Erratum to: 36th International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s13054-016-1208-6.]

A Comparative Study of Methods for Deciding to Open Data

Governments may have their own business processes to decide to open data, which might be supported by decision-making tools. At the same time, analyzing potential benefits, costs, risks, and other effects-adverse of disclosing data are challenging. In the literature, there are various methods to analyze the potential advantages and disadvantages of opening data. Nevertheless, none of them provides discussion into the comparative studies in terms of strengths and weaknesses. In this study, we compare three methods for disclosing data, namely Bayesian-belief networks, Fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making, and Decision tree analysis. The comparative study is a mechanism for further studying the development of a knowledge domain by performing a feature-by-feature at the same level of functionalities. The result of this research shows that the methods have different strengths and weaknesses. The Bayesian-belief Networks has higher accuracy in comparison, and able to construct the causal relationships of the selected variable under uncertainties. Yet, this method is more resource intensive. This study can contribute to the decision-makers and respected researchers to a better comprehend and provide recommendation related to the three methods comparison.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog

The Development of a Reference Architecture for Local Government

Traditionally, government agencies are organized vertically around departments. Many local government agencies are looking for ways to develop an integrated architecture. Many architectural methods are available, however, they remain often abstract, provide limited support for the translation of the concepts to a concrete situation, and have limited visualization support to create a shared understanding. In the research presented in this paper we describe the development of a reference enterprise architecture for a municipality using action research. Our development approach is based on modeling the interdependencies among, and within organization, business process, and application layer. We used discrete-event simulation, and animation to provide insight in the existing situation, and develop and create a shared understanding of the reference architecture.Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen

Enterprise Architecture Integration in E-government

Achieving goals of better integrated and responsive government services requires moving away from stand alone applications toward more comprehensive, integrated architectures. As a result there is mounting pressure to move from disparate systems operating in parallel toward a shared architecture designed to support information exchange and cross-agency business processes. This paper presents a simulation-based approach to designing and evaluating ways to achieve such sharing. This approach support the mapping EAI technology on the business processes needing to be supported and is based on technology, business process and stakeholder-level components. Discreteevent simulation and animation combined with activity-based costing is used to evaluate the benefits of the proposed EAI solution. The results provide insight into the implications of EAI, used to support information sharing and integration of service processes. In this way the benefits and implications of the EAI approach can be assessed.Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen

Internet and political empowerment: Towards a taxonomy for online political empowerment

In the age of the information revolution, the Internet can be used to involve citizens in political processes and leads to the emergence of the new version of political empowerment. This article analyses the possible effects of the Internet on the political empowerment of citizens. We interviewed 29 citizens of Tehran to learn how the Internet affects their political involvement, and to determine whether it results in their political empowerment. We analysed the interview transcripts using Strauss and Corbin’s open-coding scheme, revealing 44 constructs. These were refined and categorised into two aspects: ‘political awareness’ and ‘political participation’. This taxonomy can be employed to evaluate the use of the Internet for political empowerment and to develop the ways to empower citizens. Six main findings on the effect of factors which contribute to the political empowerment of citizens were developed. The question of which factors are essential for citizen empowerment is likely to be context-specific and is recommended as the topic of future research.Information and Communication Technolog

Open data for evidence-based decision-making: Data-driven government resulting in uncertainty and polarization

Over the last decade, more and more data are collected and opened. Governments actively stimulate the opening of data to increase citizen engagement to support policy-making processes. Evidence-based policy-making is the situation whereby decisions made are based on factual data. The common expectation is that releasing data will result in evidence-based decision-making and more trust in government decisions. This study aims to provide insight into how evidence-based policy based on open data can result into uncertainty and even polarize the policy-making process. We analyze a case study in which traffic and road utilization datasets are used and model the decision-making process using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). The BPMN model shows how the government and business organizations can use the data and give different interpretations. Data-driven decision-making might potentially create uncertainty, polarization, and less trust in decisions as stakeholders can give different meanings to the data and arrive at different outcomes. In contrast to the common belief, we found that the more data released, the more discussions happened about what is desired according to the data. The various directions derived from the data can even polarize decisionmaking. In other words, the more data opened, the more people can construct their perception of reality. For further research, we recommend understanding the types and role of data to create an evidence-based approach.Information and Communication Technolog

Toward a Reference Architecture for User-Oriented Open Government Data Portals

Governments have established Open Government Data Portals (OGDP) to open various types of datasets that can be used to increase transparency, accountability, and innovation. OGDP is becoming a strategic program for citizen engagement and empowering users. Nevertheless, many OGDP architectures focus merely on publishing data and do not support the actual data use. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a reference architecture (RA) that takes a broader set of requirements aimed at enabling the use of open data into account. The RA consists of recommended structures and integrations of the end-to-end user interactions and services. In this research, we use the DKAN open data management platform as the basis to design a full suite of cataloguing and visualising the end-to-end user interactions. Five layers are proposed providing functionalities for using data. Whereas most portals are focused on releasing data, our RA is focused on empowering users by providing functionalities for the use of data.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog

Mini Track: ‘e-Policy’ (Cluster: e-Government)

Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen

A Stakeholders Taxonomy for Opening Government Data Decision-Making

Stakeholders can have different views on the opening of data, and conflicts may arise between them. Several causes of disputes may arise during the decision-making process due to the diverse objectives, interests, and needs among the stakeholders that perceive their desires. Yet, no stakeholder taxonomy exists to guide this decision-making process. Direct and indirect stakeholders include open data providers, software developers, data scientists, privacy experts, decision-makers, users, open data evangelists, software developers, policy-makers and politicians. Using an iterative process, a stakeholders taxonomy was developed by classifying stakeholders based on their varying levels and views on openness. The taxonomy includes unaware, unknowledgeable, resistant, risk-averse, neutral, supportive, expert, champion, and leading roles. Each stakeholder proposes a unique mix of expertise, legitimacy, sense of urgency, perceived possible benefits, and risks. The stakeholder’s taxonomy can help to improve the adoption of the decision-making process to open data.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog

Transformation to cloud services sourcing: Required it governance capabilities

The sourcing of cloud services is a relatively new type of service delivery model in which an organization gets access to IT services via a cloud service provider that is delivering services over the web to many users on a pay per use or period basis. Even though the importance of IT governance is often underlined, there is limited literature available regarding the required IT governance capabilities that public sector organizations need to have in place to successfully implement and manage a cloud service delivery model. Using an existing governance framework of IT core capabilities as basis, the required cloud computing capabilities are investigated using interviews and studying reports. The analyses helped to identify 16 discriminating capabilities that are essential when effectively implementing and managing cloud services in the public sector. Different factors, including the cloud service and deployment model, the strategic intent underlying cloud sourcing, the degree and complexity of cloud sourcing and the IT governance structure, were found to influence the relevance of cloud capabilities and the relevance might also change over time.Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen