Loutas, Nikolaos

Narducci, Fedelucio

Ojo, Adegboyega

Palmonari, Matteo

Paris, Cecile

Semeraro, Giovanni

MURAL - Maynooth University Research Archive Library

106 Int. J. Electronic Governance, Vol. 9, Nos. 1/2, 2017Guest EditorialNikolaos LoutasPwC, Woluwedal 18,Sint-Stevens-Woluwe, 1932, BelgiumEmail: nikolaos.loutas@pwc.beFedelucio NarducciUniversity of Bari “Aldo Moro”,Via Orabona, 4,Bari, 70126, ItalyEmail: fedelucio.narducci@uniba.itAdegboyega OjoInsight Centre for Data Analytics,National University of Ireland,IDA Business Park,Lower Dangan Co. Galway, NW1, Republic of IrelandEmail: adegboyega.ojo@deri.orgMatteo PalmonariDepartment of Informatics, Systems and Communication,University of Milano-Bicocca,Viale Sarca 336, U14,Milan, 20126, ItalyEmail: palmonari@disco.unimib.itCécile ParisCSIRO, Data61,Level 5, 13 Garden Street,Eveleigh NSW, 2015, AustraliaEmail: Cecile.Paris@csiro.auCopyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.Guest Editorial 107Giovanni SemeraroUniversity of Bari “Aldo Moro”,Via Orabona, 4,Bari, 70126, ItalyEmail: giovanni.semeraro@uniba.itBiographical notes: Nikolaos Loutas is a Senior Manager with PwC Consulting,helping organisations respond to data management and analytics challenges toimprove their products and services, and use technology megatrends to transform.Before joining PwC, he worked as a Researcher with the Insight Centre for DataAnalytics and the Centre for Research Technology Hellas. He holds a PhD insemantic web technologies, where he studied how the feedback of customers onservices can be collected and made machine-readable, so that it can be used asinput to analytic algorithms that support service discovery, recommendation andpersonalisation.Fedelucio Narducci is a Research Assistant at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro”and he is a Member of the SWAP (semantic web access and personalisation)research group. His primary research interests lie in the areas of machine learning,content-based recommender systems, user modelling, and personalisation.He served as co-chair of the three editions of Pegov. He is reviewer and co-reviewerfor international conferences and journals on the topics of a recommender system,user modelling, and personalisation. He is also the author of several papers ininternational conferences and journals.Adegboyega Ojo is a Senior Research Fellow and the Head of the E-GovernmentUnit at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland,Galway (NUIG). His research addresses data-driven innovation in the governmentdomain, value chains in big open linked data and socio-technical design of opendata platforms. He has published over 100 scholarly papers. He currently servesas Principal Investigator on European Commission Projects in the area of linkeddata and open government. He is the current Secretary of the Digital GovernmentSociety. He obtained his PhD in Artificial Neural Networks from the Universityof Lagos in 1998.Matteo Palmonari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics,Systems and Communication at the University of Milan-Bicocca. His researchinterests include semantic matchmaking, information quality, and knowledgerepresentation for the semantic web; several of his researches have been applied toservice modelling, service matchmaking and e-government applications. He hasbeen Visiting Postdoc at the ADVIS Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago.He is a coordinator of the H2020 innovation action EW-Shopp: supporting eventand weather-based data analytics and marketing along the Shopper Journey.He has published more than 70 papers in peer-reviewed international journals andconference proceedings.Cécile Paris is a Science Leader at Data61, CSIRO. Her expertise is inNatural Language Processing, User Modelling, Social Media Analytics, and,more generally, in artificial intelligence and communication. She seeks tounderstand how people communicate and to facilitate communication withinformation environments. With a Bachelor degree from the University of108 N. Loutas et al.Berkeley (California) and a PhD from Columbia University (New York), shehas over to 25 years of experience in research and research management.Her group develops systems that are being used in government and industry, innumerous domains, including service delivery, digital libraries, health, businessintelligence and media monitoring. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academyof Technology and Engineering (ATSE).Giovanni Semeraro is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the Universityof Bari “Aldo Moro” and leads the Semantic Web Access and PersonalisationResearch Group “Antonio Bello”. His research interests include AI, recommendersystems, user modelling, personalisation, intelligent information retrieval,semantic and social computing, semantic web, natural language processing,and machine learning. He received his MSc in Computer Science from theUniversity of Bari. He served as Program/General Chair of several conferences,such as RecSys 2015, UMAP 2013, EC-Web 2010, SWAP 2010, ISMIS 2006,IEA-AIE 2005, He is the co-author of more than 300 papers published in journals,conferences/workshops and books.We are pleased to introduce the special section on personalisation in e-government andsmart cities, a prominent topic in digital governance research.Over the last decades, user modelling and personalisation have been playing an importantrole in the development of intelligent systems, whereby these systems adapt their behaviourbased on knowledge about their users. Such knowledge can include users’ characteristics,interests and preferences, but also locations or past behaviours. While personalisationhas been extensively studied and employed in domains characterised by the digital-objectconsumption (e-commerce, news, music, video recommendations, etc.), personalisation ine-government applications is still in its infancy.e-Government (e-Gov) has transformed interactions between governments, citizens andother stakeholders in the society. Public services and public sector information can now bedelivered electronically through Web portals and mobile apps (e.g., see Palmonari et al.,2008; Loutas et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2011; Colineau et al., 2013; Paris and Nepal, 2016).In this new context, innovative solutions that are better tailored to citizens’ needs canfacilitate better access to e-Gov services and reduce the red tape that usually characterisesthe provisioning of public services (e.g., Castelli et al., 2009; Bianco et al., 2013; Bistaet al., 2013). In this direction, solutions for providing a cross-lingual access to e-govservices (e.g., Narducci et al., 2013a, 2013b, 2017), or solutions for delivering more targetedinformation to citizens (e.g., Colineau et al., 2013; Paris and Nepal, 2016) have been recentlyinvestigated. Governments have also started to look at ways to better engage with citizens,both for the delivery of services and for policy making (e.g., Lee et al., 2011). As a result ofthese initiatives, providing personalised services, often grouped in life-events and businessepisodes, are a real possibility now for governments.Another interesting development is the recent push towards more openness of publicsector information, with an emphasis on opening up government data (Ojo et al., 2015),which presents new application areas and opportunities for personalisation. This trendhas specifically created the need for personalised access to Open Government Datapredominantly by means of visualisations and faceted browsers. It has also given riseGuest Editorial 109to opportunities for improved decision making (e.g., Lee et al., 2011), as well asrecommendation and personalisation of e-Gov services (e.g., Loutas et al., 2011; Baldassarreet al., 2013).This introduces new challenges for personalisation models. On the one hand,personalisation can lead to better services and more relevant information. This is seen asdesirable, by both the public and governments, as it can improve service delivery (e.g.,Colineau et al., 2013; Iaquinta et al., 2013; Penadés et al., 2014; Torsello et al., 2014;Vicente-López et al., 2014) and participation in decision-making processes (e.g., Ardissonoet al., 2013, 2014). On the other hand, there are potentially ethical (including privacy) issuesrelated to the fact that citizens might be in a dependence relationship with governments, andautomatic user profiling might be considered ‘big brother’ and not desirable (e.g., Paris et al.,2013). Indeed, the difficulties to obtain some of the information required for personalisation,because of privacy, confidentiality, ethical and potentially trust reasons, represent the mainhindrance for personalisation in the e-Gov