eGovR - ID 5.1.2.2- 9.2.3.2 - Innovation Report - Joinup

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Prepared for the ICT for Government and Public Services Unit
DG Information Society and Media
European Commission
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
European Commission
B-1060 Brussels
European Commission
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.
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Table of Contents
Executive summary ................................................................................................................. 2
1
Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 7
2
Open Source software ..................................................................................................... 9
2.1
2.2
3
Policy Issues ............................................................................................................ 9
Pilot cases ...............................................................................................................11
Intelligent, personalised eGovernment services for all ............................................. 12
3.1
Multi-channel delivery............................................................................................. 12
3.1.1
Conclusions ....................................................................................................... 14
3.2
Inclusive government ............................................................................................. 14
3.3
Attracting users ...................................................................................................... 15
4
eGovernment support systems .................................................................................... 17
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.5.1
4.5.2
4.6
4.6.1
4.7
4.7.1
4.7.2
4.8
4.8.1
5
Innovation as an efficiency enabler ............................................................................. 40
5.1
5.2
6
Risk management in customs processes............................................................... 40
Restructuring business processes ......................................................................... 41
Europe’s most innovative public services .................................................................. 44
6.1
6.1.1
6.2
6.2.1
6.2.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
7
Ontology/process design and maintenance tools for public administrations ......... 18
Semantically enriched web services ...................................................................... 21
Innovation in practice ............................................................................................. 22
Ontologies for multilingual applications.................................................................. 23
eCustoms ............................................................................................................... 24
The Beer Living Lab Pilot................................................................................... 24
Single Window systems ..................................................................................... 25
Legal support systems ........................................................................................... 26
eLegislation and eParticipation .......................................................................... 28
Health care and social security .............................................................................. 31
Social and medical care..................................................................................... 32
Successful transfer of innovation ....................................................................... 33
Model-centric development .................................................................................... 34
The ELLECTRA-WeB Application Framework................................................... 36
Better services to citizens and business (HoReCa1)............................................. 44
Transferability and sustainability concerns ........................................................ 45
Electronic citizen-centric online services (Mypage) ............................................... 46
Further details .................................................................................................... 46
Transferability and sustainability concerns ........................................................ 47
Improve the citizens IT skills (Besançon.clic)......................................................... 47
More efficient and transparent public administration (DVDV) ................................ 48
An Online Police Station (OLPS)............................................................................ 49
G2B: transfer of technology and experience .............................................................. 51
7.1
Statistics Denmark.................................................................................................. 52
7.1.1
Results ............................................................................................................... 52
7.1.2
Transfer and experience gained ........................................................................ 52
7.2
The AEAT portal for companies, Spain................................................................... 53
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7.2.1
7.2.2
7.3
7.3.1
7.4
7.4.1
7.5
7.5.1
7.6
7.6.1
7.6.2
7.6.3
8
Secure pan-European eGovernment ............................................................................ 63
8.1
8.1.1
8.2
8.3
8.4
9
eMAYOR: Certificates and smart cards ................................................................. 63
Innovation value................................................................................................. 64
GUIDE: Identification.............................................................................................. 64
TERREGOV: Data security and privacy................................................................. 65
Note ........................................................................................................................ 66
Innovative ICTs for democratic involvement............................................................... 67
9.1
9.2
9.3
9.4
9.5
9.5.1
10
10.1
10.2
10.3
10.4
11
Impact and results.............................................................................................. 53
The Altinn project, Norway ..................................................................................... 54
Digital Signatures, Denmark .................................................................................. 55
The Knowledge Network, UK ................................................................................. 57
eProcurement and eTendering............................................................................... 58
The Danish public procurement portal............................................................... 58
The Piedmont Region’s eProcurement platform and CONCIP, Italy.................. 61
Federal eProcurement platform (E-Vergabe), Germany.................................... 62
Content Management Systems.............................................................................. 67
Adaptation and personalisation technologies......................................................... 69
Web 2.0 technologies............................................................................................. 72
Natural Language Processing................................................................................ 73
Innovative technology for eParticipation ................................................................ 75
TID+: a comprehensive eParticipation tool ........................................................ 79
Innovation in parliaments ........................................................................................ 81
Requirements and needs of the elected representative ........................................ 81
Use of ICT by parliamentarians.............................................................................. 82
The eRepresentative virtual desktop...................................................................... 84
Impact on the mobile representative ...................................................................... 85
Innovative features in government websites ........................................................ 86
Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 89
Project Index .......................................................................................................................... 90
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List of tables
Table 1. Efficiency achieved
53
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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 14. http://www.amsterdam.nl/horeca 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
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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,
1
single-window customs and European Citizenship. Policy aims are set to :
♦
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
nd
th
above) in FP6 belong to consortia which responded to the 2 and the 4 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
2
study 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 2004. It was based on the in-depth
analysis of a series of best practices in the implementation of e-government by local and
1
European Commission, Call 4, IST priority, 1st December 2004, http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/so/govt/home.html
2
http://www.epractice.eu/document/1104
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European Commission
regional authorities, following a methodology derived from the Common Assessment
3
Framework (CAF) model .
