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2014 | Book

Social Signature: Signing by Tweeting Read chapter Read first chapter

Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective

Third International Conference, EGOVIS 2014, Munich, Germany, September 1-3, 2014. Proceedings

Editors: Andrea Kő, Enrico Francesconi

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective, EGOVIS 2014, held in Munich, Germany, in September 2014, in conjunction with DEXA 2014. The 23 revised full papers presented together with one invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: identity management in e-government; e-participation; intelligent systems in e-government; semantic technologies in e-government; e-government cases; open government data and G-cloud; and privacy and security in e-government.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Identity Management in E-Government

Social Signature: Signing by Tweeting
Abstract
In many application contexts, qualified electronic signature appears difficult to be adopted both for the cost of smart cards and qualified certificates and for the complexity of the signing, verification, registration and certificate management.However, the European legislation allows us to use electronic signatures when application scope of the signature is limited. As a consequence, designing new signature protocols that relax the heaviest features of qualified electronic signature in favor of usability and cheapness is a timely and important issue. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight e-signature protocol with a good level of security, not using public key cryptography and dedicated devices. The protocol is conceived for closed domains of users, such as the case of document exchanges between citizens and municipal public offices or private companies and employees. According to the protocol, signature functions are spread out over the popular social network Twitter, without requiring changes of its features, so that the adoption of our solution appears both realistic and effective.
Francesco Buccafurri, Lidia Fotia, Gianluca Lax
Accessibility Issues in E-Government
Abstract
Government services are almost always monopoly services, and as a result, it is important to maximize inclusion. However, substantial numbers of people are unable or unwilling to use internet services. Usability and accessibility issues are a major deterrent to internet use and are important in users’ perceptions of websites. These are particularly important for older people, many of whom have reduced visual acuity, loss of fine motor control and other disabilities that make it more difficult to deal with poorly designed websites. We undertook two sets of experiments, the first involving an assessment of the accessibility and standards compliance of local and national e-government sites in the UK. The second focuses on sites in several other European countries. Results show significant differences between different levels of government and between standards compliance and accessibility.
Eleanor Leist, Dan Smith
An Interoperability Approach for Enabling Access to e-Justice Systems across Europe
Abstract
The creation of a pan-European area of Justice is one of the leading policies of the EU: to this aim the development of e-Justice services across Europe has been promoted within the e-CODEX project. In this paper an overview of the e-Justice platform architecture developed by e-CODEX, as well as the semantic solution conceived to transmit business documents in the domain of Justice within a scenario characterized by different languages and different legal systems, are described.
Enrico Francesconi

E-Participation

An Efficient Homomorphic E-Voting System over Elliptic Curves
Abstract
The homomorphic tallying paradigm provides efficient e-voting solutions when implemented using the multiplicative homomorphic property of the ElGamal cryptosystem. However, that is not the case when implemented over the Elliptic Curve ElGamal cryptosystem (EC-ElGamal) due to the need to solve a knapsack problem for obtaining the election result. In this paper, we present a homomorphic tallying based e-voting system implemented over the Elliptic Curve ElGamal cryptosystem that includes a redundancy system which allows to obtain the election result in a fast way.
M. Àngels Cerveró, Víctor Mateu, Josep M. Miret, Francesc Sebé, Javier Valera
Exploring the Determinants of Citizens’ Intention to Participate in the Development of e-Government Services
Abstract
The EGS (Electronic Government Services) impacts greatly on the relationship between citizens and their governments, so governments seek to manage and develop these services more effectively. By integrating the ‘involvement’ and ‘innovativeness’ theories into the expectation disconfirmation paradigm, this study investigates the significance of the role of expectation disconfirmation on the intention to participate towards the EGS. 320 Taiwanese samples were used. Our findings indicated that positive disconfirmation of the EGS leads to a high involvement with the EGS. A citizen’s involvement and disconfirmation together increases the citizen’s satisfaction with the EGS and thus the participation intention to develop the EGS. A citizen’s innovativeness moderates the relationship between their satisfaction and participation intention. Practical implications and future research suggestions were proposed accordingly.
Her-Sen Doong, Hui-Chih Wang
E-mail Responsiveness in the Public Sector
Abstract
During the last decade, the scope of digital communication between citizens and the public sector has increased rapidly, and consequently, the use of Web technologies has replaced traditional face-to-face interactions and other conventional and accepted modes of communication and exchange. The aim of online dialogues is to provide the public with certain accepted standards and values of efficiency and effectiveness and thereby create more efficient communication channels with users, such as citizens and businesses. By shedding light on this fact, the present study investigates response time and quality with reference to e-mail inquiries to municipalities in Norway. The findings indicated that, in general, there is a short response time in the public sector. The quality of answers provided was relatively high, but a large variance was noticed in the profundity and complexity of the answers. It was observed that seventeen percent of the municipalities did not respond to the e-mail inquiry. A potential for possible improvements is also connected with the use of autoreplies, a function which has been implemented by only ten percent of the municipalities. The study offers suggestions and methods by which governments can improve their performance in the interest of enhanced service quality in the public sector.
Hanne Sørum

