Bringing Together and Accelerating egovernment Research in the EU

Transcription

1 Bringing Together and Accelerating egovernment Research in the EU Innovative Government, Maturity and Transfer Report Date June 2009 Authors: I. Kotsiopoulos, N. Paparoidamis, G. Kolomvos, P. Rentzepopoulos Ch. de Charleroi, 123A B-1060 Brussels

2 Executive summary The present document addresses innovative government including maturity and transfer of such innovation as seen through the results of the IST priority in FP6 and the trends of eservices in Europe. In addition, the report highlights international practice with examples of innovative features present within egovernment portals worldwide. Research conducted in various areas of potential application has highlighted the role of ICT as a driver for better governance. Important, possibly radical changes such as the exclusive use of Open Source Software (OSS) in public administrations have been studied. Conclusions drawn out of pilot implementation cases (although indicative of benefits as well as pitfalls which may affect a full scale application) show that OSS is a feasible solution. In addition, FP6 research proposes the adoption of policy measures to promote wider adoption of OSS. Services-for-all is the cornerstone of innovative government. Research results here offer novel ICT solutions for delivery of services through voice and mobile channels, without the need for compromise: Requests via natural speech can be machine processed and answered; mobile telephony channels can provide a secure and interoperable environment. A series of informed policy recommendations has been produced as a result of studies on the causes and effects of the digital divide. ICT support for egovernment has centred on ontologies and semantic web languages applied in local government environments. These are supplemented by pilot implementation of process modelling tools addressing administrators, domain and process specialists. Knowledge management has also been addressed via ontologies. A characteristic innovative application is models for multilingual support in egovernment. The contribution of innovation to governmental efficiency and effectiveness has also been addressed in FP6 research. Subjects include the risk management of critical processes and the restructuring of business processes so that egovernment gradually becomes a citizencentric service. Novel areas of application such as fraud detection, legal process modelling and support as well as ICT for elected representatives on the move have produced encouraging results to sustain innovation in governance. These are supplemented by technological developments in support of enhanced democratic processes. Finally, results on security and authentication, besides their obvious use in safeguarding privacy of personal data, show the feasibility of cross-border interoperability leading to effective mobility in Europe. This, in turn, calls for priority actions in the policy field. A-2

3 Table of Contents Executive summary Introduction Open Source software Policy Issues Pilot cases Intelligent, personalised egovernment services for all Multi-channel delivery Conclusions Inclusive government Attracting users egovernment support systems Ontology/process design and maintenance tools for public administrations Semantically enriched web services Innovation in practice Ontologies for multilingual applications ecustoms The Beer Living Lab Pilot Single Window systems Legal support systems elegislation and eparticipation Health care and social security Social and medical care Successful transfer of innovation Model-centric development The ELLECTRA-WeB Application Framework Innovation as an efficiency enabler Risk management in customs processes Restructuring business processes Europe s most innovative public services Better services to citizens and business (HoReCa1) Transferability and sustainability concerns Electronic citizen-centric online services (Mypage) Further details Transferability and sustainability concerns Improve the citizens IT skills (Besançon.clic) More efficient and transparent public administration (DVDV) An Online Police Station (OLPS) G2B: transfer of technology and experience Statistics Denmark Results Transfer and experience gained The AEAT portal for companies, Spain A-3

4 7.2.1 Impact and results Transfer and experience gained The Altinn project, Norway Transfer and experience gained Digital Signatures, Denmark Transfer and experience gained The Knowledge Network, UK Transfer and experience gained eprocurement and etendering The Danish public procurement portal The Piedmont Region s eprocurement platform and CONCIP, Italy Federal eprocurement platform (E-Vergabe), Germany Secure pan-european egovernment emayor: Certificates and smart cards Innovation value GUIDE: Identification TERREGOV: Data security and privacy Note Innovative ICTs for democratic involvement Content Management Systems Adaptation and personalisation technologies Web 2.0 technologies Natural Language Processing Innovative technology for eparticipation TID+: a comprehensive eparticipation tool Innovation in parliaments Requirements and needs of the elected representative Use of ICT by parliamentarians The erepresentative virtual desktop Impact on the mobile representative Innovative features in government websites Conclusions Project Index A-4

5 List of tables Table 1. Efficiency achieved 53 A-5

6 List of figures Figure 1. Areas of cases worldwide addressing innovative egovernment issues 8 Figure 2. Access-eGov: expected change 18 Figure 3. SemanticGov: publication of a Business (PA) Service 20 Figure 4. Technical architecture of the LEX-IS system 29 Figure 5. Basic constructs used in LEX-IS process models 29 Figure 6. Knowledge Organisation System in DALOS 30 Figure 7. Fraud Ontology Layered Architecture 31 Figure 8. iwebcare: The TSAY domain specific fraud ontology 34 Figure 9. Basic stages of MDD 35 Figure 10. The application framework architecture of ELLECTRA-WeB 37 Figure 11. ELLECTRA-WeB Platform Independent Model specification 38 Figure 12. Architecture of the ELLECTRA-WeB platform 39 Figure 13. RACWEB: General platform architecture 41 Figure home page 45 Figure 15. Basic information flows (AEAT) 54 Figure 16. Basic information flow (ALTINN project) 55 Figure 17. The tendering process via ETHICS 59 Figure 18. The eprocurement process in Denmark 60 Figure 19. The FIT aim 71 Figure 20. Required features of an eparticipation support system 76 Figure 21. The FEED general topology 78 Figure 22. TO-BE decision-making process design (Ideal-EU) 79 Figure 23. Applications and services for parliamentarians (erepresentative) 82 Figure 24. Typology of parliamentarian s roles and purposes (EPRI) 83 A-6

7 1 Introduction Innovative government embraces a wide spectrum of objectives and accompanying activities. The contribution of IST research in FP6 in this direction is embedded within major EU policy objectives such as electronic procurement, electronic invoicing in public administrations, single-window customs and European Citizenship. Policy aims are set to 1 : modernise and innovate public administrations at all levels; foster good governance; provide citizens and industries with new service offers and thus create new public value; contribute to easing mobility of European citizens within the Internal Market, making European Citizenship a reality, and supporting them as active citizens through innovative services and through participation in decision making processes. These are to be realised through ICT research addressing four specific focal points: eparticipation: Tools for formulation and enactment of democratic decisions, scalable large scale dialogues and new forms of interactivity in democratic processes. Intelligent, personalised egovernment services for all: Intuitive interaction, inclusion, multi-channel service delivery platforms, context-awareness and privacy protection. Adaptive and proactive egovernment support systems: Knowledge-based government, process models, administrative management tools, process transparency technologies, diversity, multi-level governance and multi-linguality. Secure pan-european egovernment: Very large scale, heterogeneous, cross-border administration architectures/processes/info-infrastructures, pan-european egovernment eid management and authentication. Projects directly addressing the innovative government area (under the focal points described above) in FP6 belong to consortia which responded to the 2 nd and the 4 th call (March 2005) of the IST priority. In what follows, we shall briefly present the contributions to innovative government made by those projects through successful outcomes. For formal details of the projects (such as full names, starting/finishing dates, etc.) the reader is referred to previous reports such as those on the analysis of projects. Earlier efforts to monitor innovative egovernment practices have been manifested through a study 2 published in early 2004 by the Committee of the Regions. This study has provided valuable insight into some of Europe s most innovative e-government projects at regional and local level. The study, entitled Governance and ICT Innovative e-government actions at local and regional level, was published in February It was based on the in-depth analysis of a series of best practices in the implementation of e-government by local and 1, Call 4, IST priority, 1 st December 2004, A-7

8 regional authorities, following a methodology derived from the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) model 3. The international dimension of innovative egovernment is addressed by the UN/DESA Compendium in a study 4 (2006) consisting of a compilation of case studies of solutions, services and applications at international level. The objective of the aforementioned work is to provide a focal point of egovernment activities that create public value and may thus constitute the examples other countries should follow. The areas covered within the cases presented in that study appear in the following figure: Cases by themes 3% 5% 5% 1% 1% 2% 7% 10% 1% 29% 2% 4% 5% 5% 20% Cit. Service Delivery e-education Government portal Crisis management e-procurement e-justice e-health e-participation Sustainable development e-customs Information access/sharing e-commerce Gender equality e-taxation e-accounting Figure 1. Areas of cases worldwide addressing innovative egovernment issues The has addressed the issue of innovation at the level of policy already from 2006, as presented by the DEMO-Net 5 project. Particular emphasis to the role of governments has been placed. The national governments should pioneer in the adoption of new technologies and innovative procedures in order to provide better and more effective public services. DEMO-Net also underlines the significant under-exploitation of ICT technologies in EU generally and in the public sector in particular. In this direction the CIP is seen as a key element in improving innovation performance and competitiveness through the uptake of ICTs by both the private and public sectors 6. 3 The CAF a result of the cooperation between the EU Ministers responsible for Public Administration 4 Compendium of Innovative E-government Practices,Volume II, UN Dept of Economics & Social Affaires, DEMO-NET Deliverable 11.4: Assessment of the egovernet strategies for integrating eparticipation into innovation and implementation programmes, and consequent recommendations for DEMO-net p. 8 at 6 DEMO-NET Deliverable 11.4: Assessment of the egovernet strategies for integrating eparticipation into innovation and implementation programmes, and consequent recommendations for DEMO-net p. 9 at A-8

9 2 Open Source software ICT-aided government is necessarily affected by the paradigms of software development methods and processes used. Of those, the Open Source model presents the largest promise (and challenge) on the way to innovative government. Open Source Software (OSS) is a highpriority theme in the research agenda of the, especially for the implementation of egovernment services (since the eeurope 2005 programme). Two FP6 projects have studied the introduction of OSS in public administration as a means for innovative government: COSPA (Consortium for Open Source Software in Public Administration) FLOSSPOLS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Policy Support) The COSPA project analyses the effects of the introduction of Open Data Standards (ODS) and OSS for personal productivity and document management in European Public Administrations (PAs). The project has provided fact-finding, analysis, knowledge and possible implementation scenarios for potential OSS migrants with actionable knowledge that will simplify and streamline any decision process about making the transition to OSS. Drawing on fieldwork and an analysis of the literature, COSPA benchmarks the effectiveness of deployed OSS solutions and compares and pools knowledge from an analysis of user requirements. The entire project findings are collected in a dynamic knowledge base available to PAs and citizens seeking an objective, in-depth account of OS parameters, options, experiences, costs, barriers, and opportunities. Another outcome is a method 7 for selecting an Open Data Standard for a specific application type in a PA undertaking a software migration. It is designed to enable PA managers to find a suitable ODS from a corpus of standards for their specific process requirements. For word-processing-centric processes, the COSPA method selected the OpenDocument format as the best, most relevant Open Standard to ensure that functional requirements were met. 2.1 Policy Issues FLOSSPOLS examines policy support for Open Source software and open standards. For the case of egovernment, the studies show that public authorities in practice fail to achieve promotion of increased competition and reduced vendor lock-in goals, as they support strongly anti-competitive behaviour through their procurement policies favouring compatibility with proprietary technologies. Based on an analysis of the economic basis for open standards FLOSSPOLS concludes in the following four recommendations: 1. Open standards should be defined in terms of a desired economic effect: supporting full competition in the market for suppliers of a technology and related products and services, even when a natural monopoly arises in the technology itself. 7 Work Package 5, Definition of a target ODS to use in the project; development of bridges from existing documents to ODS, also using existing tools Deliverable 5.1 A-9

10 2. Open standards for software markets should be defined in order to be compatible with Open Source licences, to achieve this economic effect. 3. Compatibility with proprietary technologies should be explicitly excluded from public procurement criteria and replaced by interoperability with products from multiple vendors. 4. Open standards should be mandatory for egovernment services and preferred for all other public procurement of software and software services. As observed by COSPA, governments today must be aware that the growth of an Open Source developer base is increasingly an indicator of the innovative capacities (in the software domain) of a national economy. There are a number of reasons for this: OSS is a public resource with low entry barriers and an excellent training system at no direct cost to society. By its nature it is also an automatic source of de facto standards for any number of protocols or systems, both historically as well as those being developed today. COSPA observes that public administrations are gradually implementing OSS in many of their units, but they have to be aware that its usage generates wide-ranging changes that require time and human resources. Important policy guidelines are proposed for governments, which must act in the communal interest, ensuring that their legal and organisational structures prohibit no person or organisation from offering goods and services, while, at the same time, contractual conditions safeguard public welfare. In the case of software, such requirements should include criteria for adequate processing of data from and about citizens and for ensuring its integrity confidentiality and accessibility through time. Measures for the dissemination of OSS to a wider public are also proposed, namely: Establish and foster Open Source work groups at national level; Develop and introduce statistical systems for monitoring the usage of Open Source in the public and private sector; Develop and promote comprehensive policies for improving the usage of OSS in public institutions; Help to enable and coordinate OSS migration and implementation in the public sector for small and medium size organisations; Coordinate and cooperate with public interest Open Source projects; Develop strategies to migrate the public and private educational sector to Open Source requirements; Support business models based on OSS; Inform and advise SMEs before and during their implementation/migration to OSS. SMEs, in contrast to larger organisations are rarely in a position to invest in basic research or standardisation efforts so as to include OSS at the heart of their business model. It is this imbalance that governments should address actively by suitable policy measures and actions. A-10

11 2.2 Pilot cases Pilot cases studied by both projects have shown the feasibility of OSS in the public sector. Cases studied by COSPA such as: Beaumont Hospital, in Dublin, where transition to OSS was mandatory due to unaffordable licence fees. Hanstholm Kommune, a small Danish PA of nearly 70 employees, which, through participation in the COSPA project, arrived at the conclusion that Microsoft Office 2000 was not revolutionary enough to spend money on. Province of Pisa, which adopted Open Data Standards (ODS) and OSS well ahead of national and regional initiatives. Consorzio dei Comuni dell'alto Adige, a consortium of 116 small municipalities in Italy, which successfully worked with pilot implementations of OpenOffice for document creation and conversion for web publishing with promising results for permanent use. FLOSSPOLS reports on the Province of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, where transition to OpenOffice proved to be quite successful, with the administration deciding to install OpenOffice on all the PCs of its offices, about 5,000 desktops. A-11

12 3 Intelligent, personalised egovernment services for all In the words of call 4 of the IST priority, research in this area should distinctively focus on public service obligations of assuring privacy protection and public services that are provided for all. This addresses citizen-centric, context-aware, intuitive and intelligent interfaces capable to serve every citizen individually through seamless and personalised multi-device service delivery, and application of technologies for novel egovernment services. From the point of view of innovation, measures that seek to facilitate wider (and cheaper) reach of relevant services by providing multi-modal service delivery, including utilisation of more widely available devices and platforms such as SMS, digital TV and mobile devices, have an important role to play. For example, euser provides evidence that handheld devices (like mobile phones and PDAs), providing mobile as opposed to fixed access to services, are increasing in importance and are particularly being used by people who are otherwise likely to be digitally excluded. The overall goal must be equivalent quality of service, whatever the mode of access. Although the euser study has identified initiatives in this field in a number of countries, to date there is little systematic information available on the extent to which key services of public interest are available to an equivalent degree of quality for all users, whatever mode of access. 3.1 Multi-channel delivery In many countries, innovation in egovernment means service innovation. One way this can be achieved is multi-channel service delivery and better use of back-end processes and systems. As the UN egovernment report of 2008 states 8, this is about creating a drive towards more collaborative models of service delivery that can be referred to as connected government or networked government. One of the diktats of this new paradigm is that government agencies rethink their operations to move from being system-oriented to chainoriented with respect to their structure, functioning, skills and capabilities, culture and management. Recent evidence shows that in many developed countries, where most services are already online, citizens and businesses prefer to have both traditional and nontraditional channels of delivery at their disposal, depending on where and when they wish to access services and on the nature and type of service required. The mature level FP6 contribution here is represented by projects addressing delivery of services via alternative channels such as mobile and voice recognition/synthesis technologies. The only project in the mature group which examines services delivery via mobile technologies (m-government) is USE-ME.GOV (Usability Driven Open Platform for Mobile Government). USE-ME.GOV created an open service platform for m-government which meets the most critical interoperability and scalability requirements as well as shared use. Comprehensive business models for m-government have been elaborated, compiling interests and roles of relevant stakeholders and correlating their roles and interests in distinct service and business scenarios. 8 UN, egovernment survey 2008 From egovernment to connected Governance, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Public Administration and Development Management, 2008 A-12

13 The project was completed in March 2006 and the service platform was implemented and successfully validated in the three user sites. Further extensions and adaptations are planned. The USE-ME.GOV platform was designed in order to meet the criteria for openness, interoperability, scalability and security. Following a usability-driven approach, the platform paid particular attention to advanced solutions for discovery and binding of e-government services that are associated with the physical environment of mobile users. Delivery of services through voice channels has been achieved with the HOPS project. The platform implemented by the project uses a variety of technologies to enable people to talk to a computer over the phone in the same way as if they would be talking to a human call centre worker. The aim is that the natural language dialogue made possible by the platform overcomes people s general dislike of talking to automated call centre systems. HOPS has managed to make human-machine dialogue more natural and fluid by merging voice technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text to Speech (TTS) with natural language processing technologies to understand, interpret and respond to callers. These components are then tied into a data management system incorporating Semantic Web technology for finding and extracting the information sought by users. The platform itself is designed to be highly flexible so it can be used in any public administration call centre to provide any service or information. The only thing that really has to be changed depending on where it is deployed is the vocabulary. That could mean different languages or a different lexicon depending on whether it is used to deal with car registrations or cultural events. Preliminary trials carried out in Barcelona, Camden and Turin proved the flexibility and functionality of the system which was able to provide responses in a range of languages to callers enquiring about two different types of services. One scenario was for callers interested in finding out about cultural events, the other was to schedule a service provided by the council for collecting unwanted furniture and other large items. In both cases the call centre workers from the councils made the calls and the system functioned well. The HOPS service, as implemented in three pilots, is available for online testing by any user. Testing and eventual roll-out at the end of the project in December 2006 resulted in a second prototype with a third and final version of the platform that will also serve to gauge citizens reactions. All three town halls involved in the project are planning to employ the finished version of the platform. The pilots can be accessed as follows: 1. SECOND PROTOTYPE The available channels are: o voice channel: o text channel: 2. FIRST PILOT IN BARCELONA The available channels are: o voice channel: o text channel: 3. FIRST PILOT IN TURIN The available channels are: o voice channel: (Monolingual: Italian only) o voice channel: (Multilingual: Italian and English) 4. FIRST PILOT IN CAMDEN The available channels are: o voice channel: A-13

14 3.1.1 Conclusions The overall experience of the HOPS project has also produced useful conclusions regarding the maturity and the applicability of the proposed solution, which are given below 9. It is possible to create more advanced voice portals by exploiting the synergies between voice recognition, natural language processing and semantic web technologies There is a demand on the market for user-driven voice portals Semantic web technologies can potentially represent a quantum leap on advanced eservice provision, but more applied research is needed so that they can be exploited in real environments. 3.2 Inclusive government There can be no innovative government without an all-encompassing user-base. Government addresses all citizens. Innovative government employs advanced methods and tools such as ICT to achieve the same, therefore the defining feature of any innovation should be the degree to which inclusion of all citizens and reduction of the digital divide has progressed. The definitive marker in the area is the findings of the euser (Evidence-based support for the design and delivery of user-centred online public services) Specific Support Action. These resulted in a state-of-the-art resource base on user needs in relation to online public services and on user-oriented methods for meeting these needs. Besides egovernment, the domains covered are ehealth and elearning. Findings of the Action show that egovernment presents usability problems. The euser survey has shown that significant barriers to take-up exist, most of which decrease significantly once egovernment services are used. Much of this is lack of awareness and unfounded reservations or fears on the part of prospective users, although both these issues vary considerably depending on the type of potential user, so that clear targeting and segmentation will also be needed in many instances. The Action has also resulted in recommendations for the improvement of services take-up and acceptance by users. These are summarised as follows: Marketing and promotion campaigns, by governance and policy makers, targeted at promoting the overall benefits, calming fears, and offering general information about what is involved technically, where to find and how to use services. Guidelines for the design of quality and usable egovernment services, issued by governance and policy makers, building on existing and best practices from different Member States and service providers. Guidelines for the design of sophisticated and personalisable egovernment services, issued by governance and policy makers, building on existing guidelines and best practices from different Member States with a focus on serving individual needs usable within a multi-channel environment. 9 Montserrat J.B, HOPS, epractice.eu Cases, March 2008, A-14

15 Develop and implement programmes for rolling out egovernment services and broadband infrastructures, ensuring that all areas, including rural and peripheral regions, are covered. Develop and implement training and educational initiatives for citizen Internet skills, by using a mix of online and offline components, with appropriate standardisation across Member States (for example building on the European Computer Driving Licence). Develop, implement and pilot Europe-wide measuring, monitoring and benchmarking activities to track progress on user-orientation of public online services. A pilot for an appropriate monitoring and benchmarking activity can be set, from which the data gathering work can if deemed appropriate be transferred to the European Statistical System at a later stage. From the socio-demographic point of view, major factors acting as major barriers to egovernment are to be found in the over 65 age group. As euser experts point out, this is due to worries about complexity, the anticipated effort needed and the absence of sufficient technical means 10. Incorporation of elearning facilities has been proposed as a teaching aid for this group and evidence shows that distance courses over the Internet can be successful in reaching older persons which are isolated for reasons to do with health/disability, geographical location, or care duties 11. euser experts point out however that doubts still remain regarding whether elearning can play a large role for older adult education mainly because of: lack of ICT skills among older age groups; low rates of access to the Internet preferences which seem to point towards learning environments which allow meeting like-minded people rather than learning from home. 3.3 Attracting users One of the most interesting findings of the euser Action is that existing egovernment solutions cannot effectively serve individual needs and cannot be personalised. This is manifested by egovernment users themselves, who are also users of other channels which are amenable to personalisation such as telephone and post. Within the context of the elost (e-government for LOw Socio-economic status groups) Specific Support Action, various experts pointed out that it is vital to consider the reasons for non-usage of egovernment services, especially cultural factors. If people do not use new technologies, this is because they are not designed for them. People do not have to adapt to New Technologies: it is rather the opposite. Focusing on egovernment from a cultural perspective, there is a risk associated with e-services providers ignoring users needs and taking decisions based on the existing hierarchy and organisation of public services. 10 euser Workpackage 5: Synthesis and Prospective Analysis, D5.2/D5.3: Report on current demand/supply match and relevant developments 11 Swindell, R., Vassella, K. (1999) Older Learners Online An evaluation of Internet courses for isolated older persons, Griffith University URL: A-15

16 Moreover, they conclude that egovernment requires a multi-channel approach, in agreement with the findings of euser. Regarding Low Socioeconomic Groups (LSGs), which are predominantly the subject of the elost study, an interesting contribution comes from INTELCITIES, which considered elderly citizens in Siena, Italy. In the Siena experiment a special set-top-box for interactive TV (with fibber-optic cable connection) was developed, to allow an easy interaction of the elderly citizens with different services offered by the municipality of Siena. An important observation that emerged from this experiment was that a critical factor for success, perhaps more important than the technology used, is how to attract the citizens to overcome their reluctance and to try to use the available services. The solution adopted in the Siena experiment was described by the researchers as Trojan horse : the elderly citizens were offered a free videoon-demand (VoD) service, centred on the Palio horse races, which is a major attraction in the area 12. Innovative egovernment should encompass governments determination to foster citizens participation in the public dialogue. Governments should demonstrate their will to gradually engage the citizenry in the decision-making process. For example, the French National Commission of Public Debate (CNDP) has developed an innovative site that allows citizens to debate on infrastructure projects in France. This site provides French citizens with a number of well-documented proposals to tackle the issues that are currently being debated. As a result, citizens are better informed (there is a calendar of events, several months in advance) to voice their opinions. The actual debates take place in various cities in France, and citizens have the choice of participating in person or posting their views online 13. Attracting users should be interpreted by governments as providing services more efficiently, effectively, in a transparent way, with the maximum possible quality. 12 ELOST, WP4: Foresight Study, Deliverable D4.1: Review of foresight studies and emerging technologies, Deliverable D4.2: Technology-related questions for ELOST surveys 13 UN-eGovernment survey 2008 From egovernment to connected Governance, Department of Economic and Social Affairs Division for Public Administration and Development Management, 2008 A-16

17 4 egovernment support systems egovernment support systems in IST call 4 refer to research addressing modelling of administrative processes using emerging ontology and semantic web languages. It should include technologies to support the legislative and policy development process such as intelligent tools to develop policy scenarios and to manage administrative processes and content. Research should respond to public service governance requirements such as process transparency, preservation of diversity, multi-level governance, multi-linguality as well as new services and new ways of service provision. Application of ontologies and semantic web languages by FP6 projects has been made in various public administrations with emphasis on local government environments. As TERREGOV, an IP belonging to the first generation of projects in FP6 (2002 call), observes, local government ontologies are necessary for enabling these administrations to deal with information as a strategic resource. The project has developed a local government ontology, which has also been used as the first step of the QUALEG starting ontology (see below). This was later expanded to fit the specific project needs. In a similar fashion, the later generation of projects, which started in January 2006 (2004 call), continues to address the problem of semantic interoperability via web services. Modelling of knowledge for egovernment in FP6 has been dealt with by using ontologies at various levels, structures and degrees of sophistication. Projects which mainly address issues in this area are: TERREGOV (Impact on egovernment on Territorial Government Services) emayor (Electronic and Secure Municipal Administration for European Citizens) ONTOGOV (Ontology-enabled e-government Service Configuration) Access-eGov (Access to e-government Services Employing Semantic Technologies) SemanticGov (Services for Public Administration) All projects mentioned above adopt a service-oriented approach to implement semantic web services, a trend which is almost uniform for nearly all 4 th IST call FP6 projects in egovernment. The underlying concept and technology revolves around the definition of a semantic mark-up for web services so as to provide higher expressivity than traditional XMLbased descriptions. Architecturally, these projects build on the principles of loosely coupled services and address semantic issues through ontology-guided mark-up of public administration (PA) services. The resulting platforms enable egovernment service providers (at all levels of public administration) to introduce new interoperable eservices and to keep them updated. For service users (citizens as well as businesses) the new systems can increase accessibility and connectivity for existing eservices across organisational and regional borders and can provide information necessary for the use of traditional PA services and facilitate integration. A-17

18 Figure 2. Access-eGov: expected change The schematic diagram in the figure above is from Access-eGov and is characteristic of the potential benefits. 4.1 Ontology/process design and maintenance tools for public administrations Business process (enterprise) modelling of administrative procedures and actions has been handled by all the projects above at the intra-enterprise level by using two mechanisms: Process design Ontology management The process design level concerns workflow design and management, aiming directly at solutions maintained by the users (process owners) themselves. The ontology maintenance level, although primarily concerning semantics, can affect process maintenance and this is the reason it is mentioned in this section. Actually, in many cases ontology maintenance is considered part of business process modelling and maintenance, i.e. the ontology is the declarative part of the business process. This is the view taken by ONTOGOV, where the definition and maintenance of the ontology is part of the business process modelling layer. This view is not shared by TERREGOV, which separates the ontology part (semantics) from the procedural part (described by the term workflow there). Provided one is aware of the context, both views are valid, although the authors would favour the latter as it allows a clear separation between process and semantics. All projects supply novel tools for maintenance and semantic description of processes and services. The functionality of these tools is effective and efficient but not always accessible by ordinary users. In many cases tools which operate at more critical levels must be operated by specialists. We proceed to describe some of these tools in some detail in what follows. As mentioned above, business process modelling in ONTOGOV is done through a semantic description (ontology-based) of egovernment services. This is done at the relevant Business Modelling layer by the Service Modeller module of the Ontology Management System (OMS). The Service Modeller is an editor for the semantic description of the egovernment services, which is intended for use by non-it specialist administrators who act as domain experts. ONTOGOV by-passes the use of the OASIS Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and their composition on the level of business processes (BPEL ver. 1.x) on the grounds of A-18

19 lack of semantic expressivity, which is crucial for capturing service capabilities at abstract levels. The lifecycle of an egovernment service in the ONTOGOV platform starts when Public Administration managers trigger the generation or the change of a service. In order to accomplish this task, they need to have a high-level view of service models, links to related laws, resources involved and inter-relations with other services. Such a high-level view is provided by the service models developed through the Business Model layer. The service ontology (or service model) becomes the main source of information for the Configuration layer. During configuration, the IT Consultant should identify the actual software components (Web Services) that enact the service model and the policy and security level that their SOAP messages should accomplish. TERREGOV uses BPEL as its web services orchestration language to provide a business process modelling and management system referred to as eprocedures workflows, which stands (architecturally) separate from the semantic part. At the same time, it also serves the inter-enterprise nature of the project. This demands that local government agencies provide access to their services and participate in orchestrated procedures involving such services provided by multiple agencies. In order to provide access to these services, web services technology is coupled with a Workflow Management subsystem designed to enable TERREGOV users to design, execute and monitor eprocedures, i.e. processes required for the fulfilment of citizens requests. This subsystem of the TERREGOV platform is to be used by workflow developers, i.e. users responsible for the correct design and implementation of the eprocedures as well as administrators (e.g. civil servants) that may initiate an eprocedure upon citizen s requests and are able to monitor its progress. Both categories of users coincide with the Domain Specialist function in ONTOGOV. The Workflow Management subsystem of TERREGOV is a set of modules which provide tools to help users design the eprocedures, an engine able to run and monitor them, and some tools supporting the use of semantically described services at run-time. The two projects of the later generation (Access-eGov and SemanticGov) include tools to support the creation of public administration specific services. These are called Annotation Services for the case of Access-eGov 14 and PA or Business Services for the case of SemanticGov 15. Their role is similar, although the support provided to the user (i.e. domain expert) differs. In general, SemanticGov approaches the subject in a more systematic way through the provision of a Government Enterprise Architecture (GEA) 16 based editor and user interface. Annotation services allow domain experts to semantically describe their electronic/traditional services using their respective public service ontology. These are used by Access-eGov in the form of a web-based application that is not an integral part of the AeG Infrastructure. The service will also involve annotating traditional web sites as well. For this purpose, the web 14 Access-eGov. D3.1 Access-eGov Platform Architecture, Version: 1.0.1, SemanticGov, D3.2., SemanticGov Architecture v. 2.0, June Goudos, S. K., Peristeras, V., Tarabanis, K., Mapping Citizen Profiles to Public Administration Services Using Ontology Implementations of the Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA) model, in: Abecker, A., Mentzas, G. and Stojanovic, L. (eds.), Semantic Web for egovernment, Proceedings of Workshop at the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference (June 12, 2006, Budva, Serbia & Montenegro), also at A-19

20 application in Access-eGov provides crawling capabilities to allow for easy inspection of existing content, which can be annotated in the aftermaths. The AeG Annotation module will be allowed database access via web service interfaces to the respective Repositories within the Persistence Layer (notably the Ontology and Service Repository) in order to register services and publish their respective descriptions. The creation, modification and editing of these semantic descriptions is controlled by the security subsystem. The web application also has modules for management of life events and goals. Information is stored in separate repositories and later can be accessed by a special client called the Personal Assistant to allow more user friendly and effective navigation within life events and goals. The security subsystem provides means for fine-grained access control and also for modifying or deleting any existing, or creating new life events and goals. With the help of the AeG Discovery component, the annotation service can also retrieve services with properties matching the required properties. Those services can then be chained together by the user to create workflow scenarios. These workflows can be rather generic; the downstream orchestration component will be able to customize these workflows to a certain degree to fit instances of any specific life-event or goal. In SemanticGov, a simple web service is transformed into a WSMO-PA service; the latter stores rich semantics that can be later used for automated discovery, composition, execution and monitoring of the service. The SemanticGov architecture includes two different PA services descriptions. The non-semantic description of the PA service in WSDL following existing web services standards and the semantically enriched WSMO-PA service grounded to the underlying WSDL. The service creation therefore includes two steps: 1. create a new WSDL description of an existing PA service using wrappers of legacy systems or create a new service from scratch. 2. create a WSMO-PA semantic description of the service including grounding. In addition, when creating the WSMO-PA services, the tools of composition of existing services can be used so that a WSMO-PA service becomes a composite service grounded to a number of underlying WSDL services. The composite WSMO-PA service contains a description of the WSMO-PA interface orchestration which is executed in the middleware when the service is invoked by a client. In order to publish these services and to make them available online through the SemanticGov Member State portal two different means for repository infrastructure are used, namely registry and repository (see under relevant section). The modelling of the WSMO-PA services is supported by a specific editor for the SemanticGov architecture with a user-friendly interface. The interface uses GEA concepts. In this way, with some training, this terminology can become easily comprehensible by business people. The scheme is shown in the next figure. Figure 3. SemanticGov: publication of a Business (PA) Service A-20

21 Another noteworthy feature is semantic interoperability as implemented by emayor. This is served through transformation of various electronic documents (eforms). The consortium s work transferred those conceptual elements of XForms, which were needed for fulfilling the specifications above to a smaller concept, which they called emayorforms and which was designed from the beginning to run on a client. In contrast to XForms, which uses the browser s document object model as display, the emayorforms use Swing for this purpose. This opens possibilities, which are not realisable for XForms and keep the size and complexity of the emayorforms project very small, at the expense of having the forms tightly coupled to Java. 4.2 Semantically enriched web services Both TERREGOV and ONTOGOV use semantically enriched web services. This is a general trend in interoperability technologies which can be found in nearly all IST projects in FP6, due to the dominance of Internet-based services and their inherent technical interoperability features. As TERREGOV observes 17 web services constitute the building blocks of Service Oriented Architectures, which offer interoperability between applications in complex systems. Web services standards ensure the definitions of platform and language independent functional interfaces, and enforce the decoupling between such interfaces and their specific implementation. It appears mandatory to declaratively and unambiguously define the meaning of the operations offered by web services. It is possible to find examples of different web services that may present the same functional interface but whose purpose is different. This ambiguity poses some limitations to the potentialities of Service Oriented Architectures. All algorithms having to retrieve dynamically a service from a semantic query are affected by this ambiguity. We can give as examples the dynamic composition of web services or the dynamic substitution of a web service. A dynamic query can not succeed if semantic descriptions of Web Services contain ambiguities. To resolve these ambiguities, semantic enrichment of services in ONTOGOV is not done through WSDL and BPEL but by extending the OWL-S and WSMO ontologies so that they are able to better support process and lifecycle. The consortium members illustrate their technical choices by application scenarios and show the advantages of their chosen methods which utilise the principle of working only with instances of meta-ontologies 18. This allows for strong governance of the modelling as a whole, with inherent semantic checks, which no framework (like BPEL, ivygrid or others) can provide. For example, adding the same organisational unit to two atomic services in a sequence will evoke a warning (as usually the activities will be performed as one) even though the process flow per se is correct. On the other hand, TERREGOV researchers facing the same problem have opted for WSDL and semantically enriched BPEL. They conclude that the easiest way of adding semantics in BPEL, and the chosen one, is to wrap it in standard web services calls BPEL tags. Being more specific, the main option to consider is to add the semantics as an input parameter of the Semantic Interpreter service call. BPEL is also used in the emayor solution. 17 TERREGOV: Technological state of the art and research orientations for 2006, Deliverable D1.6, July D. Apostolou et al. Configuring E-Government Services Using Ontologies, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 189/2005, Challenges of Expanding Internet: E-Commerce, E-Business, and E- Government, pp , also at A-21

