Online service delivery models : an international comparison in the public sector

Governments around the world are facing the challenge of responding to increased expectations by their customers with regard to public service delivery. Citizens, for example, expect governments to provide better and more efficient electronic services on the Web in an integrated way. Online portals have become the approach of choice in online service delivery to meet these requirements and become more customer-focussed. This study describes and analyses existing variants of online service delivery models based upon an empirical study and provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in government. For this study, we have conducted interviews with senior management representatives from five international governments. Based on our findings, we distinguish three different classes of service delivery models. We describe and characterise each of these models in detail and provide an in-depth discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches

Functional genre in Illinois State Government digital documents

Provisions for collecting or archiving digital documents can be informed by knowledge of the genres of documents likely to be encountered. Although different aspects of collecting and curation may classify documents into genres based on differing criteria (e.g., size, file format, subject), this document addresses classification based on the functional role the document plays in state government, akin to (Toms, 2001), but here specifically Illinois State Government (ISG). The classifications listed herein are based on an overview of ISG digital documents, encountered in over nine years of gathering and archiving work with and for the Illinois State Library (ISL), and on discussions with practitioners in cataloging and in government documents librarianship. This report states definitions, and including examples of each such genre. State government documents are interesting in this regard in that they are presumably somewhat comparable to both federal government documents and business documents. Perhaps surprisingly, there are also portions of the State Web that are somewhat less than businesslike, either in tone or in technological proficiency of implementation. In this respect state government digital documents may also be useful approximations to documents produced either personally or by small activities. Having a list of government document genres can inform work in information promulgation (e.g., through website design, or the design of a series of printed materials), and the grouping of documents for digital library or archival purposes.Library of Congress / NDIIPP-2 A6075unpublishednot peer reviewe

Comparing webometric with web-independent rankings: a case study with German universities

In this paper we examine if hyperlink-based (webometric) indicators can be used to rank academic websites. Therefore we analyzed the interlinking structure of German university websites and compared our simple hyperlink-based ranking with official and web-independent rankings of universities. We found that link impact could not easily be seen as a prestige factor for universities.Comment: 3 pages, ACM Web Science 201

Control What You Include! Server-Side Protection against Third Party Web Tracking

Third party tracking is the practice by which third parties recognize users accross different websites as they browse the web. Recent studies show that 90% of websites contain third party content that is tracking its users across the web. Website developers often need to include third party content in order to provide basic functionality. However, when a developer includes a third party content, she cannot know whether the third party contains tracking mechanisms. If a website developer wants to protect her users from being tracked, the only solution is to exclude any third-party content, thus trading functionality for privacy. We describe and implement a privacy-preserving web architecture that gives website developers a control over third party tracking: developers are able to include functionally useful third party content, the same time ensuring that the end users are not tracked by the third parties

Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.Comment: Describes framework and software architecture for multimodal web interaction managemen

An information-driven framework for image mining

[Abstract]: Image mining systems that can automatically extract semantically meaningful information (knowledge) from image data are increasingly in demand. The fundamental challenge in image mining is to determine how low-level, pixel representation contained in a raw image or image sequence can be processed to identify high-level spatial objects and relationships. To meet this challenge, we propose an efficient information-driven framework for image mining. We distinguish four levels of information: the Pixel Level, the Object Level, the Semantic Concept Level, and the Pattern and Knowledge Level. High-dimensional indexing schemes and retrieval techniques are also included in the framework to support the flow of information among the levels. We believe this framework represents the first step towards capturing the different levels of information present in image data and addressing the issues and challenges of discovering useful patterns/knowledge from each level