Intelligent Systems in E-Government

Business Intelligence Systems as Management, Accountability and Transparency Tools for the Government: The Case of Platform Aquarius
Abstract
This paper shows the case of Platform Aquarius, a new Web-based Government Business Intelligence System (GBIS) to enable the public transparency with information on the public funding of research and development (R&D) in Brazil. This multidisciplinary project is an initiative of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) to integrate data of federal government agencies in the field of science, technology and innovation (ST&I). Platform Aquarius has the tools necessary for the publication of Open Government data and the presentation of the essential managerial and analytics information in dashboards that are useful to the access of the average citizen in the Web. Important lessons can be elicited from the project, such as the complexity of data governance model necessary to deal with data of several science and technology federal agencies.
Ethel Airton Capuano
Process-Based Knowledge Extraction in a Public Authority: A Text Mining Approach
Abstract
Processes in public administration are complex and changing fast, according to the changes in the regulatory environment. Public servants have to face with the challenge of getting a job role specific knowledge, which is embedded into the processes or available in other unstructured sources, like in public policies. Even though much of government regulations may now available in digital form, due to their complexity and diversity, identifying the ones relevant to a particular context is a non-trivial task. Our paper will discuss a text mining solution to extract, organize and preserve knowledge embedded in organizational processes to enrich the organizational knowledge base in a systematic and controlled way, support employees to easily acquire their job role specific knowledge. The solution has been tested for the case of an agricultural service at public authority. The context of the case is sampling in controlling food safety and quality.
Saira Andleeb Gillani, Andrea Kő
Combining Knowledge Management and Business Process Management – A Solution for Information Extraction from Business Process Models Focusing on BPM Challenges
Abstract
In today’s dynamic environment all organizations need up-to-date knowledge for their operations that are based on business processes. Complex organizations use business process management (BPM) tools to model and manage these processes. BPM applications tends to model the organizational processes, together with the required information and other resources needed to perform each activity. BPM yields an overall context, but it is still static.
Our paper presents a solution to extract, organize and preserve knowledge embedded in organizational processes to enrich organizational knowledge base in a systematic and controlled way utilized in the PROKEX project. The proposed solution is to extract the knowledge from information stored in the process model in order to articulate, externalize and transfer it. Our paper focuses on the BPM aspects of the solution as we want to investigate it from the information systems perspective.
The novelty of the solution is based on the connection between process model and corporate knowledge base, where the process structure will be used for building up the knowledge structure. Common form of knowledge base is the ontology, which provides the conceptualization of a certain domain. By using the ontology and combining it with the process models, we connect knowledge management and business process management in a dynamic, systematic and well-controlled solution.
Katalin Ternai, Mátyás Török, Krisztián Varga