The international dimension of innovative eGovernment is addressed by the UN/DESA
4
Compendium in a study (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
1%
5%
5%3% 1%
29%
1%
2%
7%
10%
4%
5%
Cit. Service Delivery
Crisis management
e-health
e-Customs
Gender equality
2%
5%
20%
e-education
e-procurement
e-participation
Information access/sharing
e-Taxation
Government portal
e-justice
Sustainable development
e-commerce
e-Accounting
Figure 1. Areas of cases worldwide addressing innovative eGovernment issues
The European Commission has addressed the issue of innovation at the level of policy
5
already from 2006, as presented by the DEMO-Net 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
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competitiveness through the uptake of ICTs by both the private and public sectors” .
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, 2006
5
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
http://www.demo-net.org/what-is-it-about/research-papers-reports-1/demo-net-deliverables/pdfs/d11-4.pdf
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
http://www.demo-net.org/what-is-it-about/research-papers-reports-1/demo-net-deliverables/pdfs/d11-4.pdf
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European Commission
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 European Commission, 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.
7
Another outcome is a method 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
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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.
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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.
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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
8
systems. As the UN eGovernment report of 2008 states , 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
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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: +39 0114815865
o text channel: http://hops.csp.it:8080/demo/client.jsp
2. FIRST PILOT IN BARCELONA
o text channel: http://212.15.225.36:8080/demo/client.jsp
3. FIRST PILOT IN TURIN
o voice channel: +39 0112913664 (Monolingual: Italian only)
o voice channel: +39 0112913665 (Multilingual: Italian and English)
4. FIRST PILOT IN CAMDEN
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European Commission
3.1.1
Conclusions
The overall experience of the HOPS project has also produced useful conclusions regarding
9
the maturity and the applicability of the proposed solution, which are given below .
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, http://www.epractice.eu/cases/2682
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European Commission
♦
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
10
technical means . 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,
11
geographical location, or care duties . 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: http://www4.gu.edu.au/ext/u3a/papers/AA%20entire%20report.pdf
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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
12
the area .
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
13
have the choice of participating in person or posting their views online .
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
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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
th
services, a trend which is almost uniform for nearly all 4 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”.
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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
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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
14
Services for the case of Access-eGov and PA or Business Services for the case of
15
SemanticGov . 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
16
through the provision of a Government Enterprise Architecture (GEA) 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, 2006
15
SemanticGov, “D3.2., SemanticGov Architecture v. 2.0”, June 2007
16
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
http://www.imu.iccs.gr/semgov/index_files/Proceedings.html
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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
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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.
17
As TERREGOV observes “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
18
utilise the principle of working only with instances of meta-ontologies . 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 2006
18
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 EGovernment”, pp. 141-155, also at http://dsslab.cs.unipi.gr/Publications/c22.pdf
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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
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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 emails, 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
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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.
4.5.1
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
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♦
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
20
whom and how to tell the story. This, they claim , is not obvious and requires a lot of
coordination and effort put in that direction.
4.5.2
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.
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services that can be integrated with Single Window systems. In addition, these new eServices
21
are envisaged to be interoperable at the level of the EU and across EU borders .
22
Five case studies are also presented by ITAIDE 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.
23
As Sartor 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, 2006
22
ITAIDE: D5.0.4 v1 State of Art, 2006
23
Giovanni Sartor, The ONE-LEX project of the informational unification of the laws of Europe, Nov. 2005,
http://www2.cirsfid.unibo.it/~sartor/GSCirsfidOnlineMaterials/GSOnLinePublications/GSPUB2005PaperKlagenfurt.pdf
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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
24
ontologies 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.
