v-mWater : an e-government application for water rights agreements

In this chapter we show an e-Government application for the negotiation of water rights. Governments are employing water markets with the objective of encouraging more efficient use of water for irrigation, above all, in countries with water scarcity problems (e.g. Australia Bjornlund and Rossini 2010). Our virtual market based on trading Water (v-mWater) is modelled as a VI and facilitates human participation (in our case, citizens and business representatives). It is a simplification of mWater (Giret et al. 2011) and has been deployed using VIXEE, a robust VI eXEcution Environment that provides interesting features such as multi-verse communication and dynamic manipulation of the virtual world content (Trescak et al. 2011). VIXEE is a generic and domain-independent solution. Although v-mWater is an e-Government application, VI can also be used in other domains which may benefit from structured interactions and norms enforcement such as e-Leaming and eCommerce (Bogdanovych 2007; Bogdanovych et al. 2010).