An adaptable system to support provenance management for the public policy-making process in smart cities

© 2018 by the authors. Government policies aim to address public issues and problems and therefore play a pivotal role in people’s lives. The creation of public policies, however, is complex given the perspective of large and diverse stakeholders’ involvement, considerable human participation, lengthy processes, complex task specification and the non-deterministic nature of the process. The inherent complexities of the policy process impart challenges for designing a computing system that assists in supporting and automating the business process pertaining to policy setup, which also raises concerns for setting up a tracking service in the policy-making environment. A tracking service informs how decisions have been taken during policy creation and can provide useful and intrinsic information regarding the policy process. At present, there exists no computing system that assists in tracking the complete process that has been employed for policy creation. To design such a system, it is important to consider the policy environment challenges; for this a novel network and goal based approach has been framed and is covered in detail in this paper. Furthermore, smart governance objectives that include stakeholders’ participation and citizens’ involvement have been considered. Thus, the proposed approach has been devised by considering smart governance principles and the knowledge environment of policy making where tasks are largely dependent on policy makers’ decisions and on individual policy objectives. Our approach reckons the human dimension for deciding and defining autonomous process activities at run time. Furthermore, with the network-based approach, so-called provenance data tracking is employed which enables the capture of policy process

Design of Interactional End-to-End Web Applications for Smart Cities

Nowadays, the number of flexible and fast human to application system interactions is dramatically increasing. For instance, citizens interact with the help of the internet to organize surveys or meetings (in real-time) spontaneously. These interactions are supported by technologies and application systems such as free wireless networks, web -or mobile apps. Smart Cities aim at enabling their citizens to use these digital services, e.g., by providing enhanced networks and application infrastructures maintained by the public administration. However, looking beyond technology, there is still a significant lack of interaction and support between "normal" citizens and the public administration. For instance, democratic decision processes (e.g. how to allocate public disposable budgets) are often discussed by the public administration without citizen involvement. This paper introduces an approach, which describes the design of enhanced interactional web applications for Smart Cities based on dialogical logic process patterns. We demonstrate the approach with the help of a budgeting scenario as well as a summary and outlook on further research

Interpreting overlaps in business process mapping via organisational soft knowledge flows

Knowledge Management (KM) as the term implies, is broadly about improving knowledge use within an organisation. At a lower level, Business Process Management (BPM) is the set of management activities related to business processes that can ideally be arranged in a life cycle. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a technique enabling the researcher to better understand interactions between people. Relatively little research has been conducted with regard to the crossover of social networks and workflows, with the aim of examining workflows as management views them, as opposed to the actual social interactions of staff. Improvements in the overlay of management interpretations of work and real social networks could potentially lead to improvements in business process efficacy. In this study SNA diagrams are examined in order to implement executable models and potentially enable automated analysis of workflows. A means of converting SNA data to Business Process workflows is presented and an example provided.14 page(s