25
The recently completed ESTRELLA project 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
26
supposed to operate. Briefly, in one of these scenarios , the author of a musical composition
24
ESTRELLA: Deliverable 1.4, OWL Ontology of Basic Legal Concepts, (LKIF-Core), Jan. 2007
25
ESTRELLA project, “Periodic Activity Report”, 2008
26
ALIS: D4.3 Use-Cases, 2006
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European Commission
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.
4.6.1
eLegislation and eParticipation
ICT tools can not only assist the legislative process itself, but also widen participation in these
27
processes. Pilot application oriented projects of the eParticipation Preparatory Action
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
28
on the results of the DEMO-net network .
29
The LEX-IS legal ontology 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 (http://docasset.atc.gr) used by one of the partners and the
prototype tool of legal argumentation HERMES developed within the ICTE-PAN European
30
Research project , based on the Zeno system. To assist on the design of the trials, user
groups and new public spaces have also been identified.
27
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/egovernment/implementation/prep_action/index_en.htm
28
www.demo-net.org
29
LEX-IS project, D1.3 “Ontology for Legal Framework Modelling”, December 2007
30
Karacapilidis, N., Loukis E., Dimopoulos S., “Computer-supported G2G collaboration for public policy and decision
making. Journal of Enterprise Information Management, 2005 18(5):602-624
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Figure 4. Technical architecture of the LEX-IS system
Figure 5. Basic constructs used in LEX-IS
32
31
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”, 6th International
eGOV Conference, Regensburg, Germany, September 2007
32
LEX-IS project, D1.2 “Legislative Process Workflow Model”, November 2007
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facilities and the controlled ontology employed by the project can help the general public in
the retrieval and comprehension of legal texts.
33
The methodological approach chosen in the project 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 534
lingual LOIS database 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).
35
Figure 6. Knowledge Organisation System in DALOS
The domain ontology construction is aided by an ontology learning system which combines
36
linguistic technologies and statistical techniques, called T2K (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.
33 33
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 2007
34
LOIS project: “Legal Ontologies for Knowledge Sharing”, EDC 22161, http://www.loisproject.org/, 2003-2006
35
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 2007
36
CNR–ILC and the Linguistics Department of the Pisa University
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4.7
Health care and social security
Innovation in detecting fraud in health care and social security is exemplified by the
37
iWebCare 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
38
approaches used in the iWebCare project are based on the CRISP process model and
39
40
41
available open-source environments like R , Yale and Weka .
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 http://iwebcare.iisa-innov.com
38
http://www.crisp-dm.org
39
http://www.R-project.org
40
http://www.sf.net/yale
41
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka
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European Commission
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 517435) and a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using the IBM
42
UML 2.0 Profile for Software Services .
4.7.1
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,
43
caregivers, medical professionals and other stakeholders in health .
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, http://www.epractice.eu/cases/NEXES
43
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media, California Healthcare
Foundation, April 2008
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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.
4.7.2
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.
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European Commission
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
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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):
44
Figure 9. Basic stages of MDD
♦
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 2008.
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European Commission
♦
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
45
users .
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.
4.8.1
The ELLECTRA-WeB Application Framework
49
The Application Framework (see ref. ) 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 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
46
The approach is also followed by the Domain Specific Modelling Forum (DSL), http://www.dsmforum.org
46
ePP stands for electronic Public Procurement in the project’s terminology. To avoid introducing extra acronyms we
usually adhere to the term “eProcurement”.
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European Commission
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
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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 2008.
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European Commission
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
49
49
ELLECTRA-WeB, D5.1 “Electronic Public Procurement Solutions’ Transformation Rules”. September 2007
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European Commission
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.
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European Commission
Figure 13. RACWEB: General platform architecture
5.2
50
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
51
subject is handled by the eGOV-BUS 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, 2007.
51
http://www.egov-bus.org/web/guest/home
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European Commission
the role of research” workshop organised on the 12th of May 2009 by DG INFSO Unit H2 of
the European Commission and the “Bringing Together and Accelerating eGovernment
52
Research in the EU” study. The presentation 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.
53
The eGOV-BUS Workshop Report shows that the project managed to create demonstrators
of cross-border eID validation services allowing the provision of seamless services that
52
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/egovernment/studies/trendswatch/index_en.htm#Workshops_
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European Commission
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.
