Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective

Why did Estonia create e-Residency? e-Residency project challenges traditional notions of residency, citizenship, territoriality, and globalization—with potentially profound implications for social theories of the state and citizen networks in the modern era. This paper examines the foundations of the project within the broader context of the Estonian e-state and discusses the main actors and components involved in the creation and functioning of e-Residency. It presents and assessment of the initiative’s benefits and risks to society. Finally, the paper concludes by exploring the broad implications of e-Residency for conventional understandings of the nation state.

The Linked Data approach, based on principles defined back in 2006 and best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web elaborated by ICT experts, can play an important role in the domain of semantic interoperability of government services. Therefore, this paper explores the technical aspects and challenges of implementation of the revised European Directive on the Public Sector Information (2013/37/EU) emphasizing the role of Linked Data approach for improved interoperability and re-use. Referring to state-of-the-art approaches in EU member states, the paper proposes a framework for implementing the PSI Directive in Serbia.

The Digital Agenda 2020 for Estonia aims for a simpler state. A crucial success factor in making the public sector more effective and efficient is achieving a very high degree of paperless official communication. Therefore, in 2015, the Estonian government conducted an assessment of the document exchange between its authorities and institutions. Given the large number of 400 assessed organizations and the complexity of the task, the assessment needed extensive and systematic preparation. Hence, a tailored assessment framework, the so-called document exchange classification framework (DECF), has been developed for this purpose. This article explains the rationales and problems in the design of the DECF. The DECF enables the analysis of document exchanges between different kinds of information systems, via different channels and between different kinds of organizations. The feedback received with the help of the DECF allows for counting the volume and kind of documents that an organisation produces whilst providing a service. It helps to optimise the volume of produced documents and to optimise the service provision layer.

Voting advice applications (VAAs) are intelligent systems that provide personalized recommendations of political candidate/party to a voter with regard to her/his political attitudes. The existing gaps related to the improvements of the system design will be addressed in this paper. The paper presents a trust-aware Voting Advice Application which aims to improve the recommendation accuracy, in this way to facilitate voter’s decision-making processes and enhance citizens’ participation in eDemocracy. By establishing the candidates-to-voters communication via the forum channel, alternatively to traditional VAAs, the proposed system calculates the similarity of political profiles between voters and candidates including into the computation the candidates’ reputation based on her/his behaviour within the forum. To test the proposed prototype, the evaluation framework has been designed, and a user study has been conducted. The results show that trust-aware VAAs give satisfactorily accurate and helpful recommendations. Furthermore, causal relationships of the evaluated constructs demonstrate that by participating in forum discussions, a user can improve the accuracy of her/his recommendation that is further helpful in her/his decision-making processes.

E-government services migration to the public cloud presents novel policy and technical challenges. This paper explores possible technical obstacles one should anticipate when migrating e-government services to cloud. Technical experiment design is presented, implementation process and the steps taken are elaborated; performance experiments are presented together with findings that were considered significant in the process. Main findings of migration experiments are organized into six groups: security, identity and data architecture findings; operations architecture findings; application architecture findings; compute architecture findings; storage architecture findings; and network architecture findings.

In this paper a pilot project on Linked Open Data (LOD) and e-Participation, promoted by the European Parliament and developed by the Publications Office of the European Union (OP), is described. By exploiting the LOD service for pre-legislative documents available at OP, the project aims at allowing citizens to actively participate in public consultations within the EU decision-making process. In particular it gives citizens the possibility to participate in the preparation of standard-compliant and process-compatible documents throughout the law-making. In particular they can provide comments and amendments on each document fragment, as well express their sentiments on them. The data produced will be available as LOD; for this reason a specific semantic approach able to describe documents and users activities is implemented.

Data interoperability is a major concern on e-government, both from the point of view of service offering and from the point of view of public administration efficiency. This paper purposes an incremental, pragmatic approach to data interoperability. It is argued that integration with minor required initial efforts from institutions is feasible, may provide useful solutions and is a solid ground basis for subsequent evolution. This paper presents general guidelines and model solutions to support this approach. Also, presents a demo implementation that proves feasibility of the purposed models and delivers useful solutions on a specific business e-government scenario. Although still limited in range and demonstrated on a quite specific business environment, it is expected that the analysis and the proposed strategies, solutions and models be of interest on a larger spectrum of data interoperability problems.

In contemporary society, technology deeply changes our way of creating knowledge, making it active and dynamic. In light of that background, this contribution focuses on two key elements of knowledge creation, namely, open data and big data, highlighting their differences and their treatment under Italian law and discussing the projects and strategies developed in Italy. We will first look at open government data, whose ability to be reused enables them to act as tools for generating knowledge and offering new government services and products. We will then turn to big data, whose use carries complex legal and social consequences, and which also serve as a key tool for creating knowledge by making it possible to plot and forecast economic and social trends. We will finally consider the way open data and big data can be effectively used in combination to promote growth and forge an authentic open government in Italy.