Semantic Technologies in E-Government

Persistent Storage and Query of E-government Ontologies in Relational Databases
Abstract
Over the past eight years, building ontologies for semantic-driven e-government applications has been a subject of interest to e-government researchers. However, only a few has focused on the persistent storage and query of ontologies of the e-government domain. In this paper, 3 selected e-government ontologies are persistently stored and queried in relational databases. The OWL and RDF codes of these ontologies generated with Protégé or downloaded from the Internet are parsed with Jena API (Application Programming Interface) and loaded into MySQL RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). Thereafter, SPARQL queries are written to extract information from the created ontology databases. Experiments show that (1) the Jena parser scales well and could successfully parse and store e-government ontologies of different sizes into relational databases, and (2) the response times of SPARQL queries written in Jena to MySQL ontology databases are proportional to the sizes of the ontologies.
Jean Vincent Fonou-Dombeu, Nicholas Mwenya Phiri, Madga Huisman
Application of Process Ontology to Improve the Funding Allocation Process at the European Institute of Innovation and Technology
Abstract
This studio explains the application through the application of the ProKEx architecture is used to improve the process of allocation of funding at the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The mission of the EIT is to grow and capitalize on the innovation capacity and capability of actors from higher education, research, business and entrepreneurship from the EU and beyond through the creation of highly integrated Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). This case offers the scenario of a complex application where a fragmented process with several actors is dealing with the different domains of knowledge of each KIC. Starting from the Business Process Model, applying text-mining techniques we extract the ontology elements from the activity description and converted into an Ontology of the process domain. By the critical analysis of the information contained in the model, we gain the relevant information to improve the current approach.
Matteo Arru
Extending Computerized Adaptive Testing to Multiple Objectives: Envisioned on a Case from the Health Care
Abstract
In the age of information, only personalized learning and education enables the adaption to always changing requirements. In health care, labor forces are especially in a continuous need of improvement and adaption. Maintaining an optimal care sets a dual goal in the education of health professionals: adapt to scientific developments while retaining the compliance with changing laws and regulations.
Computerized adaptive testing (CAT), as a dynamic approach to education, is providing here the right adaptivity by optimizing time and precision of learning and scaling to the ability of the learner.
This paper will provide an overview on the current state of CAT and connected methodologies and shed light on the potentials for the next generation of adaptive testing, which can support the emergence of novel ways of education. Its strength is shown on a scenario from the health care sector.
Christian Weber, Réka Vas

E-Government Cases

From Legislation towards the Provision of Services
An Approach to Agile Implementation of Legislation
Abstract
Since the spring of 2012 a number of people from the Dutch government, academia and business have joined forces under the label ‘Blue Chamber’. The partners’ concrete ideas are intended to closely cooperate in the development of an agile implementation of legislation, allowing for a human-centred approach. The principle used is: digital whenever possible, in person when needed. Cooperation and widespread sharing of experiences are the principles that the participants embrace and promote. The emphases can be summarized as follows: 1. Knowledge management by staff responsible for policy and implementation of services. 2.Separating the management of IT systems aimed at supporting the large-scale handling of cases, but linked together. 3. Multidisciplinary knowledge work by focusing policy, service implementation and information supply on knowledge management and the preparation of IT specifications. 4. Capturing reusable and sustainable specifications for service implementation processes and IT. 5. The development of internationally recognized methods and standards.
Tom van Engers, Sjir Nijssen
Breaking the Barriers of e-Participation: The Experience of Russian Digital Office Development
Abstract
Digital signature is the key factor of e-government and e-participation processes, as it is the main security mechanism we have to use to implement the dematerialization process. The scope of digital signature is definitely not restricted to the e-government setting, existing a large number of contexts (like e-commerce, e-banking, etc.) where the need of strong authentication of people arises, so that digital signature may be a full solution ensuring both the identity of the user and the integrity of the digital document the user signs. On the other hand, open government and e-participation development is strongly connected to citizens’ engagement in online services and connections through web portals. As a consequence, the authentication systems and its characteristics (such as simplicity, usability, security, etc.) are very important for the success of the digitalization process. Unfortunately, often registration procedures do not fully satisfy the above properties, thus introducing an obstacle to the diffusion of e-participation. For instance, this is the case of online services and e-participation portals in Russia.
In this paper, we deal with this problem, by referring to the Russian system as a case study, and by proposing a protocol of distant primary registration to solve the abovementioned drawbacks. Such useful experience could be exported to other cases in the sphere of electronic services development, to fully involve citizens in the electronic society.
Samuil Gorelik, Vitaly Lyaper, Lyudmila Bershadskaya, Francesco Buccafurri
Model of Digital Mediation to Support Communication between Teachers Unions and the Education Community
Abstract
In the context of Portuguese teachers unions, the adoption of information and communication technologies is nowadays a reality. However, in our opinion, their internet portals still lack interaction, participation, and collaboration, as they are mostly concentrated on unidirectional information dissemination between union representatives and other education stakeholders. This paper aims at presenting a proposal of digital mediation based on a conceptual model and the corresponding proof of concept - a Web application - to support communication between teachers unions and other stakeholders. We strongly believe that this proposal can enrich web portals of teachers unions with innovative features and, as a result, contribute to strengthen the relationship between unions and the education community and to foster participation among all stakeholders in the education process. This paper also addresses an initiative carried out by the teachers union of the Centre region of Portugal, where the proposed platform was used to create sporadic participation events supporting bidirectional asynchronous communication.
Artur Afonso Sousa, Pedro Agante, Carlos Quental, Luís Borges Gouveia

