Transforming E-government and E-participation through...

14 1541-1672/09/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMSPublished by the IEEE Computer Society

but they are still far from satisfying their constituents, as they usually operate inef-fi ciently and ineffectively. E-government and e-participation research aims to refo-cus government on its customers—citizens and businesses—and provide the models, technologies, and tools for more effective and effi cient public administration sys-tems as well as more participatory decision processes.

To this end, there is currently a growing interest in how this challenging domain

can benefit from emerging “intelligent” technologies, tools, and applications—such as the Semantic Web, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), Web 2.0, and social computing. Initiatives and projects both in Europe and the US reflect this interest. In Europe, through the Sixth and Seventh Framework Programmes, projects such as SemanticGov and FIT are currently applying such technologies to e-government. In North America, the Digital Government Society (dg.o) and

Vassilios Peristeras, DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway

Gregoris Mentzas, National Technical University of Athens

Konstantinos A. Tarabanis, University of Macedonia, Greece

Andreas Abecker, Research Center for Information Technology (FZI), Karlsruhe, Germany

E-government and

e-participation

research aims

to provide the

technologies and

tools for more

effi cient public-

administration

systems and more

participatory

decision processes.

Public administrations are considered the heaviest service industry world-

wide. During the last decades, governments all over the world have under-

taken huge investments in information and communication technologies (ICT),

G U E S T E D I T O R S ’ I N T R O D U C T I O N

Transforming E-governmentand E-participation

through IT

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2009 www.computer.org/intelligent 15

the Semantic Interoperability Com-munity of Practice (SICoP, a joint initiative involving industry, aca-demia, and government), both sup-port the use of state-of-the-art tech-nologies in public agencies. W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, has a running interest group on e-government.

But applying intelligent tech-nologies to the e-government and e-participation domain has proven challenging. Public administrations are huge, divergent, and distributed systems, but they remain modern so-cieties’ major owners and processors of information. Setting up seamless e-government services requires in-formation and process integration involving a wide variety of agencies using their own legacy systems. Such environments need not only cross-organizational collaboration and interoperation, but also a way to han-dle the manifold semantic differences of interpretation of law, regulations, public services, and administrative processes. These interoperability re-quirements also apply at the tech-nical level to the great variety of IT solutions that must work together on local, regional, national, and inter-national levels. Another diffi culty is that there are no commonly accepted domain models and defi nitions for e-government and e-participation. This exacerbates communication problems—both internally, between agencies, and externally, between gov-ernments and society.

Despite these diffi culties, the com-bination of the two domains seems very promising: e-government and e-participation can provide an ideal testbed for existing intelligent sys-tems research, whereas intelligent systems could provide an ideal plat-form on which to achieve the vision of both a knowledge-based, user-centered, distributed, and networked

e-government and a participatory democracy with active citizens’ in-volvement. Moreover, owing to their open architecture, e-government and e-participation provide a palette of new research topics, such as inter-portal search (searching for addi-tional resources on portals to reply to a primary user or agent request), modeling and processing information coming from mass collaborative net-works of people, and exploiting new technologies to enable participatory democracy.

Interestingly, e-government and e-participation also exhibit character-istics that make them even more prom-ising when compared to e-business scenarios. These include, among many others,

lack of direct competition among • organizational units;a rigidly defi ned corpus of rules • (laws) that explicitly defi ne the sys-tem behavior; hierarchical organizations with a • clear line of command and a guar-anteed minimum degree of central coordination; strict requirements to reach the • same decisions in similar situations; a high demand for security, privacy, • and trust;

long-running process instances (for • example, in urban and regional planning); andextreme information imbalances • between stakeholders, as well as many different stakeholders in the same process (for example, citizen vs. city council, county council, or federal government).

Now let’s turn to some basic defi -nitions for the two domains in focus, and then look at the main problems and issues to which intelligent systems could provide effective solutions.

Defi ning E-government and E-participationE-government appeared as a term in the literature and practice in the mid to late 1990s.1 E-participation became a reference term later, after the turn of the century.2 (E-democracy was for some years an equivalent term but has more recently given way to e-participation; differences between the exact mean-ings of the two terms are nonetheless discernible.) Interestingly, in the US e-government was never used with the same frequency as it was in the EU; the term digital government was preferred. However, e-government has occasion-ally been used in the literature to refer to e-participation, or as a super-term to cover both areas, resulting in fuzzy defi nitions of both terms.

