e-Registry in Vietnam
e-Registry website presents national database of administrative procedures and documents prescribed by Vietnamese law. The main objective of the project was to provide a unified endpoint so that users can search administrative procedures of their interest. The project is a part of a larger initiative by the Vietnamese government to increase its transparency for individuals and for organizations.
Situation
An existing internal system was initially in place that was used for storing and organizing administrative procedures and legal documents. This system was built on top of eZ Publish CMS also by our experts, and was heavily customized as a part of e-Guillotine solution that was implemented for purpose of reducing unneeded procedures. The project was led by a partner company Sense Consulting responsible for project specification and client management. As specified by Sense and the client the goal for the new project - e-Registry was to:
- open up data stored in the system (more then 250000 objects) to broad public with simple, clear and usable web interface
- show interconnections between administrative procedures and legal documents for easier browsing
- give users advanced search functionality
- enable commenting
Solution
Due to the large volume of content available on the website good search interface was of great importance: it needed to be fast, useful, customized for Vietnamese language and able to suggest meaningful terms interactively while user is typing in the search input field. As base technology eZ Find extension and underlying Solr engine were chosen. Solr is fast and gives relevant search results based on boosting settings, filtering, etc. We normalized Vietnamese letters for the purpose of making the searching easier while not worrying about correct diacritics. eZ Find facet functionality was leveraged to give the user interactive suggestions while typing the search terms, through specially developed suggest extension that is now shared on projects.ez.no/ngsuggest . User comments for administrative procedure objects are implemented using eZ Survey extension. With it we were able to build detailed questioneers needed for the e-guillotine process.
System architecture: 3 web servers were used with sharing file system over SAN. Additional servers were used for database, Solr index and reverse proxy. For reverse proxy role Varnish HTTP accelerator was a natural choice because of its good integration with eZ Publish. Hardware specification, operating system installation and services configuration, as well as performance tuning, was done by our Linux services partner Infomar .
Technologies
- eZ Publish CMS
- eZ Find/Solr extension
- eZ Survey extension
- Netgen Suggest extension
- Varnish
- JQuery
- XHTML/CSS
Results
As a result of this project a newly designed public interface with simple and well-known iconography was developed (with 2 big boxes for searching: one for administrative procedures, other for legal documents). First screen focuses on the simple search that was perceived as the best way for user to search such a vast amount of content. Although frontpage implements only this simple search interface, advanced options are shown on search results page so that user can fine-tune search results based on several filters. Connections between related procedures and legal documents are clearly presented on their web pages. Also, registered users can comment on all publicly available procedures to provide their experience in regards with the selected procedure.
With these features in place, e-Registry serves as a main public communication point for installed e-Guillotine system. Also, due to extensibility and configurability of eZ Publish CMS, further modifications and additions to the system can be developed.