22 The newer generation of projects, such as Access-eGov and SemanticGov, instead of relying on OWL-S and semantically enriched BPEL, use the Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO), which provides a conceptual model describing all relevant aspects of general services accessible through a web service interface. At the same time, it adheres to the principles of loose coupling of services and strong mediation among them. WSMO defines an underlying model for WSMX, a semantic web services execution environment as well as WSML an ontology language used for the formal description of WSMO elements. Thus, WSMO, WSML and WSMX form a complete framework followed by both projects facilitating all relevant aspects of the semantic web services. Both those projects address the WSMO top-level conceptual model which consists of ontologies, web services, goals and mediators. (see report on the analysis of projects). It must be noted that WSMO ontologies also provide one of the solutions for handling interoperability among some components (goals, web services) achieved through a common (domain) ontology. 4.3 Innovation in practice TERREGOV and ONTOGOV had pilots on which application of their results took place. ONTOGOV applied its results in: The Swiss Announcement of Moving service, a pilot which provides a good example of running a one-stop service that involves different municipalities and is offered by a broker. The Greek Development of New Urban Areas service, implemented as a pilot within the municipal technology agency of the Amaroussion municipality in Greece. The end-user local authority evaluated the ONTOGOV platform as having great potential, provided that the user side is attended. Extensive guidance is needed so that the user is able to realise the assets of the platform in a simple way and that scepticism of the staff towards technological changes is overcome. It is worth-noting that the service put in place at the end of the project comprised the first egovernment service provided by a local government authority in Greece. The Spanish Minor Works Licence service, which was implemented in the municipality of Barcelona as a test-case of a SOA paradigm. Due to ONTOGOV, the Spanish agency responsible has taken the crucial decision of setting its systems and platforms to work under a Service-Oriented Architecture rather than legacy ones, an important facet of technology contribution to innovative government We subsequently refer to two TERREGOV pilots: The UK ongoing pilot prototype aims to demonstrate how TERREGOV software and technologies can be used to increase data sharing and transfer between local governments and their clients. The TERREGOV pilot prototype in France (the French County Council 47), where a set of approximately 10 web services is used in accordance with 4 project-developed modules. The pilot environment has been completely installed currently running on two project-developed modules. An important remark made by the TERREGOV consortium is that the project-developed modules, although currently at a prototype stage, can potentially replace the existing A-22

23 technologies provided that the business model of the TERREGOV platform is clear enough; this however is a difficult target for a research project to achieve in its life time. Perhaps some form of continuation funding scheme for successful projects could make such a business model possible and enable full scale adoption and application of the results. 4.4 Ontologies for multilingual applications The definitive knowledge management project among the mature projects in FP6 is QUALEG (Quality of Service and Legitimacy in egovernment) which proposes a knowledge management model for the support of multilingual applications in the field of egovernment. The model is based on a global ontology, manually designed for a specific domain, and local contexts, associated with ontology concepts. The combination of ontologies and contexts lends itself well to multilingual applications in which a single ontology fails to capture all nuances that stem from language and cultural differences. The single ontology system proposed, with associated concepts in multiple languages, provides a framework that is both versatile and flexible. The system, functions simultaneously in multiple languages, is lowmaintenance, and is easily extended in and adapted to different languages. The model captures cultural as well as lingual differences using contexts, thus allowing easy customization across cultures and languages. The QUALEG system is as modular as possible so as to be adaptable and configurable in different pilots. Web services and BPEL coupled with workflow models ensure interoperability between modules and external information systems. The QUALEG architecture was built in a centralised way, so that to ensure a productive development, debugging and integration phase(s). A lot of constraints had to be taken into consideration, such as the necessity of operating in three different pilot environments. Each one of these pilots has an infrastructure that meets partially the demands of QUALEG. As a result, the proposed architecture has to be thought as the outcome of the integration of different systems, where a system is composed by subsystems and modules, able to carry out a specific task. The general QUALEG results showed promising ability of the proposed models to provide language-independent support to local government decision making. QUALEG had pilots in France, Poland, and Germany and thus focused on four languages, three of which are French, Polish, and German. English was also used as a common international representation language. To maintain uniformity and avoid repetitive translations, QUALEG processes the information from the input, such as debates and s, in the local languages. For the deployment in QUALEG the first step included starting with an existing ontology and expanding it for the specific project needs. The ontology used was the local government ontology developed for TERREGOV. In the collection step, local government representatives from each of the pilots supplied organisational documents that describe each concept in the ontology collected from previous years. The extraction step created a context for each concept in the ontology using an algorithm developed by the project. The last step involved adding the new contexts to their relevant concepts and storing them. These contexts are monitored according to the system performance and can be updated when needed. The system was built to support multilingual ontology management and allows an ontology search to be performed, retrieving documents that relate to a specific ontology concept. The A-23

24 mapping of the documents to the ontology concepts is performed using the context recognition algorithm implemented in the Knowledge Extraction module. Pilot applications were made using the German language, where the advantages of the project techniques in some languages versus others and the extent of language independence of the model were evaluated positively. Further applications of the model of ontology and context were made in the field of opinion analysis. 4.5 ecustoms The ITAIDE project develops a procedure redesign methodology, supported by an intelligent software tool, to improve the efficiency and simplification of ecustoms procedures. They also develop organisational network collaboration models to build new public-private partnerships between businesses, taxation and customs offices and technology providers. In the partnerships all these stakeholders collaborate in the redesign process, which encourages the adoption of these redesigned procedures. The new procedures are currently tested in case studies at large exporting firms in different European countries, such as Heineken and United Paper Mills, and the effects will be investigated in, for example, the USA, Russia, China and Brazil. Four Living Labs (LL), which are real-life settings centred around large European exporters, are currently run: Beer Living Lab (Netherlands) Paper Living Lab (Finland) Food Living Lab (Denmark) Drug Living Lab (Germany) ecustoms is a high complexity process. There are partly overlapping responsibilities at national, EU and international level as well as a close linkage between legislative and executive issues. Changes of procedures almost always imply regulatory changes which are not easily implemented due to the long term timeframe legislative bodies operate in. We briefly describe an innovative ICT-re-engineered procedure, namely Beer LL, which comprises maximum reuse of business data for government control purposes, collaborative co-design (involving businesses, government, technology providers and universities) and innovative enabling technologies The Beer Living Lab Pilot 19 The Beer LL (Living Lab) pilot introduces ecustoms for excise goods. Taking the beer industry as its application field, it represents a showcase of how customs administrations can rely on commercial data and data flows to facilitate their monitoring of international trade, while at the same time reducing their administrative overhead. Three enabling technologies were used in Beer LL, namely: 19 ITAIDE: D5.1:5 Beer Living Lab l Final Report, 2008 A-24

25 The TREC device, a smart container seal mounted on a container that can send realtime location information about containers, developed by partner IBM. The Service-Oriented Architecture, used for distributed, web-based access to commercial data about transactions, stored in the data-bases of different supply chain partners. The EPCIS standard (Electronic Product Code Information Service) for describing product information. IBM deployed an EPC Information Services (EPCIS) event repository, making use of the WebSphere RFID Information Centre (WRIC) product, which is IBM s implementation of the EPC global EPCIS standards. WRIC supports a data capture and query interface, attribute level data access and an EPC discovery service. The repositories were physically hosted in Bangalore, India (for the case of Heineken). Connectivity between systems was established through several Internet message and communications channels protocols, such as HTTP, SMTP and, correspondingly Iridium or GPRS. For messaging solutions between remote sites across the internet a WebSphere base product extension, namely MQ Internet Pass Through (MQIPT) was used. Access to the EPCIS repositories was subject to IBM s strict internal security policy. Network access was only granted to a restricted number of IP addresses that was included in the access control list of IBM s intranet firewall. Access to the portals was username/password protected. In order to guarantee EPCIS infrastructure security, the digital certificates used, had to be accepted worldwide; however, certification authorities, such as Verisign, divide the globe in zones. This necessitated the exchange and clearance of certificates between such authorities to be somewhat eased so as to achieve a scalable solution. We note here that one very important lesson learnt concerning the success of an innovative idea is that the piloted technology must be on the critical path of the technology provider. This was the case for IBM in the project. TREC was indeed a novel technology, but customising it to meet the needs of the pilot was an unexpectedly demanding task. IBM, being an important stakeholder in the pilot, demonstrated the motivation and the will to invest in extra resources so as to resolve various customisation issues, a step which was critical for the final success of the project. When the Living Lab was finalised, there was the issue of how to consolidate and disseminate the results, so that momentum is not lost. The consortium admits that they do not know to whom and how to tell the story. This, they claim 20, is not obvious and requires a lot of coordination and effort put in that direction Single Window systems In a traditional pre-single Window environment, traders may have to contend with visits and dealings with multiple government agencies in multiple locations so as to obtain the necessary papers, permits and clearance in order to complete their import or export processes. Single Window systems enable economic operators to interact through online access points with public administration offices. ITAIDE remarks that use of novel technologies is perceived as a key enabler for the development of advanced ecustoms 20 This claim has been verified by other consortia in FP6: a similar conclusion was drawn during the recent workshop (November 2007) organised by DG-INFSO and the present study team centred on the making of a success story out of research results. A-25

26 services that can be integrated with Single Window systems. In addition, these new eservices are envisaged to be interoperable at the level of the EU and across EU borders 21. Five case studies are also presented by ITAIDE 22 from countries that are considered technologically advanced on their implementation of ecustoms solutions. They offer a brief account of innovative process design at four levels, namely: document, procedure/workflow, control ontology and public-private network collaboration. These case studies also constitute a review of Government initiatives on electronic documents and the message standards used. Leveraging interoperability is necessary at this procedural level. It is important to facilitate interoperability with information systems used in industry, focusing on the interfaces. The Singapore case is particularly interesting to consider in that light, because of their any-to-any connections approach. Another issue is that the standards for workflows and documents, like the applied SAD (Single Administrative Document) in Denmark, may not be used in the exact same way in other countries. From the cases presented, ITAIDE researchers conclude that Single Window has the ability to lower the administrative burden on companies and improve efficiency. The fact that higher quality electronic data are available makes it possible for Customs to perform better risk analysis and assess control and security-related issues. 4.6 Legal support systems Legal knowledge is a sensitive issue because of the effect it has on human life. Quality of legal texts, especially in multilingual environments such as the European one, can be improved by using techniques for legal knowledge (such as modelling) supported by modern ICT tools. elegislation is becoming a popular term collectively characterising all ICTassisted legislative tools and methods. A current research challenge is to support information unification of the laws of Europe, namely, to facilitate access, integration, and reuse of legal information pertaining to each member state separately and the European Union as a whole. To this end, one undoubtedly expects that tools provided by semantically enriched internet-based technologies have a significant role to play in modelling and standardising legal information to enable access, communication, processing and integration. As Sartor 23 points out, several important trends actually occur in the provision of legal information, which determine serious problems on one hand, but open enormous opportunities for the European legal system on the other. They mainly concern matters of creation and distribution, standardisation, and diffusion of legal information. The ESTRELLA project (Standardised Transparent Representations in order to Extend Legal Accessibility) aims to develop a Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), i.e. a language for supporting representation of knowledge in legal domains. Such formats already exist, but so far they have been produced by vendors. In addition to the risk of vendor lock-in they 21 ITAIDE: D5.0:3a Knowledge integration, ITAIDE: D5.0.4 v1 State of Art, Giovanni Sartor, The ONE-LEX project of the informational unification of the laws of Europe, Nov. 2005, A-26

27 induce, they also represent rather different things, depending on the viewpoint of each vendor: proof trees, inference rules, concepts and others. In general, knowledge interchange formats carry a large innovation potential when applied to specific domains of expertise. They comprise ontologies of concepts which include knowledge bases, specific terminologies, rules and normative statements. The most common of the ontologies 24 used in social sciences and law today are: DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering), SUMO (Standard Upper Merged Ontology), Stamper's Norma Formalism, LLD (Language for Legal Discourse Ontology), FBO (Frame-based ontology of law), FOlaw (Functional Ontology for Law) Valente's Functional Ontology of Law, LRICore, CLO, JurWordNet. The recently completed ESTRELLA project 25 has delivered an innovative, open platform which enables citizens and businesses to access, understand and apply complex legislation and regulations. The platform was demonstrated and validated on models of European legislation and national tax legislation for two European countries which were used as pilot applications. A main technical objective of the project, which was the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), has been achieved and the final version has been tested and refined in actual use in three pilots. LKIF exhibits increased expressiveness, tight integration with the CEN MetaLex XML format for sources of law and easy extensibility. It has now been published and is currently promoted as a CEN standard through the formation of a working group. The reference inference engine used for LKIF (implemented in Scheme) is called Carneades and provides APIs for interacting with LKIF knowledge bases and the translators to and from other vendor formats. Carneades has been ported to the R6RS scheme standard and now runs on 3 different open source scheme implementations. It now supports complex rule bodies and has a built-in ontology reasoner for the DLP dialect of description logic. It also has a prototype graphical user interface. The API now provides a programming language independent, weboriented interface to the inference engine based on SOAP and WSDL. Additional innovation for legal support comes from the ALIS (Automated Legal Intelligent System) project. The aim is to ease access and use of legal systems. Here the target is not to create a format, but a methodology and a software system that would facilitate compliance with existing laws, development and evolution of consistent legal systems, and would prevent conflicts by proposing methods for alternative dispute resolution. When seen in the context of the large volumes of laws and regulations, actions and decisions of governmental departments may be inconsistent with the legal framework. ALIS provides both methodological and innovative tools to check whether compliance occurs not only between laws and decisions, but also with respect to different systems of laws and regulations. ALIS aspires to make contradictions, if any, apparent, especially when several systems need to be involved in the same case. An ambitious uptake in the ALIS project is the application of game theory models and techniques in order to resolve conflicts. Modelling tools are implemented by combining advances in game theory, artificial intelligence and law and regulation corpus structuring semantics. The system developed has been tested in a number of scenarios, which are meant to be instances of use of the envisioned system within the environment in which it is supposed to operate. Briefly, in one of these scenarios 26, the author of a musical composition 24 ESTRELLA: Deliverable 1.4, OWL Ontology of Basic Legal Concepts, (LKIF-Core), Jan ESTRELLA project, Periodic Activity Report, ALIS: D4.3 Use-Cases, 2006 A-27

28 and the author of the lyrics are involved. The question submitted to the system is if the former is obliged to give his permission for dissemination of the combined work, in case the latter wishes to publish this work. According to the case described, the system retrieves all the necessary knowledge and information (laws, judgements, past cases etc) and proceeds, in a constructive manner, to provide an argumentation scheme. There, the final conclusion is either explicit, or depends on the interpretation of a concept. In the case of the combined work, for example, the decision of whether the author of a musical composition is obliged to give his permission for the dissemination of the combined work will depend on whether the argument lyrics are really poor may be deemed as a reasonable ground. Should this be accepted as being true, permission may be refused by the composer elegislation and eparticipation ICT tools can not only assist the legislative process itself, but also widen participation in these processes. Pilot application oriented projects of the eparticipation Preparatory Action 27 initiated by the European Parliament and launched in 2006, present innovative solutions in this direction. We briefly refer to some of those in what follows. An integrated approach to participation in the legislative process is taken by the LEX-IS project, which combines participation support, argumentation support, content management, legislative process workflow modelling and legal ontologies and metadata schemas development for the semantic annotation of legal elements. The technical architecture and the basic constructs used for the participative process models are shown below. Implementation is based on existing systems, for example, the selection of argumentation support was based on the results of the DEMO-net network 28. The LEX-IS legal ontology 29 structures the underlying legal domain so as to augment the participatory capabilities of simple stakeholders in understanding and interpreting legal information. The ontology adds semantic grounds to legal information by decomposing it into basic classes (i.e. annex, articles, paragraphs, etc) and by interrelating those with participation-related entities such as legal rules, arguments, opinions, participative activities etc. The basic structure is shown in the next figure as created by the open source Protégé ontology editor and verified for consistency by the RacerPro reasoner. The project has also modelled the specific processes of legislation formation and debate followed in each one of the three parliaments associated with its trials, namely Austrian, Greek and Lithuanian. Based on these three models, it has also defined a generic legislative process model that can be used by the system to enable eparticipation in cross-country legislative process. Semantic features to such models are supplied by the project s defined ontology. The project has also included participation enhancing features and tools such as the content management system DocAsset ( used by one of the partners and the prototype tool of legal argumentation HERMES developed within the ICTE-PAN European Research project 30, based on the Zeno system. To assist on the design of the trials, user groups and new public spaces have also been identified LEX-IS project, D1.3 Ontology for Legal Framework Modelling, December Karacapilidis, N., Loukis E., Dimopoulos S., Computer-supported G2G collaboration for public policy and decision making. Journal of Enterprise Information Management, (5): A-28

29 Figure 4. Technical architecture of the LEX-IS system 31 Figure 5. Basic constructs used in LEX-IS 32 process models Another innovative effort is represented by the DALOS project, which provides law-makers with linguistic and knowledge management tools which enable control on the legal language (especially in multi-lingual environments) of the legislative processes. Legislative drafting of consistently high technical quality is the primary field of application. The text extraction 31 Loukis E., Wimmer M., A., Charalabidis Y., Triantafillou A., Gatautis R., ARGUMENTATION SYSTEMS AND ONTOLOGIES FOR ENHANCING PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN THE LEGISLATION PROCESS, 6 th International egov Conference, Regensburg, Germany, September LEX-IS project, D1.2 Legislative Process Workflow Model, November 2007 A-29