Abstracting from several defi nitions from international organizations, consulting companies, and the aca-demic and research community, we can defi ne the governance system as the union of the political and admin-istrative subsystems, exposing two major types of identifi able society-governance interfaces that support relevant interactions:

the society-to-political system in-• terface, which includes interactions through processes of public policy

Public administrations

are huge, divergent, and

distributed systems, but

they remain modern

societies’ major owners and

processors of information.

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analysis, formulation, and selec-tion; andthe society-to-administrative sys-• tem interface, which includes inter-actions through the public-service provision process, covering both internal and external communica-tions: gov ern ment to government (G2G), gov ern ment to citizens (G2C), and gov ern ment to busi-nesses (G2B).

We can identify the use of ICT in these two interfaces respectively as e-participation and e-government (see Figure 1).

How and how much information and communication technologies have, could, or should change, or even revolutionize, these interfaces still remains a research topic—and at the same time a tough policy and im-plementation puzzle for governments around the globe. In this special is-sue, we focus on how intelligent tech-nologies could facilitate this process.

Intelligent Systems in E-government and E-participationDespite investment and active re-search for over a decade, there still are serious drawbacks and problems

in e-government and e-participation. These problems occur in areas in which intelligent technologies appear to have a great potential if properly applied.

In this special issue, we identify and discuss four major areas that could benefi t from intelligent technologies. The fi rst two—linked data and knowl-edge creation—are relevant to both e-government and e-participation. They relate to the challenge of using, reusing, and combining information kept iso-lated in separate “islands” and stove-pipe systems, to distill, create, and dis-tribute knowledge within governments. The other two areas—mass collaborative public networks and complex, dynamic, cross-organizational processes—relate to e-participation and e-government respectively. These four research areas are indicative of the present and future research topics for e-government and e-participation in the emerging Web 3.0 era,3 which fuses social software (also known as Web 2.0) and the Se-mantic Web.4,5

Linked Data, Information Reuse, and Semantic InteroperabilityGovernmental agencies still publish public-sector information (PSI) us-ing a wide variety of nonstandardized and proprietary formats. The sheer

volume and wealth of PSI make the potential benefi ts of reusing, combin-ing, and processing this information quite apparent.

However, agencies typically fi rst express reluctance to make their data available, for various cultural, po-litical, and institutional reasons. So, they keep their legacy systems, and the information stored there, fenced and isolated. Even if they decide to move on and free their data, the dif-ferent data formats, the lack of com-monly agreed-upon metadata, and the absence of standardized vocabu-laries and defi nitions result in a huge bulk of practically useless data.

Commonly agreed-upon ontologies (such as the FEA Ontology, http://web-services.gov/fea-rmo.html) or vo-cabularies adopted by wider commu-nities could provide the infrastructure for public organizations to publish data sets annotated with generic and domain-specifi c vocabularies—for ex-ample, using a common and generic service model to annotate public ser-vices.6 Examples of generic vocabu-laries include Dublin Core, Friend of a Friend (FOAF), Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC), Strategic Markup Language (StratML), and Simple Knowledge Or-ganization System (SKOS). Recently, Tim Berners-Lee advocated for this lightweight and vocabulary-based ap-proach, identifying diffi culties that ontologies face as they are created in a top-down manner. These diffi culties become apparent both during drafting and later during their actual use and adoption phases (see www.w3.org/DesignIssues/GovData.html). The de-bate over top-down, detailed ontolo-gies versus lightweight, bottom-up vocabularies is quite relevant to the e-government and e-participation do-mains: If the annotated information is available, third parties could then pro-vide query interfaces to reuse, combine,

Figure 1. The two major interfaces between society and the governance system.

Governance system

Political system Administrative system

Public policyformulation

Serviceprovision

E-participation E-government

Society


and process PSI in innovative and unforeseeable ways (see also discus-sion in the W3C eGovernment Interest Group). Initiatives such as Open Linked Data (see http://linkeddata.org and http://linkeddata.deri.ie) promote this approach, whereas other projects show that the discussion has already become relevant in real-world applications and systems—not only in pilots and demos from research projects. (See, for example, http://webbackplane.com/mark-birbeck/blog/2009/04/23/more-rdfa-goodness-from-uk-government-web-sites.)

