An Innovative, Open, Interoperable Citizen Engagement Cloud Platform for Smart Government and Users' Interaction

This paper introduces an open, interoperable, and cloud-computing-based citizen engagement platform for the management of administrative processes of public administrations, which also increases the engagement of citizens. The citizen engagement platform is the outcome of a 3-year Italian national project called PRISMA (Interoperable cloud platforms for smart government). The aim of the project is to constitute a new model of digital ecosystem that can support and enable new methods of interaction among public administrations, citizens, companies, and other stakeholders surrounding cities. The platform has been defined by the media as a flexible (enable the addition of any kind of application or service) and open (enable access to open services) Italian "cloud" that allows public administrations to access to a vast knowledge base represented as linked open data to be reused by a stakeholder community with the aim of developing new applications ("Cloud Apps") tailored to the specific needs of citizens. The platform has been used by Catania and Syracuse municipalities, two of the main cities of southern Italy, located in the Sicilian region. The fully adoption of the platform is rapidly spreading around the whole region (local developers have already used available application programming interfaces (APIs) to create additional services for citizens and administrations) to such an extent that other provinces of Sicily and Italy in general expressed their interest for its usage. The platform is available online and, as mentioned above, is open source and provides APIs for full exploitation.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, journal pape

Data-Driven Methodology for Knowledge Graph Generation Within the Tourism Domain

The tourism and hospitality sectors have become increasingly important in the last few years and the companies operating in this field are constantly challenged with providing new innovative services. At the same time, (big-) data has become the “new oil” of this century and Knowledge Graphs are emerging as the most natural way to collect, refine, and structure this heterogeneous information. In this paper, we present a methodology for semi-automatic generating a Tourism Knowledge Graph (TKG), which can be used for supporting a variety of intelligent services in this space, and a new ontology for modelling this domain, the Tourism Analytics Ontology (TAO). Our approach processes and integrates data from Booking.com, Airbnb, DBpedia, and GeoNames. Due to its modular structure, it can be easily extended to include new data sources or to apply new enrichment and refinement functions. We report a comprehensive evaluation of the functional, logical, and structural dimensions of TKG and TAO

Smart cities: event everywhere

The research attempts to provide a big picture from the literature through a Systematic Literature Review about the smart city and the existing standards topics for interchanging data through Smart City Apps. Additionally a prototype was created to analyze one of the standards found in the SL

CLOUD-BASED SOLUTIONS IMPROVING TRANSPARENCY, OPENNESS AND EFFICIENCY OF OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA

A central pillar of open government programs is the disclosure of data held by public agencies using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This disclosure relies on the creation of open data portals (e.g. Data.gov) and has subsequently been associated with the expression Open Government Data (OGD). The overall goal of these governmental initiatives is not limited to enhance transparency of public sectors but aims to raise awareness of how released data can be put to use in order to enable the creation of new products and services by private sectors. Despite the usage of technological platforms to facilitate access to government data, open data portals continue to be organized in order to serve the goals of public agencies without opening the doors to public accountability, information transparency, public scrutiny, etc. This thesis considers the basic aspects of OGD including the definition of technical models for organizing such complex contexts, the identification of techniques for combining data from several portals and the proposal of user interfaces that focus on citizen-centred usability. In order to deal with the above issues, this thesis presents a holistic approach to OGD that aims to go beyond problems inherent their simple disclosure by providing a tentative answer to the following questions: 1) To what extent do the OGD-based applications contribute towards the creation of innovative, value-added services? 2) What technical solutions could increase the strength of this contribution? 3) Can Web 2.0 and Cloud technologies favour the development of OGD apps? 4) How should be designed a common framework for developing OGD apps that rely on multiple OGD portals and external web resources? In particular, this thesis is focused on devising computational environments that leverage the content of OGD portals (supporting the initial phase of data disclosure) for the creation of new services that add value to the original data. The thesis is organized as follows. In order to offer a general view about OGD, some important aspects about open data initiatives are presented including their state of art, the existing approaches for publishing and consuming OGD across web resources, and the factors shaping the value generated through government data portals. Then, an architectural framework is proposed that gathers OGD from multiple sites and supports the development of cloud-based apps that leverage these data according to potentially different exploitation roots ranging from traditional business to specialized supports for citizens. The proposed framework is validated by two cloud-based apps, namely ODMap (Open Data Mapping) and NESSIE (A Network-based Environment Supporting Spatial Information Exploration). In particular, ODMap supports citizens in searching and accessing OGD from several web sites. NESSIE organizes data captured from real estate agencies and public agencies (i.e. municipalities, cadastral offices and chambers of commerce) in order to provide citizens with a geographic representation of real estate offers and relevant statistics about the price trend.A central pillar of open government programs is the disclosure of data held by public agencies using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This disclosure relies on the creation of open data portals (e.g. Data.gov) and has subsequently been associated with the expression Open Government Data (OGD). The overall goal of these governmental initiatives is not limited to enhance transparency of public sectors but aims to raise awareness of how released data can be put to use in order to enable the creation of new products and services by private sectors. Despite the usage of technological platforms to facilitate access to government data, open data portals continue to be organized in order to serve the goals of public agencies without opening the doors to public accountability, information transparency, public scrutiny, etc. This thesis considers the basic aspects of OGD including the definition of technical models for organizing such complex contexts, the identification of techniques for combining data from several portals and the proposal of user interfaces that focus on citizen-centred usability. In order to deal with the above issues, this thesis presents a holistic approach to OGD that aims to go beyond problems inherent their simple disclosure by providing a tentative answer to the following questions: 1) To what extent do the OGD-based applications contribute towards the creation of innovative, value-added services? 2) What technical solutions could increase the strength of this contribution? 3) Can Web 2.0 and Cloud technologies favour the development of OGD apps? 4) How should be designed a common framework for developing OGD apps that rely on multiple OGD portals and external web resources? In particular, this thesis is focused on devising computational environments that leverage the content of OGD portals (supporting the initial phase of data disclosure) for the creation of new services that add value to the original data. The thesis is organized as follows. In order to offer a general view about OGD, some important aspects about open data initiatives are presented including their state of art, the existing approaches for publishing and consuming OGD across web resources, and the factors shaping the value generated through government data portals. Then, an architectural framework is proposed that gathers OGD from multiple sites and supports the development of cloud-based apps that leverage these data according to potentially different exploitation roots ranging from traditional business to specialized supports for citizens. The proposed framework is validated by two cloud-based apps, namely ODMap (Open Data Mapping) and NESSIE (A Network-based Environment Supporting Spatial Information Exploration). In particular, ODMap supports citizens in searching and accessing OGD from several web sites. NESSIE organizes data captured from real estate agencies and public agencies (i.e. municipalities, cadastral offices and chambers of commerce) in order to provide citizens with a geographic representation of real estate offers and relevant statistics about the price trend