Increasingly information transparency becomes necessary in public organizations. Either due to the imposition of laws and decrees, or to the yearning for the society. In addition to information, business processes are equally important, responsible for all the treatment and processing of information in the organization. It is important not only know the information, but the way it was generated. Providing transparency of business processes requires presenting their operating models in which are explicit the actors involved, the activities carried out and the rules that support them, among other types of information. Currently the notations used to represent process models are extremely technical, consequently difficult to understand by ordinary citizens. It seems not sufficient to provide transparency. This paper presents a case study of using a transformation method that aims to make the process easier to understand for citizens and the result shows that laypeople understand most the citizen language than technical notations. In addition, experiences, collected during the execution of a case study, illustrate the method.

A case study is described about a “Knowledge Warehouse” that stored originally a vast amount of texts about laws and other legal rules in spreadsheet-like structure; it permitted a full-text search to support public officers to give helping hand in various Life Events of citizens. The requirements for efficiency and effectiveness enforced a redesign and re-planning of the whole system. A preliminary conceptual design and a proof of concept prototype are developed that exploits the most recent database technologies with combination of ontologies and Description Logic.

Accessing relevant legal information found in text excerpts from heterogeneous sources is essential to the decision making process in consumer disputes. The Ontology of Relevant Legal Information in Consumer Disputes (ric) is the domain-independent ontology modeling this relevant legal information comprising rights, their requisites, exceptions, constraints, enforcement procedures, legal sources. Its use is exemplified with one extension thereof, the Air Transport Passenger Incidents Ontology (ric-atpi), representing both the possible incidents triggered by a complaint in the air transport passenger domain and the related legal information that might be applicable. The Ontology models the key provisions found in hard law, and those in soft law, comprising heterogeneous sources in a structured manner. An ontology-based system provides the knowledge embedded in the legal sources and their relation to the specific scenario.

This explorative eye tracking study investigates visual attention and perceptions of usability within eGovernment environments. We argue that such insights help in understanding users for better design of user Web experiences. In an initial test to identify areas of interest (AOI) on public sector websites, subjects (n = 8) were exposed to the start page of ten different websites with slightly different designs. Two websites (old versus new design) were then selected to investigate attention to different visual elements (n = 16). The System Usability Scale (SUS) was used to investigate performance on usability metrics. The results indicate differences in viewing behavior and visual attention across different designs, in terms of both eye tracking metrics and usability scores. The concluding remarks include suggestions for further research.

This paper investigates the main emerging (current and new) research challenges and areas of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling field and its taxonomy. Several articles are dealing with future trends and challenges of eGovernment and its areas, like policy making, policy modelling and governance. These papers apply various research methods, but in the majority of the articles identification of future research issues rely only on human expertise, which is a valid, but time and human resource consuming option. Another drawback of these methods is related to the limited volume and variety of data source. We suggest a different semi-automatic solution for this investigation, which is based on our semi-automatic text mining method to identify and describe the main new research areas of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling field, and its taxonomy. Our text mining solution combines four modules; linguistic analysis module, information extraction, information filtration and information categorization module. The main contribution of this work is to present a semi-automatic method to identify and describe the main new research areas.

Institutions are getting increasingly motivated to participate in an internationalization audit because the competitiveness of higher education institutions resides not only in the number of qualified students employed by organizations within a given period, but the Internationalization is also a crucial point in the evaluation. The aim of an audit is to help institutions with detailed recommendations to increase efficiency and quality of their internationalization activities.

The present paper aims to provide and elaborate a semi-automatic application, which can be used to perform the internationalization audit of higher education institutions. The guidelines must be adapted by institutions are articulated in unstructured texts shaped into Erasmus+ Programme Guide, but business processes are formalized into business process models.

This paper presents an information system that is capable of extracting business process elements from unstructured texts. Process ontologies store these extracted elements and actual business process elements as well for providing a unified base to execute compliance checking investigation between actual and reference business processes.

Models that accurately predict student performance can be useful tools for planning educational interventions aimed at improving the results of the teaching-learning process, contributing to saving government resources and educators’ and students’ time and effort. In this paper it is studied the performance of collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms when applied to the task of student performance prediction. CF algorithms have been extensively and successfully used in recommender systems, but not in the considered educational scenario. The performances of two baseline methods and six state-of-the-art CF are compared when predicting if students would hit or miss multiple-choice questions, using two large educational datasets, created from the interaction between students and educational software. It was verified that CF algorithms account for consistently higher performance than the baselines for most metrics. Among the CF algorithms, memory based methods presented an overall better accuracy, precision, and recall. Nevertheless, all CF algorithms presented relatively low recall in identifying incorrect answers.

