These are some of the unknowns as the accounting and corporate regulatory authority (ACRA) embarks on its web services journey. ACRA was established in April 2004 with the merger between Public Accountants Board and the registry of companies and business. As the central repository of information for all businesses and provide information in real time, upon request, said its heat of IT Division, Bernice Quek. This was how web services came into the picture..
With web services, subscribers benefit by getting real time access to information, reducing the information gap. And by making data available directly to a requesting system, the web services approach would reduce data entry errors, she said. For example, for partners that replicate ACRA’s database locally, web services serve to reduce duplication effort.
To identify suitable candidates for the web services, which would be mainly query-based, ACRA looked at the frequency of the requests . For example, popular ACRA services for companies included online verification of company registration number, enquiries about the company status , company basic profile, and year-end financial information.
The ACRA web services initiative is being rolled out in tandem with the development if the Government Web Services Exchange (GWS-Xchange), which is spearheaded by the infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. The exchange , a broker for government web services, will allow government agencies to deploy and publish web services. For example, a service request from a public sector agency will go through the exchange and once it is verified, the ACRA system will pass back the service that is requested.
Bernice Quek
ACRA has completed the development of its web services and is carrying out load testing. At the same time, it is doing end-to-end integration with the Government Web Services Exchange, said Quek.
During the Weave seminar, software infrastructure company Ecquaria announced the official launch of the ACRA web services Gateway, which connects to the GWS-Xchange. Built on Ecquaria’s Service Oriented Platform, the ACRA gateway is designed and implemented as a single query engine that can retrieve any of the set of common query-based web services data in a web service call.
Along with the newly developed query-based web services, ACRA Bizfile online business filing services are also readily integrated and available to consumers of web service such as government ministries, agencies and commercial users connected to the GWS-Xchange, which serves as a de facto broker which allows these parties in the business value chain to rapidly deploy, publish and consume each other’s web services.
While it can be quite challenging to develop the ACRA system in paralled with the government web services exchange, Quek also sees certain benefits. “We can define some of the requirements in there as well,” she said.
The system is scheduled to go live in about two months, and that is when another set of considerations will come to the fore. The take-up rate for web services, for example, is still uncertain, and ACRA is currently in dialogue with its partners to drive this.
Performance is another question – Will the architecture be robust enough? Without going live, it would be difficult to determine the actuall volume of requests.
But the promises of web services outweigh these unknows. According to Quek, web services will help speed up the workflow between government agencies. Currently many of them obtain ACRA information through file transfer, which typically means one day is needed to process and an application which needs the information.
With web services, this will be reduced as information will be provided in real time, she said.
ACRA is at www.acra.gov.sg
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