30 facilities and the controlled ontology employed by the project can help the general public in the retrieval and comprehension of legal texts. The methodological approach chosen in the project 33 is the definition of mapping procedures between semantic lexicons, driven by reference to an ontological level where the basic entities which populate the legal domain are described. In this way, a correspondence between terms of different languages was obtained, with terms themselves aligned to a common conceptualisation at a higher knowledge level. The lexical resource used was the 5- lingual LOIS database 34 and the domain of pilot application was consumer protection. The project employs a Knowledge Organisation System (KOS), based on the RDF/OWL standard for WordNet representation for the linguistic resource and. two layers of abstraction, namely the ontological layer and the lexical layer, which contains lexical manifestations of the concepts of the ontological layer in different languages (see figure below). Figure 6. Knowledge Organisation System in DALOS 35 The domain ontology construction is aided by an ontology learning system which combines linguistic technologies and statistical techniques, called T2K 36 (Text-to-Knowledge). T2K is used for extracting terms and clustering them according to semantic relevance, based on statistical similarity measures. The project has run pilot trials in Europe Agnoloni T., Bacci L., Francesconi E., Spinosa P,. Tiscorna D., Montemagni S., Venturi G., Building an ontological support for multilingual legislative drafting, JURIX 2007: The 20th Anniversary International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Leiden University, The Netherlands. December LOIS project: Legal Ontologies for Knowledge Sharing, EDC 22161, Agnoloni T., Bacci L., Francesconi E., Spinosa P,. Tiscorna D., Montemagni S., Venturi G., Building an ontological support for multilingual legislative drafting, JURIX 2007: The 20th Anniversary International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Leiden University, The Netherlands. December CNR ILC and the Linguistics Department of the Pisa University A-30

31 4.7 Health care and social security Innovation in detecting fraud in health care and social security is exemplified by the iwebcare 37 project, where data mining is used to automatically extract structures from data and generate predictions in order to assist fraud inspectors in identifying novel cases of fraud. The method allows them to concentrate their search on the most suspicious cases in large databases of possible fraud cases. Data mining techniques can extract automatically structures from data and can generate predictions on new fraud instances. Techniques and approaches used in the iwebcare project are based on the CRISP process model 38 and available open-source environments like R 39, Yale 40 and Weka 41. The iwebcare methodology defines a process for identifying, measuring and treating fraud in the context of egovernment services. This process comprises three steps: 1. Establishment of the fraud context. 2. Identification of fraud within this context. 3. Transformation of this information into an ontological model. Figure 7. Fraud Ontology Layered Architecture Establishment of the fraud context within an organisation is done through a business process modelling procedure that records fraud susceptible business processes of the organisation and their context. Fraud identification involves description of potential fraud cases and corresponding detection methods, accomplished via intra-organisational knowledge and/or via data mining methods in order to extract unknown fraud patterns. 37 Dimakopoulos et al, iwebcare: an Integrated Web Services Platform for the Facilitation of Fraud Detection in Health Care e-government Services, iwebcare project A-31

32 The methodology is an iterative procedure of ontology building. A generic fraud ontology acts as the basis for building domain specific fraud ontologies. Ontologies are built in a layered architecture in grades of genericity in order to maximise modularity, reusability and extensibility. The highest layer, namely the Generic Upper Ontology, captures generic and domain-independent knowledge that helps minimise redundancy and duplication of knowledge within the overall ontology. The next layer, namely the generic fraud ontology contains concepts representing fraud actors, fraud cases etc and relations linking actors with motivations and cases with actors. Finally, deviating from the egovernment projects of FP6, we note an example of innovative healthcare services to be implemented by the NEXES project. A new healthcare model is employed to provide integrated care to citizens at risk suffering form chronic illnesses at home. This is a recently started project (May 2008), technically based on the Linkcare platform (Linkcare eten ) and a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using the IBM UML 2.0 Profile for Software Services Social and medical care Adopting social networking methods in health results to an innovative way of empowering, engaging, and educating health care consumers and providers. It is mostly about usergenerated content, networks, avatars in virtual realities, blogs, patient-held electronic records, simple syndication, wikis and the like. Social networks will strongly support sound decisionmaking, by the use, for example, of health ratings, a principle where the consumer rates hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, drugs etc in city magazines (in the USA), and he may even disseminate reports and reviews on doctors quality. A similar example of successful communication with patients in Europe is the PatientOpinion portal (National Health Service, UK), where patients and carers are asked their opinion on hospitals facilities and services. They share experiences, express opinions, give ideas. Managers adopting such customeroriented attitudes may thus replace costly controls and apply changes according to the users needs. Close relations between ehealth and social networking leads to the Health 2.0 principle, a movement defined as the use of social software to promote collaboration between patients, caregivers, medical professionals and other stakeholders in health 43. A similar principle is used by the OLDES project of FP6. Although not belonging to the egovernment group, innovation revolving around the Health 2.0 principle is worthy of reporting here. By providing not only healthcare but also entertainment interactive services at home, OLDES employs a low cost but innovative solution so that: the elderly maintain contact with carer and other elderly via interactive service; the services can be personalised to the needs of the elderly; embedded monitoring of patients via sensors can avoid unnecessary hospital visits and maintain patient mobility; a central server keeps the history of the measurements from sensors for analysis and health related alarms; 42 J.Roca, NEXES - Living Healthily at Home, epractice.eu Cases, June 2008, 43 Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media, California Healthcare Foundation, April 2008 A-32

33 Technologically, the equipment for the testing group (100 elderly in Italy and 10 in the Czech Republic) is a low-cost PC running open source software. Communication is via VoIP and Bluetooth or Zegbee Successful transfer of innovation iwebcare runs pilots in social security organisations, namely NHS, UK, and TSAY, Greece. We give the example if the pilot, as an indication of successful transfer of research and innovation work in practice. T.S.A.Y. is the acronym of the insurance body of all healthcare professionals in Greece. Its main focus concerns healthcare fraud detected in the prescription costs reimbursement domain. It is often the case that the prescriptions TSAY is asked to reimburse contain erroneous or deliberately inaccurate data. The aim is that larger sums of money can be claimed or inappropriate drugs can be prescribed. Sometimes, prescriptions data viewed in isolation do not indicate fraud, correlation to other prescriptions, however, reveals the opposite. Of course, this is only an indication for further investigation; factors such as human error or special circumstances have to be considered as well. The rules identified comprise two main categories, namely auditing rules and medical rules. Auditing rules try to detect incomplete prescriptions and invalid or miscalculated data while medical rules try to detect prescriptions in which the data are inconsistent from a medical point of view. The iwebcare methodology first established the fraud context namely the description of the prescription domain. Then, a business process modelling procedure was performed and a complete business process model of the prescription domain was developed. The high level processes contained in that model were: The issue of prescription booklets to TSAY members by the insurance agency. The issue of prescriptions by doctors to patients who are TSAY members. The inspection of prescriptions by the ministry of health. The filling of members prescriptions by the pharmacists. The reimbursement process of TSAY for filled prescriptions. The next step was building the TSAY specific ontologies, i.e. the TSAY domain specific fraud ontology (shown in the figure below) and the TSAY case specific domain ontology. The first contains the knowledge regarding the prescription domain and utilises the business process model created in the previous steps. The second models the fraud types and fraud detection methods and rules for the prescription domain and utilises the knowledge derived from the domain experts. Both are built under the generic upper and fraud ontologies so that development effort and knowledge redundancy are minimised. A-33

34 Figure 8. iwebcare: The TSAY domain specific fraud ontology It is important to note that the project consortium claim that even this particular part of the TSAY case specific ontology can be transferred and applied to another organisation that faces a similar increased risk in its prescription process, with only minor adaptations. 4.8 Model-centric development An interesting perspective in supporting egovernment is through the examination of the software development process and the room for improvement therein. Despite advances in development environments, tools, and the advent of open source solutions, a large part of software development is still driven by writing code. This is particularly true of egovernment applications, due to the relatively high degree of customisation required. Software development includes a number of documentation phases (e.g., user requirements gathering and analysis, system requirements, and design) that is followed by code writing. This process may be repeated a number of times in the software life-cycle. Generally, the code-writing phase reveals a number of changes to be made in the document artefacts such as system design, user or system requirements. These changes must be taken into account either immediately (in case they are the result of problems in the design) or in the next development cycle (if they relate to changes in user requirements, for example). The FP6 project ELLECTRA-WeB (European Electronic Public Procurement Application Framework in the Western Balkan Region) considers that one significant result of the software development process is a noticeable loose coupling between the development stages before (documentation) and after coding. In this way, stages such as user requirements, analysis and design at all levels are only used as a starting point in the production of code and then loose their role and value: backwards transition from testing to code to design to analysis is too tedious to apply and usually ends up abandoned. The result is a gap between documentation and code which is ever widening as maintenance processes take over in production operation. The situation is made frequently worse by short-sighted management who press for production of code at the expense of documentation. Obvious consequences A-34

35 are increasing loss of maintainability of applications and premature shortening of the useful life of an investment in a certain technological solution. The project addresses software development for electronic public procurement systems and the problems associated with the code-centric development environments. The aim is an integrated software production environment that enables automatic generation of the required code, implemented as an Integrated Open Source Application Framework. ELLECTRA-WeB researchers observe that the development of eprocurement solutions in Europe today represents a typical case of low-level bespoke design and coding. This state of affairs has been recognised by the software industry as being the main contributory factor to the cost of deploying an eprocurement system. This characteristic makes eprocurement a suitable candidate for the verification of the principles behind the model-centric development methodology proposed. To answer this cost escalation challenge ELLECTRA-WeB employs the Model Driven Development (MDD) approach of the Object Management Group (OMG), as realised by the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) via UML. MDD aims to raise the level of abstraction in developing systems by employing models expressed in modelling languages. This shifts the focus and development effort from coding to modelling and allows a higher level of abstraction than what is possible with programming languages. The methodology is based on the derivation of three models and appropriate model transformation rules (also shown in the following figure): Figure 9. Basic stages of MDD 44 The Computational Independent Model (CIM) captures system requirements for a particular business domain and identifies the key concepts or business entities and relationships among them. 44 ELLECTRA-WeB, White-paper: ELLECTRA-WeB Open-source electronic Public Procurement Application Framework, April A-35

36 The Platform-Independent Model (PIM) models the system ιn a more formal but technology independent representation. The Platform-Specific Model (PSM) views the system from a platform specific viewpoint with the aid of a set of appropriate model transformation rules. PSM is transformed into code with the aid of another set of appropriate model transformation rules. In the interest of architectural and maintenance simplicity, ELLECTRA-WeB has used a simplified version of the formal MDD approach. They opted to omitting the intermediate step of generating the platform-specific models (PSMs) and proceed directly into code generation. This approach makes handling of the development framework easier for inexperienced users 45. The MDD process is realised by ELLECTRA-WeB as the eprocurement Application Framework integrated around the Eclipse platform. Eclipse is an extensible, open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE), originating in a 2001 IBM-donated source-code from the WebSphere Studio Workbench project. The Eclipse consortium (of which, SINTEF, one of the partners in ELLECTRA-WeB is a member) manages the development effort of what has now evolved into an extensible architecture which accepts several optional plug-ins without the need for additional integration code. Examples of plug-ins include the Eclipse Meta Facility (EMF), Java Development Tools, the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) and others The ELLECTRA-WeB Application Framework The Application Framework (see ref. 49 ) is built on top of the Eclipse Platform and several different plug-ins and is shown in the next figure. Components are identified by solid boxes as opposed to dashed boxes which represent optional components that may be introduced at a later stage. Each component may include different sub-components and plug-ins. The five major components are shown in the following figure and are briefly described below. Development Environment: corresponds to the required components for the development of models and code. Generation engine, responsible for the transformation of models into code. Optional components, which represent a collection of components that can be optionally integrated into the Application Framework. epp 46 specific components developed for the needs of the framework, such as fixed web-services to support different security implementation schemes, conversion of forms (represented in XML standard) into PDF/HTML documents, deployment descriptors etc. epp Application Framework Integration Plug-in, responsible for the integration of all plug-ins under the Eclipse platform. 45 The approach is also followed by the Domain Specific Modelling Forum (DSL), 46 epp stands for electronic Public Procurement in the project s terminology. To avoid introducing extra acronyms we usually adhere to the term eprocurement. A-36

37 Figure 10. The application framework architecture of ELLECTRA-WeB 47 The Application Framework also includes a server environment, where solutions are deployed, as well as a testing environment, where the eprocurement (epp) solutions are tested, realised via the server applications Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 and Open ESB 2.0. The latter was chosen because the Sun application server does not come with a BPEL engine which is required by the Application Framework. Open ESB is an open source project that can easily be integrated with the Sun application server, and is a standard way to work with BPEL and service-oriented integration. The entire framework is an open-source downloadable application and utilises Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Within the code of the generated solutions, annotations are used to describe both Web-services and persistence objects. Annotations are defined for Stateless Session Beans (SLSB), Stateful Session Beans (SFSB), Entity Beans, Entity relationships and Object-Relational mappings. The Universal Modelling Language (UML) is primarily used to model the persistence tier and part of the business logic of the end system as shown in the next figure. The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is used for the definition of eprocurement processes that constitute the business tier. No modelling is required for the web tier. This comes implemented based on IDABC standards, but the needed parameterisation is performed via UML and transformation rules are employed for the compilation of the necessary web-pages expressed in Java Server Faces (JSF). The proposed Platform Independent Model (PIM) for the eprocurement application is a set of models and diagrams (model building blocks). These components are expressed in UML and BPEL. The next figure presents how these models implement the PIM specification. 47 ELLECTRA-WeB, D10.1 Electronic Public Procurement Application Framework, (1st release), March 2008 A-37

38 Figure 11. ELLECTRA-WeB Platform Independent Model specification 48 The development of an eprocurement solution via the Framework involves a two-phase generation process: 1. The first phase transforms the UML reference and user models into code implementing the persistence tier and part of the business logic of the end-system. For this phase, a set of transformation rules are used to produce the persistence tier and the Java implemented web-services. 2. The second phase transforms the PBEL models into code implementing the business tier and its integration with the web tier. The web-services of the first stage become orchestrated web-services. They, along with transformation rules and web-pages (in JSF) feed the transformation engine to produce the generated code. The generated output can be deployed on any J2EE compliant application server. The services generated are implemented as Java Web services; therefore the code is both portable and interoperable. The transformation specifications demonstrate a partially novel approach to code generation by treating the User Model and the Reference Model as separate. This introduces some new complexity aspects to the implementation of the transformation specification, but also provides an easier and more user friendly interface for the application developers working with the Application Framework. The ELLECTRA-WeB researchers estimate that after the generation of the code the Application Developer s effort on manually writing supplementary code (enhancement modifications on the generated interface, integration of web pages with other processes etc.) is not more than 25% of the total code that constitutes a complete eprocurement solution, which adheres to the EC directives. 48 ELLECTRA-WeB, White-paper: ELLECTRA-WeB Open-source electronic Public Procurement Application Framework, April A-38

39 An application developer may build an eprocurement solution from scratch by defining his own models or by using the pre-existing template models offered by the Application Framework. In the second case, the developer s effort lies in the parameterisation of existing models or the definition of new models based on re-use, extension or optimisation of premade ones. A detailed installation guideline has been documented by the project in order to provide an aid to installation and configuration of the development and server-side environment of the framework. This has been used in pilot trials in the Western Balkan states. Based on user experience and feedback, further improvements on the integration and usability of the Eclipse environment will also be made. Finally, the tiers of the Java EE (J2EE) application utilised by the ELLECTRA-WeB platform and their components are shown in the following figure. Figure 12. Architecture of the ELLECTRA-WeB platform ELLECTRA-WeB, D5.1 Electronic Public Procurement Solutions Transformation Rules. September 2007 A-39

40 5 Innovation as an efficiency enabler One of the main expected characteristics of egovernment is improved efficiency, compared to the paper-based standard processes. Several research projects try to address the efficiency improvement goal as a result of applying innovative technology and solutions. 5.1 Risk management in customs processes Customs administrations all over the world face the problem of controls against trade facilitation and cost-effectiveness. The RACWEB project advocates that an appropriate balance between trade facilitation and trade control can be achieved by applying risk management techniques. The primary method for risk management in customs organisations is profiling. A set of risk indicators is defined and every profile corresponds to a specific combination of metrics for these indicators. The profiles are identified through analysis and classification of acquired past data about movement of goods and the parties involved. Currently, the difficult task of analysis of these large complicated datasets is performed by human experts in an ad-hoc manner. RACWEB proposes an automated alternative to the process of customs declarations with the development of a web-based risk assessment service that utilises data mining techniques. The project offers an automated risk level assessment service, which analyses data without needing any prior assumptions about what is expected to be found. Main features of the service are: Automatic check of all customs declarations against a given set of risk profiles. Application of risk profiles derived from the experience of domain experts but also from statistical analysis and data mining on data collected from processed declaration and other trade-related sources. Employment of risk-level assessment rules. Ability to learn from experience as users (customs administrations) register the results of detailed checks on declarations and associate them with combinations of values in those declarations. Thanks to the acquired expertise the system eventually becomes able to identify more risk profiles and of higher complexity than what was possible with manual methods. The service intends to complement the national customs systems and assist human controllers in the performance of their tasks. It will also have a number of other benefits: detection of fraud can generate multiple side-effects on other customs departments and other agencies such as audit control, customs investigations and tax administrations. It will also become an opportunity to strengthen regional cooperation. The general platform architecture is shown in the following figure. A-40

41 Figure 13. RACWEB: General platform architecture Restructuring business processes The egovernment evolution has reached a point where deeper changes must be considered. The potential of egovernment to improve efficiency and effectiveness in A2B and A2C transactions will soon reach its limits unless the underlying processes evolve in parallel. This subject is handled by the egov-bus 51 project that focuses on modelling business process performance in administrative systems. The egov-bus project examines and attempts to model in a concrete framework the different business processes (BP) related to the public administration operation. The main concept of the project is that for any significant advancement in egovernment, a new way of thinking should be considered. The usual methodology of analysing the user requirements frequently fails. This is the result of conflicting requirements coming from different stakeholders, their viewpoints, and the corresponding procedures they are accustomed to follow. The proposed methodology is based on the assumption that before the normal workflow of software development methodology commences, an explicit layer of business processes must be defined. The project was presented in the ICT for efficient government: 50 Legal M., RACWEB presentation in 1st RACWeB workshop "egovernment initiatives in Western Balkan Countries", Skopje, 19th June, A-41

