Increasing citizen and association involvement in government decision-making by implementing civic engagement platforms: Valencia city case study

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesCivic engagement is believed to be one principle requirement in successful governmental decision making and in turn in realizing deliberation and democracy (Peña-Lopez, 2017; Irvin and Stansbury, 2004). In this study, a state-of-the-art investigation was executed among five civic engagement platforms to decide on the most suitable platform to start building the prototype for the use case of Valencia. The selection was based on the comparison matrix of the specifications elicited from technical project requirements, user suggestions through a survey and a participatory workshop; and adaptability criteria. The selected platform “Communecter” was developed, implemented and deployed on the internet for the validation part for which evaluators from the students of the international master of peace, conflicts and development studies were invited for a validation participatory workshop. Results from the first survey and participatory workshop emphasised the importance of the discussion availability through the platform, possibility of displaying volunteering opportunities and organizing events among a bigger set of functions that are available in the selected platform. The results of the validation show that the current civic engagement platform is a good environment for pursuing civic activities by citizens and associations despite the technical improvements needed and the usability issues. The platform furthermore should be supplemented with other non-technological procedures that will tackle other concerns raised during the study’s participatory workshops including motivation and social & age divide

An Online Analytical System for Multi-Tagged Document Collections

The New York Times Annotated Corpus and the ACM Digital Library are two prototypical examples of document collections in which each document is tagged with keywords and significant phrases. Such collections can be viewed as high-dimensional document cubes against which browsers and search systems can be applied in a manner similar to online analytical processing against data cubes. The tagging patterns in these collections are examined and a generative tagging model is developed that can mimic the tag assignments observed in those collections. When a user browses the collection by means of a Boolean query over tags, the result is a subset of documents that can be summarized by a centroid derived from their document term vectors. A partial materialization strategy is developed to provide efficient storage and access to centroids for such document subsets. A customized local term vocabulary storage approach is incorporated into the partial materialization to ensure that rich and relevant term vocabulary is available for representing centroids while maintaining a low storage footprint. By adopting this strategy, summary measures dependent on centroids (including bursty terms, or larger sets of indicative documents) can be efficiently and accurately computed for important subsets of documents. The proposed design is evaluated on the two collections along with PubMed (a held-back document collection) and several synthetic collections to validate that it outperforms alternative storage strategies. Finally, an enhanced faceted browsing system is developed to support users' exploration of large multi-tagged document collections. It provides summary measures of document result sets at each step of navigation through a set of indicative terms and diverse set of documents, as well as information scent that helps to guide users' exploration. These summaries are derived from pre-materialized views that allow for quick calculation of centroids for various result sets. The utility and efficiency of the system is demonstrated on the New York Times Annotated Corpus