Knowledge Management for Public Administrations: Technical Realizations of an Enterprise Attention Management System

The improvement of governments’ efficiency has gained great importance and validity especially in the current times of economic downturn. E-Government constitutes the most contemporary techno-managerial proposition in the track of possible interventions. The paper addresses, more specifically, empowerments necessitated by Public Administration (PA) organizations. Anchored on the needs of three real-life cases, the paper describes the conception and the realization of an IT artefact together with its methodological appeals aiming at improving information access and delivery and thus PAs’ decision making capacity. Our proposition constitutes a novel approach for managing users’ attention in knowledge intensive organizations which goes beyond informing a user about changes in relevant information towards proactively supporting the user to react on changes. The approach is based on an expressive attention model, which is realized by combining ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules with ontologies. The technical realizations described in the paper constitute the underlying infrastructure of an Enterprise Attention Management System

Legal Ontologies for the spanish e-Government

The Electronic Government is a new field of applications for the semantic web where ontologies are becoming an important research technology. The e-Government faces considerable challenges to achieve interoperability given the semantic differences of interpretation, complexity and width of scope. In this paper we present the results obtained in an ongoing project commissioned by the Spanish government that seeks strategies for the e-Government to reduce the problems encountered when delivering services to citizens. We also introduce an e-Government ontology model; within this model a set of legal ontologies are devoted to representing the Real-estate transaction domain used to illustrate this paper

Organizational challenges of the semantic web in digital libraries

The Semantic Web initiative holds large promises for the future. There is, however, a considerable gap in Semantic Web research between the contributions in the technological field and the research done in the organizational field. This paper examines, from a socio-technical point of view the impact of Semantic Web technology on the strategic, organizational and technological levels. Building on a comprehensive case study at the National Library in Norway our findings indicate that the highest impact will be at the organizational level. The reason is mainly because inter-organizational and cross-organizational structures have to be established to address the problems of ontology engineering, and a development framework for ontology engineering in digital libraries must be examined

Marinas and other ports and facilities for the recreational craft sector: an ontology domain to support spatial planning.

Marinas and other ports and facilities for the recreational craft sector in Sardinia (Italy) can host more than 19,000 pleasure boats and yachts, according to a recent estimate (Osservatorio Nautico Nazionale, 2010); this capacity, at the national level, is second only to that of the Liguria region. However, Sardinian infrastructures and facilities are not part of a coherent network. Moreover, they are unevenly scattered along the coastline and are very diverse, in terms of type, dimension, and endowment of facilities for sailors. A key issue to be taken into account in the early stages of the preparation of a plan for the pleasure craft sector, which might create the conditions for the setting up of a coherent network, is the lack of a proper, detailed knowledge of the system of Sardinian marinas and other facilities. To this end, this paper begins with an analysis of current information (both spatial and non-spatial) and attempts to build a spatial database that integrates available data. The analysis identifies differences in structure and semantics, together with differences in purpose and date of production/update of the data, as the roots of inconsistencies among existing data produced by different sources. Such differences in structure and semantics risk, if not properly identified, considered and handled, to cause an incorrect integration of data. Following the methodology provided by the guidelines produced by the Ordnance Survey with regards to domain ontologies (Hart et al., 2007; Hart e Goodwin, 2007; Kovacs et al., 2006), the construction of an ontology of the domain of infrastructure and facilities for the recreational craft sector is therefore proposed as a possible solution to the problem. By applying this methodology, a ‘knowledge glossary,’ consisting of a shared vocabulary of core and secondary concepts and of relationships (some of which spatial) among concepts is developed, leading to the construction of a conceptual model of the domain, later formalized by means of the software Protégé.

Improving Knowledge Retrieval in Digital Libraries Applying Intelligent Techniques

Nowadays an enormous quantity of heterogeneous and distributed information is stored in the digital University. Exploring online collections to find knowledge relevant to a user’s interests is a challenging work. The artificial intelligence and Semantic Web provide a common framework that allows knowledge to be shared and reused in an efficient way. In this work we propose a comprehensive approach for discovering E-learning objects in large digital collections based on analysis of recorded semantic metadata in those objects and the application of expert system technologies. We have used Case Based-Reasoning methodology to develop a prototype for supporting efficient retrieval knowledge from online repositories. We suggest a conceptual architecture for a semantic search engine. OntoUS is a collaborative effort that proposes a new form of interaction between users and digital libraries, where the latter are adapted to users and their surroundings

Organisational challenges of the semantic web in digital libraries: A Norwegian case study

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Emerald Group Publishing LimitedPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine from a socio-technical point of view the impact of semantic web technology on the strategic, organisational and technological levels. The semantic web initiative holds great promise for the future for digital libraries. There is, however, a considerable gap in semantic web research between the contributions in the technological field and research in the organisational field. Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive case study of the National Library of Norway (NL) is conducted, building on two major sources of information: the documentation of the digitising project of the NL; and interviews with nine different stakeholders at three levels of NL's organisation during June to August 2007. Top managers are interviewed on strategy, middle managers and librarians are interviewed regarding organisational issues and ICT professionals are interviewed on technology issues. Findings – The findings indicate that the highest impact will be at the organisational level. This is mainly because inter-organisational and cross-organisational structures have to be established to address the problems of ontology engineering, and a development framework for ontology engineering in digital libraries must be examined. Originality/value – ICT professionals and library practitioners should be more mindful of organisational issues when planning and executing semantic web projects in digital libraries. In particular, practitioners should be aware that the ontology engineering process and the semantic meta-data production will affect the entire organisation. For public digital libraries this probably will also call for a more open policy towards user groups to properly manage the process of ontology engineering

OBOME - Ontology based opinion mining in UBIPOL

Ontologies have a special role in the UBIPOL system, they help to structure the policy related context, provide conceptualization for policy domain and use in the opinion mining process. In this work we presented a system called Ontology Based Opinion Mining Engine (OBOME) for analyzing a domain-specific opinion corpus by first assisting the user with the creation of a domain ontology from the corpus. We determined the polarity of opinion on the various domain aspects. In the former step, the policy domain aspect has are identified (namely which policy category is represented by the concept). This identification is supported by the policy modelling ontology, which describe the most important policy – related classes and structure. Then the most informative documents from the corpus are extracted and asked the user to create a set of aspects and related keywords using these documents. In the latter step, we used the corpus specific ontology to model the domain and extracted aspect-polarity associations using grammatical dependencies between words. Later, summarized results are shown to the user to analyze and store. Finally, in an offline process policy modeling ontology is updated

Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: An ontological approach

This is the post-print version of the Paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerSupporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.This work is funded by the European Commission under the 2006/1 eParticipation call

Unlocking the potential of public sector information with Semantic Web technology

Governments often hold very rich data and whilst much of this information is published and available for re-use by others, it is often trapped by poor data structures, locked up in legacy data formats or in fragmented databases. One of the great benefits that Semantic Web (SW) technology offers is facilitating the large scale integration and sharing of distributed data sources. At the heart of information policy in the UK, the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) is the part of the UK government charged with enabling the greater re-use of public sector information. This paper describes the actions, findings, and lessons learnt from a pilot study, involving several parts of government and the public sector. The aim was to show to government how they can adopt SW technology for the dissemination, sharing and use of its data