53
http://www.egov-bus.org/c/portal/layout?p_l_id=PUB.1.85&p_p_id=20&p_p_action=1&p_p_state=exclusive
&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+9.2++0104.pdf
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European Commission
6 Europe’s most innovative public services
54
During the Ministerial eGovernment Conference 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 (HoReCa155)
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
4th Ministerial eGovernment Conference , Lisbon, 19-21 September 2007, http://www.egov2007.gov.pt/
55
van Erven M., One-stop-shop for Hotel Restaurant Café licences, epractice.eu Cases, June 2007,
http://www.epractice.eu/cases/horeca1
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European Commission
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 14. http://www.amsterdam.nl/horeca home page
6.1.1
Transferability and sustainability concerns
For this section, we draw on the conclusions reported in the analysis of the case by T.A.
56
Urnheim . 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
www.epracticejournal.eu, February 2008.
eGovernment:
on a knife-edge
between
success
and
failure”,
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European Commission
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 (Mypage57)
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 2009. 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.
6.2.1
Further details
58
T.A. Undheim who analysed the case 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
http://www.epractice.eu/cases/mypage
58
Undheim T.A., “Best practices in
www.epracticejournal.eu, February 2008.
citizen's
eGovernment:
portal,
epractice.eu
on a knife-edge
between
Cases,
May
2007,
success
and
failure”,
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European Commission
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.
6.2.2
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.clic59)
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.
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Garrigues M., Besançon.clic, epractice.eu Cases, May 2007, http://www.epractice.eu/cases/besacclic
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European Commission
♦
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 2009.
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, e-mail 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 (DVDV60)
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
http://www.epractice.eu/cases/dvdv
Services
Directory
(DVDV),
epractice.eu
Cases,
June
2007,
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European Commission
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 (OLPS61)
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, http://www.epractice.eu/cases/olps
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European Commission
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.
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European Commission
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.
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European Commission
♦
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 600.000 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
7.1.1
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.
7.1.2
Transfer and experience gained
The case was successfully transferred to the Slovenian statistical service. The experience
acquired is summarised by Statbank Denmark as follows:
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European Commission
♦
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.
7.2.1
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
2001
2
3,305
661
0,43
2002
46
1,037,378
207,476
135,96
2003
90
771,130
154,226
101,07
Table 1. Efficiency achieved
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European Commission
Based on a rate of employee/year of 1.526 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)
7.2.2
62
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,
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European Commission
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)
7.3.1
63
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
7.4
Digital Signatures, Denmark
64
The digital signature project was initiated as part of the Danish eGovernment programme,
launched to meet the increasing demands of modernisation and development in the public
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http://www.transfereast.net/UploadDocs/26_WebShowCase_f4ALTINN.pdf
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European Commission
sector. The objective was to have at least 1.1 million digital signature certificates, by the end
of 2006. Current data available shows that as of early 2007 approximately 875.000 electronic
signatures have been issued in Denmark compared to circa 500.000 at the end 2005 and
65.000 in 2003. 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 e-mail. Services offered include:
♦
Electronic communication, where the only requirement is that citizens or businesses
have an electronic postal address, i.e. an e-mail 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.
7.4.1
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
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G.,
Digital
http://www.epractice.eu/cases/DSDK
Signatures
in
Denmark,
epractice.eu
Cases,
February
2006,
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♦
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
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
7.5.1
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.
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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
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.
7.6.1
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.
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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
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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 Denmark66
7.6.1.1
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.
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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 www.doip.dk.
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.
7.6.2
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
2004.
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
7.6.2.1
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.
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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.
7.6.3
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
2008. 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 www.evergabe-online.de.
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.
7.6.3.1
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.
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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 panEuropean 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
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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.
8.1.1
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:
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♦
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
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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.
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9 Innovative ICTs for democratic involvement
67
According to Timmers 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
e-mail, 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.
68
The areas covered by eParticipation include :
♦
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
69
Web-based Content Management Systems (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
70
publishing content to any outlet . 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 2004
68
http://www.demo-net.org/what-is-it-about/eparticipation-areas
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DEMO_net : D 14.3 CMS Content Management Systems in eParticipation Contexts, Feb 2008
70
Boiko B., Content Management Bible. New York, USA: Hungry Minds, 2002
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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
71
engagement defined by DEMO-net : 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 2006. 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.
72
In a study 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
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DEMO-net: Deliverable 5.1 Report on current ICTs to enable Participation, Aug 2006
72
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 1499-1511
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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
73
Group Support Systems (GSS). Authors 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”.
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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).
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As is pointed out in the study by Lourenço and Costa 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
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technologies in eGovernment portals is the reference found in DEMO-net about a system
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
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eGovernment domain is the FP6 project FIT . 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.
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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 1499-1511
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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. 435-444, 2006
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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, 2006.
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Figure 19. The FIT aim
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The project relies decisively on a set of purpose-built ontologies structure . 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.
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In order to enforce innovation in eParticipation projects, DEMO-net researchers suggest the
provision of personalised views of background downloadable documents based needs
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specified by user profiles. Based on the idea of Grandi et al (see footnote [ ] before) legal,
technical and even policy formation documents can be treated in this way. To take this one
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FIT: “D1: Dissemination Resources”, April 2006
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FIT: “D3: Requirements specification and process modelling formalism”, July 2006
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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
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funded project eParticipate . 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
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features may bring innovative aspects when applied to eParticipation applications, such as :
♦
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
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indicative examples of innovative applications of Web 2.0 technologies on eParticipation :
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.
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eParticipate eTEN project home page, (2007). Available at http://www.eparticipate.org/Project_overview.htm
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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
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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.
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As the DEMO-net project indicates large administrative and policy bodies benefit from
translation services and machine translation. The European Commission’s DirectorateGeneral 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
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attended a school abroad?” In this case, semantic models and technologies are called for . 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.
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Two interesting examples are also listed by DEMO-net , 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
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“Bringing Together and Accelerating eGovernment Research in the EU”, Information Integration Report, September
2008.
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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 email 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.
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Relevant theories 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:
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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
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Figure 20. Required features of an eParticipation support system
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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
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the Gov2DemOSS platform that besides content management provides features such as:
♦
User registration under a standard authentication system with username, password and
an email 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
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Karacapilidis N., Loukis E., Dimopoulos S., “Computer-supported G2G collaboration for public policy and decisionmaking, Journal of Enterprise Information Management”, Vol. 18 No. 5, 2005
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http://www.gov2u.org
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The platform was awarded the eGovernment Good Practice Label by the ePractice portal
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(www.epractice.eu) in November 2006. The promoters of the platform claim that it is Open
Source, and customisable.
Another tool used to similar effect is the Public-i platform (www.public-i.eu), 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
(http://epetitions.bristol.gov.uk) and the very successful eParticipate project of the eTEN
programme (www.eparticipate.eu). Other service components which the newer platform
implementation has integrated are:
♦
the Viewfinder multimedia discussion forums as applied by Bristol Council, UK
(www.askbristol.com/viewfinder.php) and the YourSpace Web/Video facilities
(www.neddc-yourspace.org.uk);
♦
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 (http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial) 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.
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The LEXIPATION project puts forward a new approach to participatory legislation, which
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combines two different participation methodologies, namely Living Labs and Moderated
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Internet Discourses 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.
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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, 2006
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LEXIPATION project, D3.2, “Operational methodology”, July 2007
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Initiated by W. Mitchell and further supported by E. Von Hippel (MediaLab and Sloan School of Management
respectively at MIT, USA)
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http://www.epractice.eu/en/cases/demos
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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.
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Figure 21. The FEED general topology
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.
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FEED project, D2.1 “FFED Architecture”, September 2008
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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.
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Figure 22. TO-BE decision-making process design (Ideal-EU )
9.5.1
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.
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The result is that software developed under the TID+ project provides a functional, elaborate
solution, which governments can use to enable citizens to participate in the legislative process.
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Ideal-EU project, D2.3 “The IDEAL-EU Workflow Model and Technical Architecture”, October 2008
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http://tidplus.net/project
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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.
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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
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their own line of work. EPRI_Knowledge 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.
10.1 Requirements and needs of the elected representative
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As stated by eRepresentative project participants , “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
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in the following user requirements :
♦
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.
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EPRI_Knowledge belongs to the family of parliament initiatives under the acronym EPRI; we’ll henceforth refer to it
as EPRI.
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Karamagioli E., epractice.eu Cases, A virtual desktop for the mobile European elected officials, April 2008,
http://www.epractice.eu/cases/erepresentative
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Angus Whyte (Napier), Onno van Dommelen, Jordi Puiggali (Scytl), Alexandros Xenakis (Gov2U), eRepresentative
Deliverable D2.1 User Requirements & Acceptance Criteria WP 2, June 2006
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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
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final form employs :
♦
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.
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Figure 23. Applications and services for parliamentarians (eRepresentative )
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).
