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

Towards A Taxonomy of Emerging Topics in Open Government Data: A Bibliometric Mapping Approach

The purpose of this paper is to capture the emerging research topics in Open Government Data (OGD) through a bibliometric mapping approach. Previous OGD research has covered the evolution of the discipline with the application of bibliometric mapping tools. However, none of these studies have extended the bibliometric mapping approach for taxonomy building. Realizing this potential, we used a bibliometric tool to perform keyword analysis as a foundation for taxonomy construction. A set of keyword clusters was constructed, and qualitative analysis software was used for taxonomy creation. Emerging topics were identified in a taxonomy form. This study contributes towards the development of an OGD taxonomy. This study contributes to the procedural realignment of a past study by incorporating taxonomy building elements for taxonomy creation. These contributions are significant because there is insufficient taxonomy research in the OGD discipline. The taxonomy building procedures extended in this study are applicable to other fields

Cyber-Virtual Systems: Simulation, Validation & Visualization

We describe our ongoing work and view on simulation, validation and visualization of cyber-physical systems in industrial automation during development, operation and maintenance. System models may represent an existing physical part - for example an existing robot installation - and a software simulated part - for example a possible future extension. We call such systems cyber-virtual systems. In this paper, we present the existing VITELab infrastructure for visualization tasks in industrial automation. The new methodology for simulation and validation motivated in this paper integrates this infrastructure. We are targeting scenarios, where industrial sites which may be in remote locations are modeled and visualized from different sites anywhere in the world. Complementing the visualization work, here, we are also concentrating on software modeling challenges related to cyber-virtual systems and simulation, testing, validation and verification techniques for them. Software models of industrial sites require behavioural models of the components of the industrial sites such as models for tools, robots, workpieces and other machinery as well as communication and sensor facilities. Furthermore, collaboration between sites is an important goal of our work.Comment: Preprint, 9th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2014

Collaborative Solution Architecture for Developing a National Interoperability Framework in Romania

Interoperability framework is a set of standards and guidelines that describe how organizations have established or will establish to interact. The framework is not static, but one that adapts to the change of standards, administrative requirements and technology. It can be adapted to the socio - economic, political, cultural, linguistic, historical and geographical purposes and to a specific context or situation. The article aims to clarify the essential concepts necessary for outlining Romanian national interoperability framework and to propose collaborative solution architecture for its development, updating and maintaining.Interoperability Framework, National Interoperability Framework, European Interoperability Strategy, Collaborative Solution Architecture