Smart cities: event everywhere

The research attempts to provide a big picture from the literature through a Systematic Literature Review about the smart city and the existing standards topics for interchanging data through Smart City Apps. Additionally a prototype was created to analyze one of the standards found in the SL

Geolinked Open Data for the Municipality of Catania

Linked Open Data (LOD) is reaching significant adoption in Public Administrations (PAs), where it is often required to be connected to existing platforms, such as GIS-based data management. Bearing on previous experience with the pioneering data.cnr.it, through Semantic Scout, as well as Italian DigitPA agency recommendations for LOD in Italian PA, we are working on the extraction, publication, and exploitation of data from the Geographic Information System of the Municipality of Catania, referred to as SIT ("Sistema Informativo Territoriale"). This paper describes the results and lessons learnt from the first campaign, aiming at analysing, reengineering, linking, and formalizing the Shape-based geo-data from the SIT

Geolinked open data for the municipality of Catania

Linked Open Data (LOD) is reaching significant adoption in Public Administrations (PAs), where it is often required to be connected to existing platforms, such as GIS-based data management. Bearing on previous experience with the pioneering data.cnr.it, through Semantic Scout, as well as Italian DigitPA agency recommendations for LOD in Italian PA, we are working on the extraction, publication, and exploitation of data from the Geographic Information System of the Municipality of Catania, referred to as SIT (“Sistema Informativo Territoriale”). This paper describes the results and lessons learnt from the first campaign, aiming at analysing, reengineering, linking, and formalizing th

Setting the course of emergency vehicle routing using Geolinked open data for the municipality of Catania

Linked Open Data (LOD) has gained significant momentum over the past years as a best practice of promoting the sharing and publication of structured data on the semantic Web. Currently LOD is reaching significant adoption also in Public Administrations (PAs), where it is often required to be connected to existing platforms, such as GIS-based data management systems. Bearing on previous experience with the pioneering data. cnr. it, through Semantic Scout, as well as the Agency for Digital Italy recommendations for LOD in Italian PA, we are working on the extraction, publication, and exploitation of data from the Geographic Information System of the Municipality of Catania, referred to as SIT ("Sistema Informativo Territoriale"). The goal is to boost the metropolis towards the route of a modern Smart City by providing prototype integrated solutions supporting transport, public health, urban decor, and social services, to improve urban life. In particular a mobile application focused on real-time road traffic and public transport management is currently under development to support sustainable mobility and, especially, to aid the response to urban emergencies, from small accidents to more serious disasters. This paper describes the results and lessons learnt from the first work campaign, aiming at analyzing, reengineering, linking, and formalizing the Shape-based geo-data from the SIT