Data protection and privacy issues might arise for PSI in an open data en-vironment, but there are many “safe” candidate start-up areas for which in-formation reuse looks quite harmless: for example, data related to geography, statistics, traffi c, and public works.

Knowledge Creation, Storage, and DistributionKnowledge has been and still is gov-ernment’s most important resource. The presence of highly trained, legally educated, and specialized civil ser-vants has historically been considered a primary prerequisite for successful administrations. Because knowledge is regularly localized or even personal and diffi cult to share, it becomes immediately evident that although there is indeed a lot of knowledge within governments, it is not neces-sarily available anywhere, anytime, for anybody. This means that not all parts of a public organization can benefi t from that knowledge. Con-sequently, much “reinventing the wheel” goes on in public administra-tion. Existing approach es for knowl-edge management in e-government and e-participation attempt to address these problems; however, they mainly focus on the effi cient management of isolated knowledge resources and on supporting communication between public administrators.7

The demands for knowledge-based e-government and e-participation are nevertheless much higher.8 First, ex-isting approaches don’t take into ac-count the increased granularity of informational resources and the man-ifold semantic differences in dealing with those resources. Second, because of the complexity of the decision-making processes, effective knowl-edge management requires a support-ive, collaborative culture without the traditional rivalries. Moreover, many administrative processes are collabor-ative; because their course is not pre-determined, it is often up to the public servant in charge of a process step to determine what should be done next. Other people working on the process

should therefore be made aware of past actions and current status. Third, using existing knowledge resources is indeed a valid aspiration, but the crucial ques-tion is how to create new knowledge.

Because the key to knowledge cre-ation lies in the mobilization and conversion of tacit knowledge, the focus of knowledge management in e-government and e-participation should shift from explicit to tacit knowledge. This means, for example, that writ-ten documentation should be enriched with the knowledge public servants have drawn from other documents,

and with the knowledge communi-cated among team members. Finally, ad hoc management of changes in e-government and e-participation sys-tems might work in the short term, but to avoid unnecessary complexity and failures in the long run, system-atic management of the process is nec-essary. To improve the speed of change propagation and to reduce modifi ca-tion costs, knowledge used by a public servant in making decisions must be effi ciently reedited. If the underlying knowledge is not up to date, the reli-ability, accuracy, and effectiveness of e-government and e-participation sys-tems decrease signifi cantly. The over-all aim of such research is to radically improve the quality of service provi-sion9 and hence enhance perceived cit-izen satisfaction.

Discussing and Formulating PolicyEngaging more people in the discus-sion and formulation of public poli-cies and then being able to create meaningful summaries of their con-tributions is clearly a major challenge for e-participation. Several issues re-late to this goal.

First, technologies should lower the entry barriers to these types of discus-sions. Web 2.0 and social software applications have already signifi cantly changed the way people discuss and exchange ideas on the Web, but partly owing to their success, a new problem has emerged.

Let’s imagine that the entry bar-rier to policy-related discussions has become very low. As a result, thou-sands of previously excluded people now openly express and exchange their opinions and ideas, creating a vivid community of participation, the foun-dation of what has been called partici-patory or deliberative democracy. How can we now easily “sense” what this community wants? For example, how

Although there is indeed

a lot of knowledge within

governments, it is not

necessarily available

anywhere, anytime, for

anybody.

18 www.computer.org/intelligent IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS


can we actually capture the trends, main issues, and prevailing ideas dis-cussed in the blogosphere, with con-tributions from thousands of users on a specifi c topic? Web 2.0 platforms are providing an easy vehicle for the read-write Web, but at the same time they remain mainly legacy and pro-prietary systems, which makes infor-mation reuse and sharing diffi cult, if not impossible.

Open Linked Data and the Web vocabularies already discussed seem relevant to these types of situations. To process, present, and query large volumes of input generated in mass collaborative public networks that emerge dynamically over the Web, we need to combine “traditional” intelligent technologies such as natu-ral language processing with appli-cations for argument representation,

visualization, and opinion processing. (See, for example, the Wave Project, www.wave-project.eu.)