Open Government Data and G-Cloud

Open Government and Electronic Government: Some Considerations
Abstract
Knowledge and innovation are hailed as an important advantage. The contribution considers two trends with promising innovation aspects, namely Open Government and Electronic Government. Both trends are interconnected caused by being based on fairly similar prospects. Although the standpoints are in some way similar the resulting views are diverging. The contribution deliberates mutually influences of both areas under discussion. In concrete, one locates sustaining and reinforcing impacts as well as disturbances and frictions. Finally, some links are considered, so participatory activities, social media and mobile communication.
Roland Traunmüller
Modeling, Fusion and Exploration of Regional Statistics and Indicators with Linked Data Tools
Abstract
This paper contributes to the understanding of challenges related to publishing and consuming public sector information using Linked Data tools. Linked Data paradigm has opened new possibilities and perspectives for the process of collecting and monitoring socio-economic indicators. Due to multidimensionality of the statistical data, in order to ensure efficient exploration and analysis, hierarchical data structures are needed for modeling the space and time dimensions. This paper presents several illustrative examples of modeling, analyzing and visualization of Linked Data from Serbian government bodies. The approach utilizes tools from the Linked Data stack, as well as the first prototype of the Exploratory Spatio-Temporal Analysis component that has been developed in the GeoKnow project framework.
Valentina Janev, Vuk Mijović, Dejan Paunović, Uroš Milošević
Environmental Thesauri under the Lens of Reusability
Abstract
The development of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) at European level is strategic to answer the needs of environmental management requested by the European, national and local policies. Several European projects and initiatives aim to share, integrate and make accessible large amount of environmental data in order to overcome cross-border/language/cultural barriers. To this purpose, environmental thesauri are used as shared nomenclatures in metadata compilation and information discovery, and they are increasingly made available on the web. This paper provides a methodological approach for creating a catalogue of the environmental thesauri available on the web and assessing their reusability with respect to domain independent criteria. It highlights critical issues providing some recommendations for improving thesauri reusability.
Riccardo Albertoni, Monica De Martino, Paola Podestà