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Information retrieved in http://www.erepresentative.org/about.htm
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Angus Whyte, eRepresentative Deliverable D6.1, Pilot Plan & Detailed Application Scenario, WP 6, February 2007
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Figure 24. Typology of parliamentarian’s roles and purposes (EPRI
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)
EPRI partners have located different impacts and needs depending on the role the
parliamentarian assumes when using ICT. For instance, the parliamentarian-representative
mostly uses e-mail to communicate with his electors, while the parliamentarian-legislator
needs digitalisation and storage of legislative documents.
According to surveys conducted by EPRI
grouped below:
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, some findings about parliamentarians are
♦
The more “wired” the legislator, the more likely he or she is to engage in multiple digital
practices at increasingly strategic levels.
♦
A ‘digital divide’ separates political candidates and their campaigns.
♦
A critical mass of legislative web sites has not yet evolved beyond ‘brochure’ content;
they lag behind interactive websites of individual legislators.
♦
Elected officials at national level are more ‘digitally advanced’ than their peers at regional
and municipal levels.
♦
Legislators demonstrate leadership in web-enabled technologies.
♦
Elected representatives believe that information technology can enhance democracy.
In terms of use of ICTs by parliamentarians, there are not too many surprises in the results of
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the research . All of the parliamentarians, selected because of their ‘early adopter’ status,
use most of the mainstream, publicly available ICTs. Everyone has a mobile phone and e-mail
is starting to replace the highly popular fax machine as the main tool for written
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Coleman S. and Nathanson B., EPRI_Knowledge, Learning to live with the Internet, How European
Parliamentarians are adapting to the digital age, 2005
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EPRI: Parliamentarians & ICTs: Awareness, understanding and activity levels of European Parliamentarians, 2005
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communication, although verbal one is almost always dominant. Interestingly SMS has
become popular among members of parliament, suggesting firstly that parliamentarians are
now more likely to use the technology themselves (rather than just their assistants, on their
behalf) and secondly that they can be potentially engaged in new activities: becoming more
involved in their personal organisational matters or having increased contact with certain
groups – perhaps experts, advisors or voters.
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Evidence suggests that parliamentarians are more interested in increased effectiveness,
meaning improved internal communication or increased internet use in electoral campaigns,
than in a general increase in political communication between political elites and their public.
While the use of intranets by parliamentarians is high, the use of ICT with citizens is very low.
Another explanation is that the political system shapes the behaviour of parliamentarians with
respect to ICT.
10.3 The eRepresentative virtual desktop
103
Technically, the aim is that the representative’s desktop application is realised by using
intelligent agents (developed by the project participant Gov2U) to integrate existing products
such as DSpace and Pnyx.parliament by project partners Hewlett Packard (HP) and Scytl.
♦
Scytl’s Pnyx.parliament platform is an electronic voting solution for parliaments and
assemblies. It allows elected representatives to cast their votes from any computer with
an Internet connection and a Java-enabled web browser, using a user-friendly interface.
♦
Pnyx.parliament supports several authentication methods and includes special
cryptographic solutions to guarantee that the electronic vote is as secure as the
traditional paper-based one.
♦
DSpace is an open source digital asset management (content management) system codeveloped by HP Labs and MIT. DSpace currently uses a qualified version of the Dublin
Core metadata standard. It enables institutions to:
◊
capture and describe digital works using a submission workflow module,
◊
distribute an institution's digital works over the web via a search and retrieval
system,
◊
preserve digital works over the long term.
Integration of those products by eRepresentative uses agent applications by Gov2U to
provide document authenticity verification, “Trusted" federation of content among assemblies’
repositories, content organisation and dynamic/customised views of search results. The
system is intended for use in a variety of locations, including:
♦
Committee rooms in assembly buildings.
102
EPRI: Parliamentarians & ICTs: Awareness, understanding and activity levels of European Parliamentarians, 2005
103
eRepresentative: D2.1 User Requirements & Acceptance Criteria, 2006
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European Commission
♦
Transient locations, e.g. public areas in and around assembly buildings or transport
stations, where connectivity may be unreliable.
♦
Home office, where access may be by dialup, and there is a corresponding need for
response time to be acceptable for low bandwidth connections.
Two requirements have not eventually been met by eRepresentative: first, available resources
were not considered appropriate to support collaborative editing and second, streamed audio
and video was ruled out of scope as it would have been practically impossible to implement
application level security.