42 the role of research workshop organised on the 12th of May 2009 by DG INFSO Unit H2 of the and the Bringing Together and Accelerating egovernment Research in the EU study. The presentation 52 concluded with the following remarks: Business process performance monitoring and modelling are key for continuous management improvement. Business process hierarchical models provide a robust and consistent platform representing all process monitoring and modelling perspectives. Analytical models coupled with resource allocation optimisation algorithms may be incorporated in business model design tool sets. Further research is required to exploit the advanced performance modelling results in the business process monitoring and modelling context. These points present accurately the landscape in which egovernment will need to evolve. As soon as egovernment escapes from being a front end to legacy bureaucratic processes it will be able to provide truly citizen-oriented services for all. The egov-bus project proposes a software environment providing user-friendly, advanced interfaces supporting life events of citizen- or enterprise-administration interactions transparently involving many government organizations within the European Union. The egov-bus platform is a dynamically adaptable information system supporting life events experienced by the citizen or business serviced by European government organizations. The life-events model organizes services and allows users to access services in a userfriendly and seamless manner. The model hides the functional fragmentation and the organizational complexity of the public sector. This approach transforms Governmental portals into virtual agencies, which cluster functions related to the citizen s everyday life, regardless of the responsible agency or branch of Government. The objective of the egov-bus project is to integrate and extend research and standards in the area of process and content management for government and cross-government systems. In this direction several aspects have to be considered: To create advanced applications of digital signature with the aim to enhance acceptance of the technology. To establish trusted system validity and non-repudiation. To base the digital signature functions on web services, process, and repository management platforms. To be based on a highly secure, highly available, scalable, and distributed architecture providing data access abstraction. A key downstream effect is the reduction of integration costs of many of egovernment projects. The egov-bus Workshop Report 53 shows that the project managed to create demonstrators of cross-border eid validation services allowing the provision of seamless services that 52 A-42

43 required transactions with administrations from different EU member states. The workshop was held in Prague on 22/4/2008 co-located with the 6th East European E-Government Days EEEGOV conference &p_p_col_id=null&p_p_col_pos=0&p_p_col_count=0&_20_struts_action=%2fdocument_library%2fget_file&_20_fol derid=308&_20_name=egovbus_wp9+_d+r+co pdf A-43

44 6 Europe s most innovative public services During the Ministerial egovernment Conference 54 that took place in Lisbon in September 2007, four cases were selected among the 52 finalist projects to be nominated as the most innovative public services in Europe. This initiative was undertaken in order to highlight and build upon new developments in Europe and thus stimulate the dissemination of good practices. The City of Amsterdam from the Netherlands, the Ministry of Government Administration and Reform of Norway, the City of Besançon from France and the portal of the Federal Government of Germany each picked up one of the prestigious awards celebrating Europe s most innovative public services. The prize for the Most Inspiring Good Practice was awarded to the State Police of Italy as a result of a public vote. We briefly discuss each of those five cases in what follows. 6.1 Better services to citizens and business (HoReCa1 55 ) This case won the award in the category Better public services for growth and jobs. It is about a one-stop-shop for hotel, restaurants or café licences and was submitted by the Economic Development Department of the City of Amsterdam. Eighteen different authorities were involved in the process of obtaining a licence to operate a bar or a hotel or a restaurant, resulting in a cumbersome process for those who wished to set up in business. Procedural simplifications needed to reduce administrative burden, service and operating costs. The City of Amsterdam cooperated with four national ministries and finally created a one-stop-shop service, where the entrepreneur only needs to fill in a single form. The system distributes relevant data to different authorities concerned, such as local and national tax agencies, food and health authorities and music-licensing agencies. A questionnaire comprising twenty key-questions acts as a guide selecting the right forms to submit out of a total of forty applicable governmental documents. The project was organised around four main groups: 1. Internal end-users those who issue permits and licences. 2. Reference cities, as this is not uniquely about the City of Amsterdam. The system has to be designed generically for use nationwide. 3. Technical panel to discuss implementation problems, further development, and legacysystems. 4. Entrepreneurs panel to offer commentary on which services they want and evaluate results on a regular basis. Concentration of information in one location, transparent procedures, well-informed civil servants, better service quality, speed and efficiency are some of the positive innovative changes the project has brought. Financially it has shown a cost-saving potential of the order of 30 million Euros per year. Moreover, the method s transferability ensures straightforward 54 4 th Ministerial egovernment Conference, Lisbon, September 2007, 55 van Erven M., One-stop-shop for Hotel Restaurant Café licences, epractice.eu Cases, June 2007, A-44

45 application to other administrative procedures and sectors, as well as expansion of scope to incorporate new regulations and licences. The successful results produced rendered the HoReCa1 method to gain approval by the national ICT implementation organisation ICTU and the egovernment advisory agency EGEM as a pioneering method and effective technology transfer showcase. The latter will be enabled by these organisations in the form of active support for other local governments in the country who want to solve similar problems using the HoReCa1 method. Figure home page Transferability and sustainability concerns For this section, we draw on the conclusions reported in the analysis of the case by T.A. Urnheim 56. Given that available funding will allow the HoReCa1 service to run until 2009, the method has found popularity in Amsterdam and is to de adopted for online services such as building permits, public events applications and other services. The ex-manager of the project, Maurice Van Erven, has now been promoted and become responsible for this expansion and transfer. Two other Dutch cities (Nijmegen and The Hague) want to transfer the system to implement their own licensing procedures as well. 56 Undheim T.A., Best practices in egovernment: on a knife-edge between success and failure, February A-45

46 Amsterdam specialists have created a transfer-enabling toolkit and intend to promote it as an open standard. Also, HoReCa2, a new project to serve the back office process and help the officials involved is under way. The city of Amsterdam intend to put 400,000 of their own resources and to develop everything using open standards. 6.2 Electronic citizen-centric online services (Mypage 57 ) Mypage is a user-defined, secure citizen s portal in Norway. It is designed as a one-stop-shop service offering users single-point, personalised, public electronic services regardless of the service provider. Citizens can also have access and control on personal data held by various public administrations, thus improving transparency and data quality. The goal is that all relevant services at all levels of administration are to become available through Mypage by the end of The project is considered as a key enabler for the realisation of egovernment objectives in the country, both at the local, regional and national level. Mypage has achieved interoperability at all three levels defined by the IDABC framework, namely technical, organisational and semantic. Other innovative features include the incorporation of high accessibility, multilingualism, high security and privacy, subsidiarity. Implementation follows open standards and runs open source software. The project is carried out by the Ministry of Administration and Reform in cooperation with the leaders of state agencies, who are kept involved in the process. Authentication services occur through the utilisation of a PIN code which is currently distributed by mail and will soon be delivered via mobile phones. Pilot testing on mobile phones was performed using the mobile browser Opera. Impact assessments carried out on the results of the project, show that the innovative principle of the one-stop-shop has led to increased simplicity for the user in carrying out routine operations and higher levels of transparency and data quality. For example, there have been cases where citizens discovered that vehicles which they did not own were registered in their name. The steady growth in users (currently 200,000 registered users) combined with a steady growth in available online services (currently 200 services offered) ensures sustained growth and impact. As in the case of HoReCa1 previously, the Mypage solution and architecture is scalable and thus able to accommodate more users, services and service providers Further details T.A. Undheim who analysed the case 58 reports that when Mypage was launched on 18 December 2006 it was 18 months late, and used PIN-codes and not PKI (PKI implementation had already failed. Only 23 services were initially on offer and even these were mostly existing electronic services now displayed on one page online. The important thing however, as Undheim states was that over 20 municipalities were actively involved and even when tension had been high, this commitment and partnership at local level was not broken. 57 Tor Alvik Tor, Mypage self-service citizen's portal, epractice.eu Cases, May 2007, 58 Undheim T.A., Best practices in egovernment: on a knife-edge between success and failure, February A-46

47 In May 2007, after only four months of operation, about 200 services from more than 40 public administrations were serving around 5 percent of the population. I must also be noted that Mypage has spent almost nothing on traditional advertising, as the marketing budget of the parent Norge.no portal, an organisation with only 26 employees, was very small Transferability and sustainability concerns T.A. Undheim continues and reports that as Norge.no is too small, Mypage must get more national registry services and more geographically-based services: these are used more often and can be used as attractors to Mypage. The service officials are interested in sharing the new portal experience at European level. They aspire to make Mypage more generic and to make the solution available to the community so that developers can have access and build services on top of the existing system. They also encourage other countries to make use of the present solution. 6.3 Improve the citizens IT skills (Besançon.clic 59 ) The City of Besançon has become one of the most connected cities in France. Collaborative work between the municipality and the Ministry of State Education on issues regarding democratisation of ICTs has resulted in the provision of a home computer for every single student. An ebook pack was given to every family, comprising a computer with a digital workspace and the installation of public multimedia access points in every neighbourhood. A sixty Euros cheque was also granted for each "e-book pack" to enable families to subscribe to the Internet. Schools are not the only category targeted; the nobody left behind principle was applied. In addition to schoolchildren, hospitalised children, families, teachers, associations, old persons from the retirement homes, handicapped workers and 16,771 students in Senegal also benefited from the initiative. Today, all public or semi-public institutions exchange information freely on the network: schools, universities, hospitals, libraries, the city administrative services, chambers of commerce, etc. All equipment used in the project was acquired in the most efficient way possible: Partnerships with banks allowed the project to recover over 1,000 computers for schools. A partnership between Hachette Multimedia and the National Education system has allowed access to educational software, encyclopaedias, atlases and on-line documentaries, all of which are regularly updated with all the necessary network licences at low price. La Cinquième television station granted access to its library of educational documentaries. IBM France took care of the delivery of the servers. Lotus France supplied software. 59 Garrigues M., Besançon.clic, epractice.eu Cases, May 2007, A-47

48 Microsoft France took care of software licences. A partnership with AXA France, in the framework of "Seneclic", will lead to the supply of 30,000 computers to schools in Senegal by The project s main innovation lies on the development of a digital workplace, or educational portal, accessible to computers at school and at homes. The portal provides access to educational software and other programmes. Since all software is installed only at the server, the risk of deletion or destruction of software or files by the workstation used by the student, either at school or at home is minimised. Besançon.clic is not only an innovative project but also a boost towards widening einclusion: it reaches an entire age group, independently of its social class. It is worth noting that the old computers distributed were refurbished in a centre for disabled workers. In this way, the whole initiative had a positive impact on a wider part of the Besançon society. We itemise some aspects of this impact in what follows: Decrease of the digital divide. Besançon is expected that will soon become a city in which the number of homes connected to Internet is comparatively very large. To grasp the size of involvement of school students in ICTs, it is noted that schools in Besançon have one computer per 4 pupils while, at the same time, the national average is one computer per 20 pupils. Collective training sessions take place in digitally equipped public areas which favours communication among parents and parents and teachers alike, thus strengthening communal ties. Promotion of the work of handicapped people, which, in turn, creates employment opportunities for them. The use of educational software enables teachers to implement innovative teaching techniques based on wider knowledge bases, such as videos, based exchange of information with other schools, etc. Economic development. The project has obviously created an increase in the turnover of local I.T retailers, while the 60 grant given to each family for Internet connection increased business for services providers. 6.4 More efficient and transparent public administration (DVDV 60 ) The German Administration Services Directory (DVDV) lists electronically available egovernment services via a reliable infrastructure based on open Internet protocols and standards. This infrastructure allows cross-organisational paperless processes and has resulted in monthly savings of more than a million Euros for 5,200 German civil registration agencies. It is the result of effective cooperation between various levels of government. DVDV comprises agencies, services and providers at logical levels. The structure allows freedom for each agency to specify its own services and respective technical channels. 60 Hagen M., German Administration Services Directory (DVDV), epractice.eu Cases, June 2007, A-48

49 The system consists of a central database, running on a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server, and a series of decentralised databases updated via replication. There has been an important organisational effort for the Federal IT Agency (BIT) and the 16 states to finally agree upon a common scheme of operation. Stand-in and fall-back scenarios are solved through bi and multilateral agreements between providers, thus creating further efficiency through joint operations. Also, up-to-date data referring to more than 5000 civil registration agencies was collected for the first time ever via a coordinated organisational effort by the ministries responsible for civil registration. The DVDV enabled electronic interchange reduces administrative burden and costs: estimates show that the new system needs one to three (depending on the agency) persondays fewer per month and per agency compared to before. Handling costs for a single transaction have fallen from 2.70 to 0.38 approximately. On a general appraisal, administrative personnel have been relieved from paper-based processes, while citizens don t have to visit several agencies any more. Other impacts include a decrease in the number of errors and a resulting higher quality of data. Inquires are answered faster and better than before. The main innovation of DVDV lies on the cross-organisational and paperless processes which a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has made possible. In addition, it has equipped Germany with one of the first and globally largest standardised service-oriented infrastructures, which can reliably address all different actors involved. Another important innovation lies in the use of open international standards and standards agreed by German governments such as LDAP, WSDL, X.509/ISIS-MTT, OSCI-XMeld and OSCI-Transport. An important lesson learnt out of this experience is that cross-level, cross-sector co-operation of governments (local or even national) can be achieved through clever use of IT and innovative organisation models. SOA technology can provide cheap, fast and stable solutions of high availability, security and performance. The case can serve as an example of effective technology experience transfer to all public IT managers and decision makers in Europe. 6.5 An Online Police Station (OLPS 61 ) The Italian police force has created the world s first Online Police Station (OPS), where citizens may seek general information, download forms and make online complaints about computer crimes, or receive valuable advice by interacting with experts and reporting illegal conduct and events on the web. The online police station comprises the following virtual rooms: ICT Security, Immigration, Licences and Permits, Recruitment, Passports, Minors, and Complaints. In each room, visitors can find detailed information on each topic, as well as downloadable forms to obtain licences, authorisations and documents. Performance figures show that In less than a year the site has received 6,000 complaints and 17,000 information requests by more than 750,000 visitors. Visitors seem to be satisfied form the services provided in general; this is manifested by favourable feedback from users who 61 Masciopinto M., Online Police Station, epractice.eu Cases, June 2007, A-49

50 often express their thanks for the initiative and give suggestions and advice on how to improve it. This innovative uptake results in economy of labour effort compared to conventional police stations and allows for more efficient resource allocation. It also increases trust in the authorities and transparency of operation: citizens surf the web in the knowledge of social phenomena and new kinds of crimes, while at the same time they can ask for advice on the protection measures against specific threats. The new service was heavily promoted via ads in main Italian web portals with links to OPS and via main consumer associations and the ANCI (National Association of Italian Municipalities). Innovation lies on how police contact citizens: instead of them visiting the station, the station itself goes at home, work and every place with an Internet connection. Other innovative features include the ICT Security area, where citizens can submit their complaints online or report computer crimes. Every online complaint submitted is sent to the communications police station chosen by the user through a dedicated network. The project has been presented at Interpol headquarters within the European Working Party on Information Technology and has received unanimous appreciation by European police forces. We may thus see a successful technology transfer case, where the service becomes a commonly accepted standard at police stations in Europe. To enable this transfer, a model of the online police station is under preparation. The model will include different network structures and legal systems so as to address other police forces in the EU. A-50

51 7 G2B: transfer of technology and experience The issue of technology transfer in egovernment is difficult to resolve due to the multiple factors affecting each egovernment application: technological, cultural, social, financial etc. The subject is examined by the Transfer-East Specific Support Action aiming at the transfer of learning and the facilitating of the exchange of egovernment good practices. The specific domain of application of Transfer-East is Government to Business (G2B) applications transferable to the New Member States. The Action initially selected and documented 32 good practice cases as candidate pilots for technology and application transfer. These were presented to Public Administrations in the New Member States involved in the project, with the mandate to select 10 of those. This selection has been completed and the cases have completed their knowledge re-engineering and transfer phase. In Transfer-East, good practice cases are successful practices which represent leading edge experience, can stimulate creativity, ingenuity, self reflexivity and the transfer of good ideas. Good practice in this context: Has fully or substantially achieved its own objectives. Has had a beneficial impact on its environment. Most importantly, provides relevant and useful learning points and lessons, which act as a reservoir of ideas, guides, checklists, etc., that others can use as input to their own learning and implementation processes. Good G2B practices result from highly specific and unique conditions and contexts meaning that there can be no one-to-one transferability to other circumstances. It is interesting to note here the main areas of interest of the administrations of the New Member States when faced with a selection of a case, as summarised by Transfer-East: Point of departure the background for and the set-up of the service at the very initial stages. Kind of services officered. Interoperability how to deal with interaction between administrations, the level of back office integration, standards and forms. Dealing with the national, regional, and local level how to ensure cooperation, interoperability of data systems and metadata, level of communication, general IT and egovernment advancement that varied from the central to the very local level. Technical issues and problems. Security both in terms of data handling between administrations, and how the users submitting the data felt it was being treated. Problems encountered. User response. Communication, both internally and with the end users and customers. A-51

52 Legislative issues potential barriers, changing the law, implementing new directives to accommodate government practices. Strategies how and at what stages were IT and modernisation strategies developed, and whether they were implemented centrally or out in the regions. Sustainability would the service or project be run by the public administrations themselves, in house, or was it often contracted out to external parties. Based on those criteria the cases selected for transfer are briefly commented on in what follows. 7.1 Statistics Denmark StatBank Denmark (Statbank Denmark) is an official public statistical organisation in Denmark. It contains detailed statistical information on the Danish society. The database is free of charge and data can be exported in several file formats and presented as diagrams or maps. On a yearly basis, Statbank Denmark receives approximately data reports. The IT centre accounts for approx. 10% of the staff of Statbank Denmark s organisation. The centre develops its own systems in combination with standard software. Statistic Denmark s production of shelf goods and specially adjusted services is the result of 250 fixed statistical processes, as well as a variable number of ad-hoc investigations. Operation, maintenance, and further development of the 250 statistical processes take place in 21 statistical offices, which are organised in three statistical departments. The service today comprises an IT system for reporting, production and publication of statistical data with an internet interface, supporting databases and a CRM system. As a result, Statbank exhibits improved quality, flexibility and productivity which result in higher income generation from services and sales as well as improved customer satisfaction Results The number of tests has been reduced and the detection of errors has been improved through IT support tools. Digitalisation has increased sales of services by 3% as new, improved, and most importantly, more customer-tailored services are possible to develop. Customers requirements are met in a more targeted way. The printing office, which was part of Statbank Denmark, has recently been closed as it was no longer considered necessary. Most of the publications are placed on the web, resulting in very few hard copies being sent out to customers Transfer and experience gained The case was successfully transferred to the Slovenian statistical service. The experience acquired is summarised by Statbank Denmark as follows: A-52

