, dialog tree and web-hooks. The
while you concentrate on the UI itself, using a familiar first Intent is related to frequent greeting forms such as:
component-based approach, almost like you’re building "Hello", "Good morning", "Good night", "Good evening".
a traditional desktop app. Sàvio Back Office Archive is Then two options are proposed: "I am using your services
based on PostgreSQL. and I have problems", "Other issues". In the study of Sàvio
Sàvio Agent is a chatbot that uses the public govern- Agent, it was very important to define a guiding node:
ment knowledge base that was built with Sàvio BO. Sàvio it is the way to restart the dialogue in case the agent
Agent invokes Sàvio BO core API services through HTTP recognizes the #Restart intent. In this context, the first
calls with post method from one or more dialogue nodes. level of interoperability with Sàvio BO Core is defined
This mechanism is activated when Sàvio Agent processes through the activation of Webhooks.
a node that has a call-out enabled. The chatbot collects This mechanism allows you to call a service RestFul
the data during the conversation with the user and saves API with authentication token in method post HTTP.
them in the context variables, subsequently transmitting The webhook calls the resource exposed by Sàvio BO
the data as part of a HTTP post request to the URL of core passing the parameter containing a JSON structured
the restful API of Sàvio BO core (listener). The listener as follows: ""description": "value" where "Value" is the
performs a predefined action using the information trans- value of the context variable assigned during the dialog
mitted to it in the definition of the Sàvio Agent call-out. interaction with the user. Sàvio Agent sends a callout to
Subsequently, the chatbot optionally returns a response Sàvio BO Core and waits for the details of the topic, then
to the user also based on the call-out response. proposes the answer with multiple options or as one URL
referring to a website for more information. Sàvio Agent
3.2. Case study research and applications also allows users to forward reports to the back office.
The user is initially directed to the FAQs registered in
The Sàvio model has been applied to public adminis- the Sàvio BO Archive. Sàvio Agent performs a callout on
trations and local authorities. Local authorities are nu- the resource "/rest/v2/ entities/savio_defect/search". The
merous in every national territory and do not have chatbot allows the user logged in to also forward new
human resources with the skills to manage the re- reports to the back office.
lationship with service providers. Often, cloud ser- This technology approach offers the ability to quickly
vice management and service contracting are delegated and easily extend system functionality and integrate with
to the service provider. The study analyzed a num- multiple interoperable back-office systems. In fact, the
ber of government digital cloud marketplaces such as: virtual assistant embeds interoperability nodes with back
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Ernesto W. De Luca et al. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 11–18
office management systems. To add new actions, it is not References
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