10.4 Impact on the mobile representative
By using ICTs in his daily life, a parliamentarian’s work is largely facilitated and becomes
highly effective. During the eRepresentative project, application scenarios were developed to
stimulate discussion with intended users of eRepresentative applications and provide a
context for usability testing. The scenarios were developed with the assembly representatives
in a workshop held at the 4th consortium meeting in Budapest. In the following, one of the
scenarios developed is presented:
During a parliamentary recess period Boer Piet travels on his GPS guided tractor. He receives
notification for an unplanned high urgency committee debate concerning measures against
the bird flu disease. On his GPS PDA he has already received the analysis of the most up-todate situation, the draft agenda and the position of the relevant committee.
The meeting room and time are displayed. Out of a list of supplied relevant links he selects
those documents he wants to read in the train on his way to Den Haag. While driving home on
the tractor he arranges for the documents to be printed in his house. When he gets there he
redresses, collects the documents and departs.
Using the discussion space on his PDA he collects information from his fellow committee
members and searches for background information on the Internet. Half way to Den Haag, he
receives updated information and half an hour before the committee meeting he receives the
updated agenda, including the abstracts of an interview of the Commissioner on agriculture.
The scenario illustrates the results of innovative use of ICT:
♦
A more efficient use of time; in this scenario the representative is using the time travel
takes for preparation; the printing job is also being done while he is on the way to return
home.
♦
Prevention of information overload by providing the parliamentarian with the possibilities
of selecting the most relevant sources to consult.
♦
Help to share opinions and information with colleagues using the discussion space.
♦
Provision of up-to-date agenda and documents in almost real time.
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European Commission
11 Innovative features in government websites
Using a detailed analysis of 1,667 national government websites in 198 nations around the
104
world, D. West , in a recent study, reports that countries vary enormously in their overall
eGovernment performance. eGovernment websites were evaluated for the presence of
various features dealing with information availability, service delivery and public access,
online publications, online database, online services, digital signatures, credit card payments
and a multitude of other features covering almost all functionality a modern site.
Among the ten most highly ranked eGovernment nations in this study are South Korea, the
US, Canada and Australia and these particular rankings broadly coincide with those of the UN
105
eGovernment readiness report of 2008 . This is not so for other countries, where the two
studies vary: the UN report puts Sweden, Denmark, Norway at the top, while D. West does
106
not include them even in his top ten. Results of web measurement assessment , in the
same UN report, present a similar ranking to that of eGovernment readiness.
Some of the findings provided by D. West are of special interest:
♦
Across the world, 50 percent of government websites offer services that are fully
executable online, up from 28 percent last year. Ninety-six percent of websites this year
provide access to publications and 75 percent have links to databases.
♦
The inability to use credit cards and digital signatures on financial transactions is one
feature that has slowed down the development of online services. On commercial sites, it
is common practice to offer goods and services online for purchase through credit cards.
However, of the government websites analysed, only 5 percent accept credit cards and 2
percent allow digital signatures for financial transactions; no change from the previous
year.
♦
Only 57 percent of government websites provide foreign language translation to nonnative readers. Eighty percent offer at least some portion of their websites in English.
♦
Fourteen percent offer the ability to personalise government websites to a visitor’s area
of interest, while three percent provide PDA accessibility.
♦
Only 16 percent of government websites have some form of access for disabled persons.
In the same study, the most innovative and novel features of international (mainly US)
websites are noted. We pick some of the most important ones:
♦
The U.S. White House website offers an online interactive forum that allows visitors to
interact with White House officials.
♦
USA.Gov offers live web chat to answer questions.
104
Darrell M. West, Improving Technology Utilization in Electronic Government around the World, Governance
Studies at Brookings, August 2008
105
UN-eGovernment survey 2008 – From eGovernment to connected Governance, Department of Economic and
Social Affairs Division for Public Administration and Development Management, 2008
106
According to the authors, this measures how governments provide eGovernment policies, tools and applications to
meet citizens’ needs. This is done by measuring the online presence of national websites.
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European Commission
♦
Antigua and Barbuda’s Department of Tourism has online newsgroups where people
planning trips can have online discussions.
♦
The National Endowment for Arts has an application where visitors can share the page
via Facebook, MySpace and Stumble, for example.
♦
The Canadian Portal site provides a good example of an accessibility feature that
provides audio readings of the page - vital for those visitors who have problems seeing
or reading information on websites. This feature allows visitors to change the voice and
speed of the reading.
♦
A few Canadian sites and the Norwegian portal site allow visitors to customise pages to
suit their needs.