Thesauri usability, within a Spatial Data Infrastructure for the Environment, is pivotal for metadata compilation and data discovery. Thesauri effectiveness is affected by their quality. Diverse quality measures are available taking into account different facets, nevertheless an overall measure is needed whenever thesauri have to be compared in order to identify those to be improved for a proper reuse. The paper proposes a methodology for the quality assessment of linked thesauri aimed at providing an overall quality ranking. It provides a proof of concept of the Analytic Hierarchy Process adoption to the set of linked data thesauri deployed in the Thesaurus Framework for the Environment (LusTRE) developed within the EU funded project eENVplus.

One of the main challenges faced by the Brazilian Office of the Comptroller General (CGU) is applying consistent knowledge discovery tools and methodologies to learn from several years of auditing experience from hundreds of thousands of auditing reports with millions of pages it produced during these years. More specifically, we tackle the problem of identifying the most common topics in a context of Information Technology audits performed in Brazil since 2011. In order to tackle this problem, we compare two different approaches, supervised and unsupervised learning. On the one hand, the supervised learning approach generated a model that achieved around 73 % accuracy for seven categories using random forest. On the other hand, the unsupervised learning approach using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) generated a model with five topics, which was considered the best model based on the validation performed by the subject matter experts (SME) from CGU. Nevertheless, it is important to note that both approaches, although implemented independently, generated very similar topics. This also reinforces the success in identifying the main problems found during all these years of IT auditing at CGU using consistent and well-known knowledge discovery methods.

Biosecurity covers a full range of issues, from identifying and combating threats internationally, to border and post-border protection, right down to identifying and controlling pests at the farm, food-chain and export levels. The effectiveness of a biosecurity system relies on its ability to convene, share and discuss sensitive, current and real-time information about possible threats as early as possible. However, in Australia, at the state border level, most of interstate sale related data is collected in paper-based systems and distributed in various forms. This greatly hinders the process of effective information access and decision making. Provenance describes history of result including people, process and source data. By capturing, integrating and analysing digitised provenance information with domain knowledge, biosecurity information systems could provide better capabilities to access and analyse information for proper decision making. In this work, we introduce our current development on building a near-real-time knowledge management system by working with one of the six state biosecurity agencies in Australia, including the design and implementation of a knowledge model and a workflow to capture provenance information, and some initial provenance analysis.

This paper is aimed at conceiving and testing a method to inspect the level of adoption of policies regarding Open Government Data based on the analysis of the Audit Court’s transparency portal of Brazilian states and the Federal District. The method establishes a score for public data of audit offices in the domains of People Management, Budget, Biddings and Contracts. We herein analyze the data from the State Audit Office of Brazil, and we discuss issues related to the method. We concluded that, despite the efforts of the audit offices, there is still a lot to do in order to reach a quality level of the public information according to the conceptual and legal devices audit offices are subject to.

Binding electronic documents to persons are usually achieved by using electronic signatures that are created off-line. It is argued that this approach hinders both the widespread usage and the long-term applicability of e-government services. In order to enable e-government uptake, a new on-line electronic document service is to be offered in Hungary. The legal background for the new service was laid down by the Hungarian counterpart of the Regulation 910/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council.

Advanced electronic signature is a form of signature recognized by EU legislation, which does not include the heaviest features of qualified electronic signature (i.e., qualified PKI certificates and qualified signature creation devices). The massive adoption of advanced electronic signature strictly depends on how solutions are easy, usable, and little invasive for citizens. In this paper, we propose a new advanced electronic signature protocol that relies on a public system for the management of the digital identity. Our proposal aims at implementing an effective synergy between the two mechanisms to provide the citizen with a unique, uniform, portable, and effective tool applicable to both peer authentication and document signature. The solution is designed for the Italian Public Digital Identity System (SPID), but it is easily extensible to any identity management system compliant with the EU regulatory environment (i.e., eIDAS).

There are some obstacles, towards a paperless office. One of them is the collection of signatures, since nearly half of all documents are printed for the sole purpose of collecting them. Digital signatures can have the same legal evidential validity as handwritten signatures, provided they are based on certificates issued by accredited certification authorities and the associated private keys are stored on tamper proof token security devices like smart cards. In this article, we propose a platform for secure digital signature workflow management that integrates secure token based digital signatures with the Enterprise Content Management Alfresco, where each user can associate a set of smart cards to his account. The documents can then be signed with the citizen card or other smart card that has digital signatures capabilities. We have implemented an Alfresco module that allows us to explore several workflow techniques to implement real task secure digital signatures workflows, as people for example do when they pass a paper document between various departments to be signed. Since all users can see the current state of the documents being signed during the entire signage process, important security properties like system trust are preserved. We also describe an external validation web service, that provides a way for users to validate signed documents. The validation service then shows to the user important document security properties like timestamps, certificates attributes and highlights the document integrity in face of the digital signatures that have been collected in the workflows defined by our module in Alfresco.