Privacy and Security in E-Government

Empowering Users to Specify and Manage Their Privacy Preferences in e-Government Environments
Abstract
The provision of advanced e-Government services has raised users’ concerns on personal data disclosure and privacy violation threats as more and more information is released to various governmental service providers. Towards this direction, the employment of Privacy Policies and Preferences has been proposed in an attempt to simplify the provision of electronic services while preserving users’ personal data and information privacy. This paper addresses the users’ need to create, manage and fine-tune their privacy preferences in a user friendly, yet efficient way. It presents a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that empowers them to articulate their preferences in machine readable format and resolve possible conflicts with Service Provider’s (SP) Privacy Policy, without being obliged to go through complex and nuanced XML documents or being familiar with privacy terminology. Users can now be confident that their personal data will be accessed, processed and transmitted according to their actual preferences. At the same time they will be aware of their privacy-related consequences, as a result of their selections.
Prokopios Drogkaris, Aristomenis Gritzalis, Costas Lambrinoudakis
Helios Verification: To Alleviate, or to Nominate: Is That the Question, or Shall we Have Both?
Abstract
Helios is an end-to-end verifiable remote electronic voting system which has been used for elections in academic contexts. It allows voters to verify that their vote was cast, and included in the final tally, as intended. User studies have shown that voters are unlikely to perform this verification, probably due to the effortful and cumbersome manual steps that are required by the system. To address this challenge, we propose, in this paper, two improvements: the first is to ameliorate the cumbersome nature of the verification process as much as possible. We offer two suggestions for doing this. To accommodate voters who have no interest in verifying, we propose a further improvement: delegation. This will allow voters to nominate a trusted third party to perform the verification on their behalf as and when they cast their vote. Hence no extra effort is required, and we can exploit existing trust in public institutions to provide voters with the assurance that the voting process is indeed honest and above board. In addition to providing end-to-end verifiability in a less effortful manner, we provide stored as cast and tallied as stored verifiability as well, for voters who do not wish to verify their own votes.
Stephan Neumann, M. Maina Olembo, Karen Renaud, Melanie Volkamer
Certification of SME Online: A Web-Based Service, of Universal Use, for SME Qualification
Abstract
SME certification is an electronic service that certifies SME condition according to criteria defined in Portuguese legislation which, in turn, follows the EU recommendation. The process of certification occurs exclusively online. If the enterprise meets all necessary requests an electronic certificate is immediately generated, certifying it as micro, small or a medium-sized enterprise. The certificate may be accessed online by any entity, public or private, that is obliged to request the SME proof. The service reduces administrative burden, reduces contextual costs and promotes harmonization of SME classification.
This service is, up to the moment, the only structured, of general use, information-system based, online implementation of SME recommendation. Also, it is the first formal approach to SME dimension constraints modeling.
This paper presents the SME certification service, discusses its major implementation issues and evaluates exploitation results. Also points out possible future work from a national and European Union perspective.
Miguel Cruz, Rita Serrano, João Gonçalves

Open Government Data and G-Cloud

Open Government Data Beyond Transparency
Abstract
This paper aims to present and analyse the Open Government Data (OGD) legislation framework in force in the current Italian legal system. The previous legislation has been compared with the recently enacted Legislative Decree about transparency (the so called Transparency Act d.lgs. 33/2013). After discussing the normative contest, this paper completes the theoretical analysis with an empirical research conducted on the Italian Municipalities’ web sites (35 portals) in order to deeply understand the connection between the Open Government Data legislation and the new Transparency Act. The aim of this comparison is to test and prove our theory about the fact that the Transparency Act doesn’t enable and reinforce the OGD – as FOIAs do – but it subtracts resources, human capital, skills, funds and motivations. The Transparency Act, in fact, implements an old-style model of web site oriented to a "Public Administration centered" paradigm instead of an "ODG centered" one. The authors, finally, wants to identify a method to combine the two different approaches, having a unique production workflow of data and documents in Open Data format, with a semantic web metadata classification that qualify the information.
Monica Palmirani, Michele Martoni, Dino Girardi
Ahead in the G-clouds: Policies, Deployment and Issues
Abstract
Current governments are overhauling established administrative processes as they rapidly deploy e-government. In this paper we present examples of such development from two countries with well-developed e-government programmes: the United Kingdom and the Republic of Kazakhstan and provide a comparison of key aspects of e-government in each country. We observe that quite different policies often result in very similar outcomes. For example, in the area of g-cloud there are rather similar technologies, driven by completely different policies. We show how measures of e-government that focus on outputs may be missing a substantial part of the picture: why is this being done and what is the capacity of this technology to scale to social, economic and cultural environment of the country involved.
Aliya Mukhametzhanova, Richard Harvey, Dan Smith
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective
Editors
Andrea Kő
Enrico Francesconi
Copyright Year
2014
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-10178-1
Print ISBN
978-3-319-10177-4
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10178-1

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