Innovative forms of service provision may be efficiently provided via public private
partnerships, a goal also articulated in the call 4 of the IST priority for eGovernment. A
successful example is given by British Columbia where the provincial government began an
innovative procurement process in 2004 that led to an agreement in June 2005 with a private
sector consortium led by IBM Canada based upon the pursuit of the following objectives:
♦
Integrate the telephone, online and in-person service channels to provide consistent
information and services to its citizens;
♦
Develop an approach to service channel management in which touch-points, technology
platforms, data access and business processes are developed around the needs of the
citizen;
♦
More effectively meet the needs of its clients and customers within a new integrated,
cost-effective and efficient service delivery environment.
The private partner provides the City with a range of contact centre, portal and other service
transformational services in order to foster this integrated multichannel delivery framework.
This is done through leasing-type arrangements, as opposed to more traditional fee or
deliverable-based contracting. The initiative features a joint venture entity 65 percent owned
by the private company, staffed with approximately 500 individuals seconded from the local
government to the new agency.
Finally, another innovative part of governments’ websites explored by D. West is the way
some of them pay the bill for electronic governance. Only 4% of governments, according to
107
the survey, rely on ads while few sites (1% of all) include fees and apply charges to access
publications or databases. Some of the examples cited by the author include:
♦
The Slovenia Tourism website advertises car rental, other tourism bureaus, sponsored
festivals, mobile phone providers and a rafting company.
♦
The Malta Tourism website contains advertisements for a national beer, a national soft
drink, a national airline and a car rental service.
♦
The Pakistani website posts ads by Google, which advertise trips and money transfer
facilities to Pakistan.
107
Links to commercial products or services available for a fee, banner, pop-up and fly-by ads
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European Commission
♦
The Algerian National Television website has spots for Canal Algérie, BLS (language
translating service), Terastone, Som’s and Satral Motors.
♦
The Australian Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
website has an ad for Freetv.com.
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European Commission
Conclusions
IST research in eGovernment in FP6 has already shown its potential as a contributor to
innovative government. Studies on Open Source solutions and policy requirements, ICT
support systems managing knowledge in multiple languages, services through alternative
means of communication (voice and mobile devices), and security and authentication
systems with pan-European application constitute a sizeable toolset to support better
governance.
The present document shows that mature IST research has managed to offer novel but
applicable solutions which can drive future full scale implementations of information systems
and provide high quality services for citizens, administrations and businesses. Among the
wide range of activities which can become beneficiaries of such progress are:
♦
Government to Business processes such as customs, public procurement and company
registers
♦
eServices towards citizens and elected representatives
♦
Democracy-enhancing processes
♦
Health-care management
♦
Secure identification and authentication
Lessons learnt show that competent management, political will at decision-making level and
clarity of purpose are decisive factors for successful transfer of innovation.
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European Commission
Project Index
Access-eGov, 17, 18, 19, 22
FLOSSPOLS, 9, 11
ALIS, 27
GUIDE, 63, 64, 65
COSPA, 9, 10, 11
HOPS, 13, 14, 73
DEMO-net, 8, 28, 67, 68, 70, 72, 74
INTELCITIES, 16
eGOV-BUS, 41, 42
ITAIDE, 24, 25, 26
eGOVERNET, 8
iWebCare, 31, 33, 34
ELLECTRA-WeB, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
NEXES, 32
eLOST, 15, 16
OLDES, 32
eMAYOR, 17, 21, 63, 64
ONTOGOV, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22
eParticipate, 72, 77
QUALEG, 17, 23
EPRI, 81, 82, 83, 84
RACWEB, 40, 41
eRepresentative, 81, 82, 84, 85
SemanticGov, 17, 19, 20, 22
ESTRELLA, 26, 27
TERREGOV, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 63, 65,
66
eUSER, 12, 14, 15, 16
Transfer-East, 51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61
FIT, 70, 71
USE-ME.GOV, 12, 13
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European Commission
Prepared by:
Lead Contractor:
EUROPEAN DYNAMICS SA
http://www.eurodyn.com
Authors:
Dr. Ioannis KOTSIOPOULOS
Dr. Nicholas PAPAROIDAMIS
Dr. Georgios KOLOMVOS
Dr. Panagiotis RENTZEPOPOULOS
Contract No.:
Contract No. 30-CE-0043035/00-16
European Commission
ICT for Government
and Public Services
Tel
Fax
(32-2) 299 02 45
(32-2) 299 41 14
E-mail
Website:
[email protected]
http://ec.europa.eu/egovernment_research

eGovR - ID 5.1.2.2- 9.2.3.2 - Innovation Report - Joinup

Transcription

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