Proposed information access network architecture for Government information and services: Progress report

This paper presents continuing work on the proposed solution for availing government information and services through existing ICT infrastructure in Lesotho. This is projected to be achieved by embedding government information and services on the information access network architecture (IANA). IANA is the information access framework tailored for the Government of Lesotho and Basotho (Citizen of Lesotho). The major drive of this project is to reduce the distance that Basotho living in rural areas travel for Government information and services. The paper is essentially the progress report on implementation of IANA. The modules of IANA include telecommunications infrastructure (PSTN and GSM), data network infrastructure (the Internet), speech technology and data storage modules. The users interact with IANA through an interactive voice response (IVR) system which governs the input media, facilitates necessary queries and provides feedback to users who call. Work on the IVR component of the IANA is the one that forms a larger part of this paper. The testbed that simulates the IANA and its components is presented. An Asterisk PBX is the proposed telephony platform while the voice extensible markup language (VoiceXML) serves as the call and media control entity in the IANA.