53 Carry out considerable analysis of objectives, method to achieve them and expected impact. Apply a mixture of bottom-up, top-down approaches to the process internally in the organisation. Ensure that the whole organisation is involved in the process, and that senior management is on board. Choose a practical approach according to conditions. This can be incremental as in the case of Denmark or a single-go approach for cases of available assistance. Use some methodology for project management, so that process itself improves and evaluations are allowed both along the process and towards the end. 7.2 The AEAT portal for companies, Spain Spain was the first country in the European Union to offer online tax filing. Today it continues to develop its online taxation services. The Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria (AEAT) or Agencia Tributaria (Spanish Tax Agency) is a nation-wide service offering a complete online set of tax-filling services aimed at public agencies, citizens, and in particular business. AEAT s services reduce processing time and costs and offer an alternative access channel to the tax authorities. AEAT also offers computerised tax information to other public administrations. The main challenge faced by the Spanish Tax Administration today is not to offer isolated services on the Internet, but rather to create a virtual tax office where citizens are able to transact all the business they currently transact in the tax office or through the telephone. This project is now at an advanced stage, with different services for large companies, SMEs, professionals, other government agencies, individual taxpayers, etc. Currently, more than 95% of taxes (in number of declarations) can be processed online, including presentation, payment, status queries, queries of requested tax returns, issues of individual certificates, presentation of appeals, petitions for delay in payments, etc Impact and results The main drivers have been reduction of process time and costs. A multidisciplinary team within the AEAT has been set up for the preparation and development of electronic services, and all parties involved had their voice heard regarding the design. As a consequence of implementing this practice, the Spanish Tax Administration has achieved the following results: Year Agreement signed Electronic certificates issued Hours spent No of employees freed up , , ,037, , , , , ,07 Table 1. Efficiency achieved A-53

54 Based on a rate of employee/year of hours and an estimated time of 12 minutes per certificate not having to be issued by tax staff, the human resources freed up with this practice represent the results shown in the table above. In practice, however, issuing a certificate would have affected more employees for a shorter period of time, as this task was shared by many in the offices that issued individual certificates. Figure 15. Basic information flows (AEAT) Transfer and experience gained The success of the development of electronic services is partly due to the innovative character of AEAT. ICT is strongly embedded in the organisation. Changes have been gradually introduced so that both AEAT itself and its customers had the chance to become accustomed to the new services. AEAT has made it obligatory for large companies to file electronically. Although large companies showed some resistance at the beginning, they are now very satisfied and ask for more online services. For this reason, marketing has targeted other groups so as to encourage the use of online declarations. Investments have been made to improve the supporting services which help customers file electronically. This has contributed to an even higher uptake that brings along yet more savings. The case has been chosen as a technology and experience transfer case for Slovakia. More detail will be included once it becomes available by the Transfer-East Action. 7.3 The Altinn project, Norway The name Altinn has a double meaning in Norwegian. It roughly translates into All-in, but the name is in fact short for Alternative Reporting, in this case electronic reporting over the Internet, as opposed to reporting using paper forms. ALTINN (or All-in ) facilitates the electronic reporting of citizens, business and public sector organisations to authorities, through one integrated national solution, available 24/7. ALTINN thus reduces red tape for all, 62 A-54

55 while increasing efficiency, effectiveness, quality and transparency (via an non-complex interface). Technically, Altinn is built on the MS.NET platform, but in most cases users do not have to change their hardware or software. Regular access to Internet is usually sufficient. The solution builds on a standard interface based on an open standard (XML, SOAP), and integration towards the IT systems for the enterprises is implemented through web services. Altinn is designed for any security level and the software ensures that access to and treatment of data is restricted to people and software with proper access rights. Four levels of security have been implemented for storage and tracking of data. Authentication and digital signature is supported via a smart card solution based on PKI software. Figure 16. Basic information flow (ALTINN project) Transfer and experience gained The project would not have been successful without the support of business organisations, and the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprises (NHO). In 2006 almost 40 suppliers of business software offered integration with Altinn. Altinn emphasises that continuous development is important, and it must be based on feedback from users, the participating institutions, businesses and suppliers of business systems. The case has been chosen as a technology and experience transfer case for Slovakia. More detail will be included once it becomes available by the Transfer-East Action. 7.4 Digital Signatures, Denmark The digital signature project 64 was initiated as part of the Danish egovernment programme, launched to meet the increasing demands of modernisation and development in the public 63 A-55

56 sector. The objective was to have at least 1.1 million digital signature certificates, by the end of Current data available shows that as of early 2007 approximately electronic signatures have been issued in Denmark compared to circa at the end 2005 and in The vast majority of these signatures have been issued to private individuals. The Danish standard for digital signatures has been developed by ITST6 under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation utilising PKI and its three security elements, namely, authentication, integrity and confidentiality. The Danish solution does not rely on a single certification authority, therefore the individual user must judge for himself whether a given centre/authority is trustworthy or not. In addition the certification authorities must regularly report to the national IT and Telecom agency, who, in turn, evaluate their track record. Almost all Danish public authorities have implemented digital signatures and have established appropriate means for the reception of secure . Services offered include: Electronic communication, where the only requirement is that citizens or businesses have an electronic postal address, i.e. an address, and wish to exchange information and material electronically with public authorities. This reduces the need to develop new content services such as websites as information can be disseminated electronically Log-on services, which may be interactive, but they nevertheless offer opportunity for a citizen or business to access and/or change personal data. This reduces telephone, personal and written requests for information and/or access to and change of data eforms, for communication between public authorities and businesses or citizens (e.g. tax returns). Fully-utilised eforms can drastically reduce the resources used for manual, paper-based processes Transfer and experience gained Although highly successful by now, the original intention of the Danish digital signature project was to be used for ebusiness among private sector companies. This has however been slow to materialise partly because the public digital signature project is in competition with the private banks net banking ID s which is widely used in ebusiness in Denmark. Experience acquired during the project resulted in the following recommendations, to be used for cases of transfer. Involve top management and politicians, in order to clarify any strategic issues and ensure commitment Perform a full risk analysis into establishing the digital signature as part of the overall infrastructure of the public sector and as part of isolated solutions. The analysis should identify which risk and security elements should be dealt with at the development and implementation stage as well as the operation stage. Perform a needs analysis, i.e. ensure that a digital signature fulfils the needs of current and future demands Identify your target groups both internally and externally, i.e. in public administrations, businesses and citizens and focus on them 64 Leevard-Bjorn G., Digital Signatures in Denmark, epractice.eu Cases, February 2006, A-56

57 Do not underestimate the power of a marketing and public relations campaign in promoting user take-up. The case has been chosen as a technology and experience transfer case for Poland. More detail will be included once it becomes available by the Transfer-East Action. 7.5 The Knowledge Network, UK The Knowledge Network (KN) is a government-wide electronic communication tool helping government departments in the UK to share knowledge with each other, and providing an online collaborative working environment across government. To business, it offers quick access to legal and other information and to the public sector it may be employed as a better platform for efficient and equal treatment of cases and requests. The Knowledge Network provides fast flows of knowledge, facts and figures and allows government officials based in the UK (via GSi) and other government officials based in over 200 countries around the world (via internet) to communicate and share information on a common platform.. In 2006, the delivery of the Knowledge Network was outsourced to the private sector. In 2007, there are 20 current customers of the service who are all central government customers. However, any customer of the Government Secure Intranet (GSi) could potentially add applications to the service. The majority of applications are provided on the GSi, which is a secure area only available to government departments. Some of these are replicated from the GSi onto the Internet, but access to them is via a User ID and Password. A small number of applications are provided on the Internet only. The cost of the Knowledge Network was approximately 12 million pounds. After a public tender in 2005, SciSys was awarded the 1 million a year contract for maintaining the KN for a three year period from 2006 onwards. The costs for customers were calculated as daily rates and also as fixed fees to buy equipment. Implemented services include: Knowledge Network Central, a service on GSi which allows policy briefs written by officials across government to be seen and shared in a central place. LION (Legal Information On-line) - a new form of collaborative community-based working environment amongst the members of the Government Legal Service (GLS). It enables GLS members to access and share information relating to government, law and legal practice, irrespective of where they are working. Public Spending Guidance website, launched on the Knowledge Network in 2002, which allows colleagues in government Treasury departments and their agencies to share information on issues affecting public spending work Transfer and experience gained The Knowledge Network is a case of a successful knowledge initiative in a risk adverse environment. As a showcase of a successful application, it was a focused (had a clear business need to meet), demand-driven project, supported by a high-level central body of authority. A-57

58 The outsourced solution is considered favourable as it retains economies of scale and does not require Cabinet Office subsidies. It gives a transparent, consumption-based charge for each application. Also the outsourced solution provides certainty for customers for 3 to 5 years regarding delivery and cost of services. The case has been chosen as a technology and experience transfer case for Poland. More detail will be included once it becomes available by the Transfer-East Action. 7.6 eprocurement and etendering Electronic procurement and tendering is an important part of egovernment as it offers a number of unique advantages to the public sector. These are economy of effort and funds, transparency and convenience. It is therefore not surprising that this area showed the largest potential for isolating good practice cases for technology and experience transfer, manifested in four cases which are described below The Danish public procurement portal The Danish Public Procurement Portal is an electronic marketplace to which both private and public purchasers and their suppliers have access and whose functionality, interface, security and transaction costs are regulated by the public sector. National Procurement Ltd.-Denmark (Staten og Kommunernes Indkøbsservice - SKI) brings together public purchasers and suppliers by negotiating large framework contracts for their customers (including approximately 11,500 institutions, ministries and public agencies across Denmark). The suppliers total 300 suppliers on framework agreements, several with distributors, totalling more than 1200 order addresses in Denmark. The National Procurement Ltd. Denmark (SKI) has offered eprocurement to its public users since 2002, being one of the first such services in Europe. SKI is owned jointly by the state (55%) and the National Association of Local Authorities in Denmark (45%). A specific module used for tendering is a separate sub-system called ETHICS (Electronic Tender Handling, Information and Communications System) and is an open, secure webbased procurement system enabling agencies to plan, execute and evaluate public tenders in compliance with EU-defined legal guidelines. The system, shown below, works with any Javasupported browser. A-58

59 Figure 17. The tendering process via ETHICS 65 The solution covers all aspects of operating a public tender organisation, including the annual planning cycle and tender selection and timing, as well as: official pre warning and external tender announcement procedures daily management issues with work in progress, including online communications with bidders online, secure tendering using digital signatures transparent decision making based on a questionnaire design tool tool for creating questionnaires and integrating them into vendors own systems reuse of knowledge and templates, contractual terms, questionnaires and forms a comprehensive tracking and exception reporting system that helps control simultaneous tenders multiple language support. The public procurement portal is a web-based system based on Oracle exchange software. The current version supports e-auctions, e-catalogues and integration with back-office systems. Buyers can be both public and private sector customers. When an order is 65 A-59

60 submitted at the marketplace portal, the workflow is controlled in relation to that order. Furthermore, the portal enables all parties to integrate the companies buying, selling and payment terms into their underlying financial systems. This enables the companies to save money on administration since manual checking and other time-consuming procedures can be considerable reduced. To secure small suppliers access, particularly favourable conditions have been created for them. The portal employs an electronic marketplace module called DOIPEI, which also back office integration to ERP systems at both the suppliers and purchasers end. mydoip is a customised e-trade portal for public purchasers. The overall eprocurement process in Denmark as well as the role of the portal is shown on the figure below. Figure 18. The eprocurement process in Denmark Transfer and experience gained The strategy pursued by the consortia behind the Public eprocurement Portal was to select a marketplace where there was a potential for business transactions from day one. This objective was to a large extent fulfilled, given that the Public eprocurement Portal involved itself in an already ongoing electronic marketplace. The potential scope of eprocurement for the public sector was estimated to be DKK 8 billion per year. By February 2004, two years after the launch of the Public eprocurement Portal, the total value of public procurement transactions on the portal was approximately DKK 48 million A-60

61 Despite initially high expectations, adoption of the Public eprocurement Portal in the public administration has been low. Public institutions which were financially independent were not willing to subscribe to a system which centralises purchase processes and control. The 2007 decision by the Danish Ministry of Finance to make the use of certain framework contracts mandatory for public purchasers accelerated the process in combination with the electronic marketplace DOIP/DOIPEI at The ETHICS system can be used autonomously. Although it was developed in cooperation with SKI, ETHICS is now owned by IBM and is marketed as an IBM product, having been sold to a number of European countries including Portugal, Malta, and Slovakia. Technology and experience transfer has taken place in Slovenia and the Czech Republic. More detail will be included once it becomes available by the Transfer-East Action The Piedmont Region s eprocurement platform and CONCIP, Italy The Italian Piedmont Region has established a single Internet access point to public eprocurement. The Piedmont platform has also inspired the national eprocurement portal Acquisti in Rete. The project started in 2003, as an eprocurement platform at the disposal of all regional offices of the administration to support management of IT calls for tender, electronic marketplaces and agreements between bodies. One important aspect of this case is the legal framework. Italy regulates the award of procurement contracts by formal rules, which have legal status and pose multifaceted and complex issues on the appropriate use of IT tools. The legal framework was completed in At national level, the project has had substantial impact. Piedmont became one of the precursors in online management of public procurement. At local level, the increase in the number of subscriptions and users of the eprocurement platform in 2004 led to major savings in terms of both efficiency and price reductions. Today, the Piedmont eprocurement platform and Consip is a virtual marketplace which allows publication and bidding on calls for tenders on a 24/7 basis. It offers a simple, unified, all-inclusive contracting process for the public sector and contractors, including SMEs. The application has enabled: Electronic tenders of various kinds using different systems (e.g. dynamic bidding or sealed bids) Management of electronic framework agreements The use of catalogue purchases on the electronic marketplace, using electronic catalogues provided by qualified registered suppliers Transfer and experience gained The project is potentially transferable to any Italian administration since it has been customised to satisfy country-specific organisational and legal requirements. At the same time, however, the standard platform is based on generalised requirements, is available in English, it could be used by other countries with some possible adaptation to local legislation. The eprocurement offer in this case is more in the nature of a service than simply software, characterised by integration with government economic and management processes. While not requiring any radical change of duties, the use of an on-line system changes the way users work. What has been learnt is that such initiatives cannot be successful unless supported and being accepted by the operating users base. A-61

62 The effort in terms of human resources required for such a project is considerable, but the potential benefit in the medium term is considered an adequate compensation Federal eprocurement platform (E-Vergabe), Germany The e-vergabe is the federal government s eprocurement Platform, a virtual marketplace which allows authorities to publish calls for tenders electronically and enables bidders to submit offers completely and bindingly over the Internet. Every function of e-vergabe is regulated through smart cards - there are no passwords. Before 2006, registering and accessing tender documents required a smart card carrying a qualified esignature. Since 2006, a software based certificate has been issued. This certificate can be used for communication but not for signing bids electronically. To promote electronic tendering in Germany an advanced signature system is expected to be in place by The advanced signature will then be sufficient even for signing offers. The platform is built around a UNIX-based server architecture, with Windows-based Java web-start clients, which take over all encryption and decryption. It can be reached at The system runs on standard server configurations (Apache, BEA Weblogic and Oracle based on RedHat/Debian Linux or Sun Solaris) and can be ported to any J2EE 1.2/SQL92 compliant server. While a few special pieces of hardware are required (such as a time stamp device), for the most part the system consists of software that installs on top of pre-existing standard hardware. Procurement agencies can decide individually which workflow system suits them best. The platform provides an interface for workflow systems so that they can be fully integrated. Users will only work with the workflow system, while the platform offers the best security in the background and enables fast communication between buyers and agency. A key benefit of the system is that by sharing data via a web service, all federal tenders can be browsed and searched from a single starting point. Small and medium businesses can now easily access and search through tenders online at no cost. This strengthens competition, leads to lower prices and improves transparency of contracting processes Transfer and experience gained This project can be used as experience for others that wish to develop an eprocurement system. It is certainly a positive example and a success. Reduction in system requirements complexity is always beneficial: as soon as a software-based certificate for registering was developed, the number of registered companies increased at a rate of more than 100 per month. Multidisciplinary work between legal and technical staff and the organisational units is very important, but requires a great deal of time to create a shared understanding. Providing a high-availability system for the time-critical submission of bids is cost-intensive, therefore, having a multi-client application for sharing operational costs is important. Last but not least, an important factor, affecting both acceptance by users as well as transferability of the case, is the legal framework. For example, the current German legislation is characterised by complexity of structure and a large number of applicable regulations. This complicates platform functionality and possibly prevents full transparency. An amendment act to solve these problems is currently under preparation. A-62