domain.Smart Cities provide new opportunities and new challenges in this context (e.g., Villena-Román et al., 2014; Ojo et al., 2015). Smart Cities can have access to very detailed dataabout the citizens, e.g., using urban sensing devices, which can support new personalisationmodels. Improving the quality of both life and services in the city have high relevancein many research fields such as social sciences, psychology, education, medicine, andcomputer science. For these reasons, Smart Cities are becoming a very interesting topic fordifferent conferences belonging to the ICT area.This special section on personalisation in e-government and smart cities collects relevantworks which investigate the new challenges and research directions about personalisationin e-Gov and Smart Cities. This special section derives from the experiences shared inthe three editions of the personalisation in e-government and smart cities – smart servicesfor smart territories (PEGOV) workshop, which took place in conjunction with as manyeditions of the international conference on user modelling, adaptation and personalisation(UMAP).This special section is composed of three papers. In the paper MuSe: a semantic solutionfor personalised recommendations of municipality services, Carenini et al. describe anontology, called the municipality service (MuSe), which supports the creation of formal andmachine-readable descriptions of services available to citizens, and enables for personalisedrecommendations of services based on citizen profiles. The MuSe ontology is one of themain outcomes of a project supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research,and has been built having in mind the principles of the Semantic City Service Ecosystems.The result is a powerful model to represent the semantics of the services offered by localpublic administrations to citizens. Specifically, two types of usage scenarios have driven thedesign of MuSe: in the first scenario, citizens need to retrieve services and perform properactivities of browsing and searching the websites of the local public administrations (pullmodality); in the second scenario, the system proactively suggests services to citizens (pushmodality). The MuSe ontology supports the first scenario in that it offers a rich modellingof municipality services, allowing citizens to perform an effective search and navigation;with respect to the second scenario, the MuSe ontology enables the matchmaking betweenmunicipality services and citizens’ needs, with concrete examples based on citizens’profiles. The authors also present the results of a user study consisting of the field trial ofthe solutions developed in the two above mentioned scenarios with the direct involvementof citizens.110 N. Loutas et al.In SEPIR: a semantic and personalised information retrieval tool for the publicadministration based on distributional semantics, Basile et al. present a tool that analysesa large collection of documents using Natural Language Processing Techniques to enablesemantic search over that collection. SEPIR provides visualisation tools so that the userscan get a quick overview of the concepts contained in the collection. Finally, the systemis able to personalise the search based on the user’s past queries. The authors illustrate theuse of SEPIR with two use cases: the first concerns an analysis of patent data related topre-commercial procurement procedures, and the second is about the analysis of documentsabout projects funded by the Apulia Region in Italy to understand the impact of the projects.In both cases, the authors show how the system first analyses the document collectionand then supports the exploration of the collection content and the retrieval of specificdocuments.Finally, in their paper entitled Personalised community maps, Ardissono et al. describethe information-sharing model they developed together with a testbed software applicationsto enable the generation of personalised community maps to help individuals or groupsview territorial information for their specific interests (e.g., cultural events) and engagein participatory decision-making and crowdsourcing. Group members can tag informationitems to describe their content and formulate queries by specifying tags of interest. Whileusers (or groups of users) can obtain ephemeral search results, they can also define persistentmaps by