Support for Complex, Cross-Organizational, and Dynamic Processes The public sector’s service provision process is distributed among hun-dreds, even thousands of partially independent agencies. Architectural paradigms like SOA and technologies adding semantics and “intelligence” to the “service” notion seem suit-able to such an environment.10 How-ever, traditional SOA approaches and their effectiveness are questionable from various perspectives. Unlike what usually happens in the private sector, in public service, production and delivery processes commonly cut across the boundaries of one agency

and involve numerous actors with various roles. The distributed pro-cesses (or network of services) must be orchestrated, but at the same time they must remain fl exible enough to accommodate

different execution environments in • the participating agencies; different representations of informa-• tion;complex, information- and knowledge-• intensive processes with multiple decision points at runtime; and mixed manual and automated steps • and possible long intervals of pause and waiting time.

Moreover, agencies don’t like the idea of sacrifi cing autonomy to streamline such demanding and multiparty pro-cesses. Last, agencies act and behave within these processes according to a set of predefi ned rules that tend to change quite frequently; this makes formal specifi cation of these work-fl ows less effective.

Semantic SOAs with formal ser-vice ontologies, event-driven archi-tectures, model-driven architectures, social SOA, and Web-based light-weight SOA architectures are only some of the approaches to enabling a new level of service provision in an area where tremendous governmen-tal fi nancial investments (in national e-government portals, for instance) have so far not offered the expected returns.

The articles we have selected for this special issue discuss some

interesting aspects of the wide spec-trum of problems and technologies presented in this introduction.

Specifi cally, in “Responsive Knowl-edge Management for Public Adminis-tration: An Event-Driven Approach,” Dimitris Apostolou, Nenad Stojanovic,

T H E A U T H O R SVassilios Peristeras is a research fellow, adjunct lecturer, and the e-government cluster leader at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also an adjunct lecturer at the University of Macedonia, Greece. His research interests include e-government and e-participation, collaborative work environ-ments, social software, and the Semantic Web. Peristeras has a PhD in electronic gov-ernment from the University of Macedonia, Greece. Contact him at [email protected].

Gregoris Mentzas is a full professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineer-ing at the National Technical University of Athens, and the director of the Information Management Unit at the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Athens. His area of expertise is information technology management, and his research concerns e-government, knowledge management, and e-service technologies. Mentzas received his PhD in operations research and information systems from the National Technical Univer-sity of Athens. Contact him at [email protected].

Konstantinos A. Tarabanis is a professor in the Department of Business Administration at the University of Macedonia, Greece. His current research interests include conceptual modeling of information systems, service models and architectures, and the domains of e-government, e-learning, e-participation, and e-business. He has authored several research publications in the areas of software modeling and development for information systems in e-government, e-business, e-learning, and e-manufacturing. He has a PhD in computer sci-ence from Columbia University. Contact him at [email protected].

Andreas Abecker is the department manager for Knowledge Management and Semantic Technologies at the FZI Research Center for Information Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Under the direction of Rudi Studer, he and his group investigate methods and tools for knowledge management and intelligent informa-tion logistics in e-business, e-government, and e-science. Technologies studied include semantic technologies, social software, and data, text, and Web mining. Contact him at [email protected].


and Darko Anicic address the issue of responsiveness—that is, a system’s ability to respond to changing cir-cumstances and deliver relevant and timely information correctly and con-sistently. The authors examine the challenges of responsiveness in gov-ernmental knowledge management systems and propose event-based rep-resentation and processing of changes in information resources and work contexts. Their system takes action on relevant events, with relevance being qualifi ed via ontology-based preference rules. The article also dis-cusses empirical evaluations in three fi eld trials.

In “A Flexible, Event-Driven, Service-Oriented Architecture for Orchestrat-ing Service Delivery,” Sietse Overbeek, Bram Klievink, and Marijn Janssen

deal with the limitations of traditional SOA approaches for fl exibly supporting cross-organizational service delivery. To overcome these limitations, they propose an event-driven architecture based on a formal model (ontology) for creating and managing complex pro-cesses. A case study from the Nether-lands illustrates their proposal.

“Using Computational Argumenta-tion to Support E-participation,” by

Dan Cartwright and Katie Atkinson, deals with the problem of gathering and evaluating arguments to support decision making in public policy is-sues. The Parmenides tool lets users participate in Web-based discussions and supports a fi ne-grained analysis of the results by using argumenta-tion frameworks and value-based ar-gumentation frameworks techniques. The tool also visualizes the debate by creating argument maps.

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