63 8 Secure pan-european egovernment IST call 4 states that research for secure pan European egovernment should address the use of secure architectures, environments and information infrastructures, service dependability as well as interoperability challenges, in public administrations across Europe. Particular challenges are to cope with the high degree of heterogeneity, complexity and seeming perseverance of legacy systems in European public administrations. The new environments should be flexible as to allow for new forms of service provision (e.g. via public private partnerships). Research should also address technologies and implementation of pan- European secure and interoperable egovernment electronic identity management and authentication systems, including the use of smart card technologies, biometrics and trusted services. The end-user will not embrace electronic procedures instead of paper forms if transactions with the public administration are not managed in a secure and trustworthy way. Among the group of mature projects in FP6, innovation comes from the results of the following projects. emayor (Electronic and Secure Municipal Administration for European Citizens) GUIDE (Creating a European Identity Management Architecture for egovernment) TERREGOV (Impact on egovernment on Territorial Government Services) 8.1 emayor: Certificates and smart cards Security services and mechanisms have been implemented by emayor for their egovernment platform. The whole spectrum of web service security technologies and standards was evaluated by taking into account the specific requirements that came up during the system design. These requirements led to the selection of SSL for transport layer security and the usage of XML digital signatures for document authentication and integrity on the business logic level. X.509 certificates and smart cards have been the means for authentication, authorisation and document signing. Access control has been implemented using XACML as an upcoming Web Service security standard and it has been further researched with respect to its overall policy definition capabilities. The emayor PKI and its components were set up and all relevant PKI policies have been drafted and documented. All the above security components were integrated in the emayor platform and they are able to communicate seamlessly with the core components in order to carry out the security policies as demanded by the supported business processes. The emayor platform was put into operation at the pilot sites of the Municipalities of Bolzano, Aachen, Siena and Seville. In Greece the pilot site was put into operation at Expertnet, contributing to the technical tests and overall integration, from a user s perspective. At the pilot sites the platform was installed on dedicated hardware, and connected to the local Internet feed, as well as integrated with a test version of the legacy back office systems at the municipalities. It was decided that during the trial activities no real operation on real municipal database will be executed, thus a system of databases replicas were the sufficient support for the Trials. The sample users real data were extracted from real municipal databases but were then in a dummy way by the platform. The trials set-up was undertaken by the four municipalities themselves in co-operation with one of the technical partners in the emayor project. In Athens the trial version was set up at A-63

64 Expertnet and the city officials were invited for a demonstration and presentation. The trial set up proceeded at a different pace in the four cities involved, due to different back-office systems, organisation and ICT environments Innovation value The project emayor has contributed to innovation, as it showed the first really large scale set of trials achieving interoperability among European Municipalities. The technologies developed and reworked for these purposes, address a new way of the handling of digital forms, the implementation of security enforcement module, the handling of language issues in cross border egovernment and the integration into one adaptable and easy to implement egovernment platform. The project provides a lightweight implementation of a full egovernment platform for use with the clients, which fulfils future requirements of exchange of documents between stakeholders and works for users without coding. The consortium claims that emayor is the first and only project that shows how one can practically solve the cross-border interoperability challenge, without making use of a centralised architecture. As such it may form the basis of a number of applications serving mobility in Europe. Apart from the local advantages of emayor, for municipalities and other smaller government organisations this solution for dealing with cross border egovernment is considered by the consortium as a real possibility to work on real politically important priority actions. The emayor platform is available for download as an Open Source product through the BerliOS Developer site supported by the Fraunhofer Society institute FOKUS. 8.2 GUIDE: Identification The GUIDE project aims to create an architecture for egovernment electronic identity services and transactions for Europe. The project's approach is inter-disciplinary and involves technological, policy, and procedural research and development across all the member states of the EU. The central organising concept of GUIDE is identity which is understood in a broad sense, encompassing its moral philosophical foundations, as well as the legal, technological and government process issues that help shape it. Identity is defined as all information associated with an individual or organisation; not simply a token or digital certificate. Identity management involves maintaining an individual entity's complete information set, spanning multiple contexts and transactions, with the goal of improving data protection, consistency, accuracy, efficiency and security. The project envisaged a Circle of Trust among users, including citizens, businesses and Member States to determine which issues to address in the design phase. An in-depth sociological study pinpointed and contextualised all major concerns regarding electronic identity. This offered a holistic view of the challenges which improved identity management (IDM) faces. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Estonia participated in a trial in the area of social security, using European standard Form E101, as explained below. The purpose of the E101 trial was to build and test a subset of the GUIDE core pan-eu identity interoperability services, using existing member state implementations of E101 applications as a vehicle for invoking these services. The subset of these core services for the GUIDE trials was: A-64

65 Pan-EU Authentication & Identification (for citizens and businesses). Pan-EU Identity Attribute Provision (for citizens). The project interviewed national representatives of the following member states on how they perceive authentication and identification with respect to what GUIDE is able to offer. The countries interviewed were: Austria, Belgium, UK, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, and Sweden. In general, the potential offering of GUIDE was perceived positively as it protects infrastructure already in existence and aims to join national infrastructures using gateways. What was also received positively was the ability of the GUIDE architecture to deliver interoperability between countries with unique identifier schemes. 8.3 TERREGOV: Data security and privacy TERREGOV provides inter-agency services for local government and is particularly concerned with issues of data security. The architectural solution adopted is that of a clearing house, in order to establish a clear separation between the responsibility of routing data and the responsibility for data themselves. The clearing house holds absolutely no core data about citizens; its task is to route every message from one institution to another, in line with the rules jointly decided on and the authorisations granted by an ad hoc Committee. The ownership of the databases remains with the institutions which have the most legitimacy to maintain them. This rule is more or less the same as the double envelope principle used in other applications which the project studied in Bremen, Germany. Project researchers have studied the difficulties associated with transactions from one agency to another and the access rights for data transfer. They concluded that for reasons such as: adoption or not of a unique identification number for all transactions with public entities (unique ID in Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, but illegal in some counties), inter-agency authorisation of access rights, implementation of an interoperable platform interconnected to several public agencies is a complex issue which needs in-depth collaborative work, in order to define precisely the sharing of responsibilities and policy involved. Researchers in the project are currently examining integration of the project s security module in several platform modules to be installed in the pilot sites. Issues involved include: The provision of security in the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration Registry (UDDI) protocol for services. The specification UDDI v3 has been released and includes new features in security environment: digital signature and security improvements added. The Open Web Single Sign-On project (an open-source implementation of the Single Sign On Open Source initiative by Sun Microsystems Inc., which manages the foundation of identity services for web applications). This implementation will offer the following services: Authentication, Session and Logging. In the TERREGOV project, the modules must control users in order to avoid unexpected accesses to the resources they manage. In an integrated environment, data integrity and coherence is a must. Therefore, every component must ensure that the caller that invokes it is effectively A-65

66 authenticated and have rights enough for accessing the resources it provides. By the adoption of this architecture, any application involved in TERREGOV environment is able to include security. With the same approach, TERREGOV local agencies are able to log themselves in any TERREGOV application without any effort. Regarding users information storage, the best option to store such information, together with their credentials, is an LDAP database due to its optimisation in read accesses. In addition, it can be integrated in almost all the application servers. In TERREGOV, the LDAP database is managed by the CA module from the TERREGOV Security Module and is available to the rest of the platform modules. 8.4 Note For reasons of completeness we mention here the showcase practical application of the digital signature at state level in Denmark. Details of the digital signature project can be found in chapter 7. A-66

67 9 Innovative ICTs for democratic involvement According to Timmers 67 the path towards modernisation of public administration runs necessarily through innovative ICTs for democratic involvement, in particular eparticipation and edemocracy. Research should address innovative tools and methods for fact-based policy development, agent technologies, intelligent formulation and enactment tools supporting preparation of democratic decisions, scalable dialogue tools as well as new possibilities for interactivity in democratic processes. ICT technologies can provide diverse tools for eparticipation and edemocracy. These include , Instant Messaging, File Sharing, RSS, Streaming Media Technologies, CSCW/Groupware, Semantic Web Technology, Web Services, XML, Security Protocols, Agent Technologies, Data Mining, Ontological Engineering, Computational Linguistics, NLP, Identity Management and Filtering Technologies. DEMO-net, a Network of Excellence (NoE) under FP6 addresses scientific, technological and social research in eparticipation by integrating the research capacities of individuals and organisations spread across Europe. The intention is overcome the currently fragmented approach to eparticipation in Europe and to advance the way research is carried out with respect to quality, efficiency, innovation and impact. The areas covered by eparticipation include 68 : Campaigning Discourse Community building / Collaborative Environments Electioneering Consultation Information Provision Deliberation Mediation Polling Spatial planning Voting In what follows we will focus on some of the most important technological innovations which can affect democratic and participatory processes. 9.1 Content Management Systems Web-based Content Management Systems 69 (WCMS) initially appeared in mid 1990s are complex editorial systems which coordinate web-based working processes and help create content online. They facilitate, in general, the overall process for collecting, managing and publishing content to any outlet 70. Users are not required to have any technical knowledge on 67 Paul Timmers, EG-Liaison, Den Haag Seminar e-government: wat kunnen we leren van Europa, Oct DEMO_net : D 14.3 CMS Content Management Systems in eparticipation Contexts, Feb Boiko B., Content Management Bible. New York, USA: Hungry Minds, 2002 A-67

68 creating or editing websites; the generated websites, however, remain conformant to given templates. Other similar systems manage semantic content (meaningful organised content), enterprise content (content and documents related to organisational processes), documents (content management of documents in any format), digital rights (property rights information), and assets (images, video, audio, and other binary, non-textual content). Various web content management systems exist; most of them are open source and require PHP and MySQL database connections. Applications of CMSs lie in business and commerce, government and online education. Business applications are thought to be internet shops and market places, customer relationship management software, etc, Business to Customer (B2C), Business to Business (B2B) as well as Business to Administration (B2A) applications. Online education is technically characterised by the use of a computer network to present or distribute educational content providing a two-way communication (student to student, student to teachers, and students to staff) via this network. Concerning government applications, it is worth mentioning that the German Federal Office of Administration has developed the Government Site Builder (GSB) as the central content management solution for the websites of the federal administration. As the authors point out, the devices of the GSB were based on the typical requirements of authorities conceived. They include, for example, finished layout templates or navigation concepts. In addition, other modules (which are not original to a CMS but to a WCMS) are offered, such as the newsletter functionality and the search functionality. The German governments can use all modules for their demands, specifically configure them or add additional proprietary developments. The GSB was used in more than 90 projects in more than 50 agencies, as for instance the portal of the Federal Government. In the context of eparticipation, content management can be helpful at all levels of engagement defined by DEMO-net 71 : einforming, econsulting, einvolvement, ecollaboration, and eempowering. In particular, CMS plays a key role in einforming. A good example among CMS-equipped platforms supporting eparticipation is Gov2DemOSS, an open source ecollaboration platform based on a content management system. The system has been awarded egovernment good practice label by epractice.eu in It allows institutions and organisations to keep their communities informed, manage their information repositories, gauge public opinion, interact directly with their constituents, and involve them in the decision making process. Among the features included one may appreciate deliberation forums to provide participation possibilities for stakeholders, polls for gauging users opinion and petitions to mobilise citizens around specific issues. Moreover, initiatives outside the strict FP6 circle have produced interesting results that could act as enablers for improving democratic legitimacy in policy making processes. In a study 72 addressing the issue involving citizens in local policy-making, the authors propose a new model for eparticipation, which employs collaborative writing processes to produce agreed documents. This is in contrast to the so called Problem Structuring Methods are often used to support policy making processes. These usually take the form of workshops involving 71 DEMO-net: Deliverable 5.1 Report on current ICTs to enable Participation, Aug R.P Lourenço and J.P Costa, Incorporating citizens' views in local policy decision making processes, Decision Support Systems, Volume 43, Issue 4, August 2007, Pages A-68

69 experts, stakeholder representatives and political decision makers, but they exclude ordinary citizens from directly influencing policies that affect their daily lives. The authors view of eparticipation is based upon three types of model, built around the two key concepts of participants and contributors: how to properly organise contributions (discussion structure) how to relate contributions (search for related ideas from other participants) how to integrate contributions (collaborative writing model) A public participation process begins when someone decides to promote a citizens' debate on an issue of public interest. The different participants involved in a public participation process can be identified as: the sponsor, the facilitator, associated official entities, contributors and observers, assuming their individual roles. A contributor may intervene in the public participation process by submitting a text item with proposals for policies and actions or comments (viewpoints, arguments, rationales or positions) about a certain issue accompanied by the relevant support documents, or by posing or answering questions to other participants. Lourenço and Costa (see precious reference) propose a collaborative support system accessible through normal browsers. Participants may access the website either as guests (they may only view information, but cannot actively participate) or as full registered participants (submit text items, collaboratively write joint contributions, etc). Once logged in, each participant is notified about new events occurred since his/her last participation. Registered participants may subscribe to other participants' text items or they may prepare their own. Once a new text item is submitted, the author may try to merge it with other text items by proposing an integrate link to the corresponding authors. The structure of a public discussion requires links to previous messages, providing a miscellaneous collection of vaguely associated comments. This is a form of visualisation of arguments and counterarguments, which enhances deliberation potential of popular systems such as forums. Research areas where public participation support is currently being considered include the Group Support Systems (GSS). Authors 73 propose the development of a Social Decision Support System (SDSS) to support the investigation by large groups of complex topics about which many diverse and opposing views are held. A continuous dynamic voting system helps filter and organise the contributions submitted. Besides, such a system would have to depend on the citizen's ability to post each contribution under the correct label. Contributions to the debate are expressed with the label of an issue, an option, a comment or a relationship between two of them. A possible danger would be to transform the debate into a meta-debate about the correct label for each contribution. 9.2 Adaptation and personalisation technologies As conditions, needs and available information change, technologies, which enable systems to change and automatically adapt themselves to user needs and to their environment in general, have been proposed. They are usually referred to under the collective name of adaptation and personalisation technologies. 73 M. Turoff, S.R. Hiltz, H.-K. Cho, Z. Li, Y. Wang, Social Decision Support Systems (SDSS), Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Hawaii, 2002). A-69

70 As is pointed out in the study by Lourenço and Costa 74 a key question on citizens participation is how technology can enable an individual's voice to be heard and not be lost in the mass debate. Support must be provided to allow each individual citizen to find others with a similar point of view and to incorporate his/her individual contribution into a common position. The diversity of common positions, resulting from many different convergent processes, can lead to some kind of community memory being built. This community memory must then be expressed in a suitable form so as to serve as input to a policy making process, which can be supported by problem structuring methods. Adaptation and personalisation technologies are used in eparticipation websites to tackle the overflow of information and to acquire a better knowledge of the end-users in order to optimise the service provided. In the rich link structure of a portal, users can easily get overwhelmed and become unable to navigate effectively. Side effects include skipping important content, losing sight of objectives, or looking for stimulating rather than informative material. Moreover, websites provide relatively static content, which some users may have difficulty in understanding, while others may consider that much of the information provided is redundant or uninteresting. The answer comes from intelligent tools (such as data mining techniques, machine learning, user modelling, optimisation theory and graph theory) and structures which can make navigation on sites easier for the user and maximise quality and completeness. These are exemplified in eparticipation, where citizens have differing needs and expectations. Adaptation and personalisation technologies appear not to be very much used in eparticipation projects to date. An interesting innovation example in integrating such technologies in egovernment portals is the reference found in DEMO-net 75 about a system 76 which makes use of personalisation and semantic technologies in order to provide a personalised view of legal information/documents to citizens. The main idea underlying this research is that some legal documents or some of their parts only apply to specific classes of citizens. The system uses a profiling method to provide a personalised version of the legal document to a citizen, containing only articles applicable to his/her personal case. Another example of application of adaptation and personalisation technology in the egovernment domain is the FP6 project FIT 77. FIT does not include eparticipation in its objectives, however, we believe that innovative technologies which allow an egovernment system to adapt its behaviour to suit the needs of the user, do promote greater user participation. The overall objective of FIT is to develop, test and validate a self-adaptive egovernment framework based on semantic technologies. This will enable services to adapt to changing needs and preferences of users. The general principle behind FIT is the notion of a selfadaptive egovernment, which automatically discovers deficiencies in its functioning and fits itself in order to satisfy ever increasing users expectations. The FIT aim is shown schematically in the figure below. 74 R.P Lourenço and J.P Costa, Incorporating citizens' views in local policy decision making processes, Decision Support Systems, Volume 43, Issue 4, August 2007, Pages DEMO-net : D14.3 The role of Adaptivity & Personalization technologies in eparticipation, Dec Grandi F., Mandreoli F., Martoglia R., Ronchetti E., Scalas M.R., Tiberio P., Semantic Web Techniques for Personalization of egovernment Services. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Web Applications: Theory and Practice (ER SemWAT 2006), LNCS 4231/2006, pp , Stojanovic N., Stojanovic L., Hinkelmann K., Mentzas G., Abecker A., Fostering self-adaptive e-government service improvement using semantic technologies. AAAI Spring Symposium: The Semantic Web meets egovernment, Stanford University, California, USA, March 27-29, A-70

71 Figure 19. The FIT aim 78 The project relies decisively on a set of purpose-built ontologies structure 79. A set of five distinct ontologies are used, namely Rules, Quality, Enterprise, Domain and Information ontologies. As FIT researchers explain, in order to be adaptive, the process models, which are part of the enterprise ontology, must be enhanced with adaptive information. Since the adaptation to the specific user and context is made at runtime, the criteria for adaptation have to be modelled explicitly. For example, the information ontology must support adaptation of user interaction and information presentation on the public administration s web portal. Information presentation affects layout, content and linking. Therefore, the information ontology must describe the different kinds of information sources with their respective structure, access, and format. In addition there must be links to the content (which refers to the domain ontology) and the context in which the information source is used (which refers to the process model). The adaptation requirement demands that these relations are not fixed. Depending on a particular user in a specific process context the relevant content of the information sources is selected and the layout (e.g. font size) and additional links (e.g. to a specific help page) are determined. In order to enforce innovation in eparticipation projects, DEMO-net 75 researchers suggest the provision of personalised views of background downloadable documents based needs specified by user profiles. Based on the idea of Grandi et al (see footnote [ 76 ] before) legal, technical and even policy formation documents can be treated in this way. To take this one 78 FIT: D1: Dissemination Resources, April FIT: D3: Requirements specification and process modelling formalism, July 2006 A-71

72 step further, factors such as user s knowledge, expertise, background and disabilities can be taken into account. For example, the system may offer oral versions of the eparticipation site with selectable language, or variation of the font size depending on user s vision. Finally, multimedia tools such as webcasting can be used by governmental authorities for communicating key messages and involving the public, as has been investigated by eten funded project eparticipate 80. In addition to traditional web casts, the system developed there provides advanced features: citizens can fully control the movement of cameras, can view a textual summary of a meeting, and can select background information about speakers at events and others. 9.3 Web 2.0 technologies Web 2.0 is a concept that appeared in October 2004 in the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference. One of the key enablers for Web 2.0 is the emergence of a new generation of technologies and standards. The main idea behind Web 2.0 is to imagine the web, not as a bunch of static HTML pages, but rather as a platform, where software services run in a browser, and where users add value to it. Web 2.0 reveals the social aspects of networks and the Web in general; this is why Web 2.0 and social computing are two terms that appear frequently together in the literature. Some of the well-known Web 2.0 tools include blogs, wikis, tags and podcasts. All these features may bring innovative aspects when applied to eparticipation applications, such as 81 : Information flows freely. People can express their ideas without any fear. Internet becomes a democratic system. Users become more informed, as they receive their information from multiple sources. Users are allowed to make better decisions as they have in mind many facets of a certain subject. Communication is enhanced, as Internet is one of the greatest communication mediums. Web 2.0 services facilitate experimentation and testing. Web 2.0 technologies do not require any special technical expertise on behalf of the user. The above advantages may be amplified when combined with the adaptation and personalisation technologies described before. In what follows, we present some of the most indicative examples of innovative applications of Web 2.0 technologies on eparticipation 81 : Open Politics, initiated in March 2005, is a project to develop wiki technologies for public policy applications. The purpose of the site is to provide an open forum for collaboration and deliberation on political issues, by facilitating the open exchange of ideas via the Internet. 80 eparticipate eten project home page, (2007). Available at 81 DEMO-net : D14.3 The role of Web 2.0 technologies in eparticipation, Dec A-72

73 Registered users may edit a page with a specific issue, agree or disagree with a view, raise an issue, or take a position on an existing issue by proposing an action. Netpolique, initiated in February 2000, enhances interactive political communication, providing an innovative communication method to citizens, with no lucrative goals. All citizens are able to edit or make comments on any political issue that interests them. Scottish Parliament e-petitions, launched in February 2004, is a system (this is also the name of the project) that promotes community democracy, enables citizens to interact actively with the political process and provides them the ability to influence the political agenda. To do so, a citizen may raise or support an online petition, make a comment for every issue presented, view statistical results of specific issues and discuss every petition through the forum. Meanwhile, the system produces overall reports based on similar comments. The Scottish parliament is one of the promising examples of innovative eparticipation applications. Others include Bristol's e-petitions website, The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames and Deutscher Bundestag. Participatory Budget of Berlin-Lichtenberg, initiated in 2005, is a project aiming at increasing transparency and citizens knowledge on financial matters and at raising the level of effectiveness and fairness of budgeting. Citizens have access to information pertaining to the budgeting and consultation process and have the opportunity to submit, deliberate and revise submitted proposals in a conjoint fashion. Moreover, the platform supports einforming, econsulting and ecollaboration, all leading to a raised level of transparency in the political life. Referring to the area of Campaigning, it is worth noting that many politicians (among them are Ségolène Royale and John Edwards) use Web 2.0 technologies to support their political campaigns. Citizens/voters may gather information about the profile and the views of the candidate, read news, contribute to posts and blogs, or discuss political issues through forums. 9.4 Natural Language Processing Natural Language Processing is the name given to a wide range of technologies which focus on the analysis of human language. Examples of successful applications of these technologies are web search engines, automatic message processing, web based machine translation services, voice recognition and speech synthesis. These can result in dialogue systems for railways, cinemas, banks and telephone dialogue systems, such as that proposed by project HOPS in section 3.1. Natural language processing may be applied in eparticipation in a number of circumstances such as: Information provision: structure, represent and manage information Deliberation: support virtual discussions, which allow reflection and consideration of issues Discourse: support analysis and representation Mediation: resolve disputes or conflicts in an online context Polling: measure public opinion and sentiment A-73

74 Although these technologies have not yet reached their full maturity, they are currently good enough to be used in a variety of applications affecting millions of citizens. We briefly refer to some of those, at various levels of maturity, in what follows. Machine translation enables automated or semi-automated translation of texts from one language to another, which relies either on linguistic techniques (use of constraints at syntactic, lexical and semantic level) or on statistics. The latter approach is enabled by the availability of large computational power. The interest of machine translation becomes evident when thinking, for example, about back-office tasks performed by professionals in public administrations, officials and politicians. Also tools which allow preparation of legal texts in one s native language and then perform a machine translation step followed by manual revision can be of prime importance. Other challenges include translations of spontaneous content created by citizens and people around the world, or general challenges connected to content provision for egovernment services. As the DEMO-net project indicates 82 large administrative and policy bodies benefit from translation services and machine translation. The s Directorate- General for Translation, for example, offers a machine translation service for 28 language combinations. The service is known as EC Systran and is based on SYSTRAN technology. Administrators can also use the system as a browsing, translation and drafting tool. EC Systran is freely available to EU public administrations, including EU institutions and bodies, government ministries, national parliaments, regional authorities and universities. Information retrieval is a high interdisciplinary field that encompasses representation, storage and retrieval of diverse kinds of media (for example documents). Information retrieval techniques may retrieve a document from a set of documents given a certain search query. Recent trends move towards the use of statistically-motivated methods for describing textual information. Information retrieval is very common within egovernment portals. In fact, any access to the content available in the web usually starts with a query submitted to one of the many search engines available. Similarly, many web sites dedicated to public communication have a search engine allowing citizens to submit a query and obtain the retrieved documents. Although it is fairly easy for a search engine to provide results answering such a query, this is not satisfactory for eparticipation and egovernment services. More often than not, the language a public administration uses includes content organised in a way that does not correspond to the concepts and linguistic sense of citizens. For example when a married couple seeks to adopt a baby, the law will probably require the word minor to be used in the request. State-of-the-art techniques are not yet able to handle questions such as: What should I do to pursue a military career? or How can I register to an Italian school after having attended a school abroad? In this case, semantic models and technologies are called for 83. a reference model of concepts (semantics) has to capture the main concepts and their relationships; the key word here is semantics, that is, passing from the lexical (superficial) level to the conceptual one. Two interesting examples are also listed by DEMO-net 84, namely the HANDS project and the TELE_P@b project. In HANDS, specific modules, empowered by natural language processing tools, help the user find the information he is looking for. These are an Answer 82 DEMO-net : D14.3 The role of Natural Language Processing in eparticipation, Dec Bringing Together and Accelerating egovernment Research in the EU, Information Integration Report, September DEMO-net : D14.3 The role of Natural Language Processing in eparticipation, Dec A-74

75 Tree and a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) based module. The latter manages FAQ lists and retrieves questions and answers which appear to be the most similar to the user s question. In the TELE_P@b project, among the different modules foreseen, one may isolate the service for the presentation of the final budget of the municipalities involved in the project. This feature acts as a transparency and credibility aid: citizens have the opportunity to interpret and understand the data of the final balance. Text mining (or knowledge discovery) is a multidisciplinary method which combines information retrieval, text analysis, information extraction, clustering, categorisation, visualisation, database technology, machine learning and data mining. It uses natural language processing techniques to construct inferences and obtain additional knowledge from a series of texts. Typically it text mining includes two phases, namely pre-processing, where text is converted to an intermediate form, and knowledge distillation, where patterns or knowledge are extracted using the intermediate form. Typical uses include security, commerce, academia and all areas which employ text containing highly specific information. Another example is identification of spam. In a semantic web environment, text mining will enable direct answers to search queries. Applying ad-hoc opinion mining techniques is a trend that recently grows in popularity. In many applications it is important to distinguish what an author is really talking about from his or her subjective stance towards a certain topic. Information extraction, summarisation, and question answering can benefit from an accurate separation of subjective content from objective content. Opinion mining is the extraction of prevalent opinions about topics or items from a collection of texts, for example the particular sentiment expressed by an author towards a topic. Over the last few years, an increasing number of publications focused on detection and classification of sentiment and subjectivity in text has made its appearance. Relevant theories 85 are the theory of online meaning construction, conceptual blending, conceptual integration, mental spaces and the many space model, as well as network theory. 9.5 Innovative technology for eparticipation eparticipation should support interactive, collaborative decision-making processes between citizens and their representatives or politicians in general. This requires informed citizens, opinion posting mechanisms, availability of public data and communication channels. ICT systems to support this must be semantically-rich and workflow-aware, something which goes beyond currently available content management technologies usually encountered in parliaments web sites. Such systems must be able to prepare, support and maintain participation. The next figure shows a general conceptual diagramme of their basic desired features: 85 COULSON S, ; OAKLEY T., Blending and coded meaning: Literal and figurative meaning in cognitive semantics, Journal of Pragmatics, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Vol. 37, No. 10, 2005 A-75

76 Figure 20. Required features of an eparticipation support system 86 These features are indeed present in most systems employed by eparticipation projects of the Action. The following paragraphs present several innovative features proposed by FP6 and other projects promoting eparticipation in several projects. The first proposal addresses the need for ecollaboration services that allow easier participation from the citizens in several aspects of public life: polls, petitions, deliberation and even participation at different levels at committee meetings are proposed. A typical example is the Gov2DemOSS platform 87 that besides content management provides features such as: User registration under a standard authentication system with username, password and an verification system, so that only registered users can post or reply messages in forums Deliberation forums Blogs Polls for gauging users opinion. Petitions around specific issues. A secure, private and personal messaging service for forum users. Member s profiling for user s details and contributions. Search Engine 86 Karacapilidis N., Loukis E., Dimopoulos S., Computer-supported G2G collaboration for public policy and decisionmaking, Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 18 No. 5, A-76

77 The platform was awarded the egovernment Good Practice Label by the epractice portal ( in November The promoters of the platform 88 claim that it is Open Source, and customisable. Another tool used to similar effect is the Public-i platform ( which centres on multimedia webcasting supported by the inclusion of contextual information and feedback facilities. It provides easily accessible legislative documents with links to forms and the various legislation source URLs. Implementation capitalises on the citizen-participation good practice case of the award-winning Bristol Council, UK epetitions system ( and the very successful eparticipate project of the eten programme ( Other service components which the newer platform implementation has integrated are: the Viewfinder multimedia discussion forums as applied by Bristol Council, UK ( and the YourSpace Web/Video facilities ( appropriate Web 2.0 Social Networking open services, and interfaces to those services using Mashups and Application Programme Interfaces (API s) such as the Google OpenSocial API ( and others. Citizens can read and understand EU legislative documents in their own language, and can track the history and progress of the legislative implementation in their local region. The LEXIPATION project 89 puts forward a new approach to participatory legislation, which combines two different participation methodologies, namely Living Labs 90 and Moderated Internet Discourses 91 to conduct moderated online discourses on legislative proposals, involving policy makers, citizens and other socio-economic groups. The project is a participation experiment design effort which supports debates on draft legislation; the consultation/concertation" process of administrations with citizens, businesses, NGOs and other socio-economic groups; and everyday management activities of elected representatives and social interaction with their respective constituencies. The ecommittee project uses web-conferencing technology combined with the European Parliament s new video and audio streaming services. As there are no technical details available at present, we are not in a position to know whether services are based on an integrated platform similar to that of Demos@Work. Online collaboration tools and content services are expected to be provided before, during and after committee sessions. The main objective of FEED is to support public deliberation and consultation by providing users with seamless access to existing content on environmental and energy issues. Detailed studies on the profiles of user characteristics were performed at each stage of the trials. 88 Koulolias, V., Karamagioli, E., Xenakis, A. The Gov2DemOSS eparticipation Platform: A New Era Tool for edemocracy Implementation,. in P. Cunningham & M. Cunningham (Eds.) Exploiting the Knowledge Economy: Issues, Applications, Case Studies,: IOS Press, Amsterdam, LEXIPATION project, D3.2, Operational methodology, July Initiated by W. Mitchell and further supported by E. Von Hippel (MediaLab and Sloan School of Management respectively at MIT, USA) 91 A-77

78 The technical solution in FEED is via an integrated platform running on the Public-I platform used by CitizenScape. The difference here is that there are additional components such as the ontology repository and the facility which allows interaction with external sources of content lying in other repositories in the internet, as well as with the Flevoland Google maps (applied in the Flevoland pilot case). The general architecture is shown in the following figure. Figure 21. The FEED general topology 92 Finally, two different ontologies are provided: A deliberation ontology, as a guide towards defining different types of deliberation, based on local interest (group or space-specific) issues for example. Using this, different deliberation models can be specified according to the needs of every pilot site on trial operation. A domain ontology to provide a dictionary of terms and keywords to facilitate the search of (managed) content in the various data sources integrated in FEED (documents, videos, legal terms etc). The Ideal-EU project will launch a debating and voting platform on climate change and the objective is to for citizens to access European, national and regional policy debates, share opinions and send recommendations to policy-makers. Users can launch themes for discussion using a blog-like component, upload their own videos and photos and comment on other users opinions, while contributions from policy-makers will be given added prominence. A voting component will also be included. The participants aim for a three to five thousand user base in each of the three pilot regions. Electronic town meetings were organised in November 2008 and participants will generally be able to vote on their conclusions. 92 FEED project, D2.1 FFED Architecture, September 2008 A-78

79 There is no technical detail on the platform architecture published as yet; its core constituent parts are a Social Networking Platform (SNP) and a virtual Town Meeting (VTM), which support moderated online discourses and deliberation-making. What is of interest in the course of this project, however, is the design of the common workflow model of the TO-BE decision-making processes, applicable to all three pilots. The following diagramme, itself an extension of the 5-stage model of Macintosh, shows the outline of the workflow as well as the role played by the Social Networking Platform and the virtual Town Meetings. Figure 22. TO-BE decision-making process design (Ideal-EU 93 ) TID+: a comprehensive eparticipation tool The successful Today-I-Decide portal of the Estonian government, also known as TOM by the corresponding Estonian acronym is a successful public participation and deliberation space. The TID+ project, funded under the 2006 part of the Action, has provided further means to support the widening of the user s base via dissemination, software enhancements and user support activities. The result is that software developed under the TID+ project 94 provides a functional, elaborate solution, which governments can use to enable citizens to participate in the legislative process. 93 Ideal-EU project, D2.3 The IDEAL-EU Workflow Model and Technical Architecture, October A-79

80 Technically the solution is innovative; it is neither static nor proprietary, and can be freely adapted and enhanced upon, following the needs of the specific setting in which it is deployed. Extensive customisation facilities are provided via user-operated interfaces, even down to the level of affecting core functionality. Examples include changes in the way participants are identified or setting the level of support required before an idea is formally passed on to the government. The software code is made available under a free licence which allows change and redistribution, provided that the resulting (changed) system is made available to others under the same license. A-80

81 10 Innovation in parliaments Elected representatives play an important part in promoting the benefits of information society to a wider public. At the same time, they can be recipients of the benefits ICT can bring in their own line of work. EPRI_Knowledge 95 and erepresentative are both FP6 projects addressing the ICT-aided parliaments. The former is aimed at raising awareness of ICT among parliamentarians at EU, national and regional levels through studies on ICT-related topics, workshops and conferences, while the latter aims to create an innovative virtual desktop that will support the mobile elected representative. It must be noted, however, that although both projects have delivered their results, there is still a lot of undisclosed material, preventing a full appraisal. The need to develop a virtual platform for the mobile representative has also been expressed by the European Parliaments Research Initiative (EPRI) in that one of the key challenges for parliaments should be to support their members to become truly mobile workers Requirements and needs of the elected representative As stated by erepresentative project participants 96, while most of the assemblies are well served by intranet access to databases of legislative documents, these are either not available remotely (intranet/extranet) or, if they are, they are not designed to provide access on mobile devices. The functional scope of the erepresentative s virtual desktop is resumed in the following user requirements 97 : provide Inter-assembly search and retrieval track committee legislative actions provide committee events notification provide a secure discussion space provide remote e-polling for committees provide e-voting support for individual ballots These requirements have come forth after a series of discussions and interviews with various assemblies, concerning the main activities that could be improved by this project. Figure 23 below illustrates corresponding applications and services. 95 EPRI_Knowledge belongs to the family of parliament initiatives under the acronym EPRI; we ll henceforth refer to it as EPRI. 96 Karamagioli E., epractice.eu Cases, A virtual desktop for the mobile European elected officials, April 2008, 97 Angus Whyte (Napier), Onno van Dommelen, Jordi Puiggali (Scytl), Alexandros Xenakis (Gov2U), erepresentative Deliverable D2.1 User Requirements & Acceptance Criteria WP 2, June 2006 A-81

82 The project has offered an innovative virtual desktop, equipped with tailored services meeting individual interests and operating preferences of representatives. The virtual desktop in its final form employs 98 : A virtual desktop for representatives to work on the legislative process remotely, safely and easily: for example to draft a law, discuss it, introduce an amendment and vote its approval. This facility is accompanied by appropriate security without necessitating constant presence in the Assembly building. Technologies to manage data overloads and enable seamless use of desktop and Parliaments' current systems. Innovative, user-friendly and mobile-network-compatible security technologies to allow collaboration on legislative documents while meeting needs for integrity, authenticity and privacy. We note here that erepresentative does not replace legacy systems currently used in the legislative document production process, but integrates data drawn from them. Figure 23. Applications and services for parliamentarians (erepresentative 99 ) 10.2 Use of ICT by parliamentarians In EPRI, there is a clear distinction between the three missions of a parliamentarian, namely peoples representative, party actor, and legislator (see Figure 24 below). 98 Information retrieved in 99 Angus Whyte, erepresentative Deliverable D6.1, Pilot Plan & Detailed Application Scenario, WP 6, February 2007 A-82