specifying tags for their generation. Finally, they can create multiple views on themap through the concepts of personae. The authors present their model and the results ofan experiment they carried out with the model.ReferencesArdissono, L., Voghera, A. and Velluto, M. (2013) ‘Selecting people for involving them in participatorydecision-making processes’, Proceedings of PEGOV 2013: Personalization in eGovernmentServices and Applications, co-located with UMAP’13 (Vol. 997), CEUR-WS, Rome, Italy, pp.1–8.Ardissono, L., Lucenteforte, M., Savoca, A. and Voghera, A. (2014) ‘Community mappingfor participatory decision-making processes’, Proceedings of PEGOV 2014: Personalizationin eGovernment Services, Data and Applications, co-located with UMAP’14 (Vol. 1181),CEUR-WS, Aalborg, Denmark, pp.1–8.Baldassarre, C., Cremaschi, M. and Palmonari, M. (2013) ‘Bridging the gap between citizens andlocal administrations with knowledge-based service bundle recommendations’, Proceedings ofthe 24th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2013),IEEE, Prague, Czech Republic, pp.157–161.Bianco, A., Campegiani, P., Forrester, J., Iaquinta, L. and Torsello, M.A. (2013) ‘SMART project:industrial and academic collaboration for service design’, Proceedings of PEGOV 2013:Personalization in eGovernment Services and Applications, co-located with UMAP’13 (Vol. 997),CEUR-WS, Rome, Italy, pp.13–19.Bista, S.K., Nepal, S. and Paris, C. (2013) ‘The human touch of government services’, Proceedingsof PEGOV 2013: Personalization in eGovernment Services and Applications, co-located withUMAP’13 (Vol. 997), CEUR-WS, Rome, Italy, pp.20–27.Castelli, M., Comerio, M. and Cremaschi, M. (2009) ‘Towards the definition of value-added servicesfor citizens: a new model for the description of public administration services’, InternationalJournal of Management and Information Technology, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.166–173.Colineau, N., Paris, C. and Vander Linden, K. (2013) ‘Automatically producing tailored webmaterials for public administration’, New Review of HyperMedia and MultiMedia, Vol. 9, No. 2,pp.158–181.Guest Editorial 111Iaquinta, L., Torsello, M.A., Comerio, M., Fanelli, A.M. and Semeraro, G. (2013) ‘User segmentationin e-Government services’, Proceedings of PEGOV 2013: Personalization in eGovernmentServices and Applications, co-located with UMAP’13 (Vol. 997), CEUR-WS, Rome, Italy.Lee, D., Loutas, N., Sanchez Nielsen, E., Mogulkoc E. and Lacigova, O. (2011) ‘Inform-consult-empower: a three-tiered approach to eParticipation’, Proceedings of 3rd International Conferenceon Electronic Participation (ePart 2011), Springer, Delft, The Netherlands, pp.121–132.Loutas, N., Peristeras, V. and Tarabanis, K. (2011) ‘A citizen-centric semantically-enhancedgovernmental portal’, Electronic Government, An International Journal, Vol. 8, No. 4,pp.363–384.McCleary, R. (2007) ‘Ethical issues in online social work research’, Journal of Social Work Valuesand Ethics, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.6–26.Narducci, F., Palmonari, M. and Semeraro, G. (2013a) ‘Cross-language semantic retrieval and linkingof E-Gov services’, Proceedings of the 12th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2013), Springer, Sydney, Australia, pp.130–145.Narducci, F., Palmonari, M. and Semeraro, G. (2013b) ‘Cross-language semantic matching fordiscovering links to e-gov services in the LOD cloud’, Proceedings of KNOW@LOD Workshop,co-located with ESWC’13, (Vol. 992), CEUR-WS, Montpellier, France, pp.21–32.Narducci, F., Palmonari, M. and Semeraro, G. (2017) ‘Cross-lingual link discovery with TR-ESA’,Information Sciences, Vol. 394, pp.68–87.Ojo, A., Curry, E. and Zeleti, F.A. (2015) ‘A tale of open data innovations in five smart cities’,Proceedings of 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2015), IEEE,pp.2326–2335.Palmonari, M., Viscusi, G. and Batini. C. (2008) ‘A semantic repository approach to improve thegovernment to business relationship’, Data Knowl. Eng, Vol. 65, No. 3, pp.485–511.Paris, C., Colineau, N., Nepal, S., Bista, S.K. and Beschorner, G. (2013) ‘Ethical considerations inan online community: the balancing act’, Ethics and Information Technology, Vol. 15, No. 4,pp.301–316.Paris, C. and Nepal, S. (2016) ‘Next step: an online community for delivering human services’,in Nepal, S., Paris, C. and Georgakopoulos, D. (Eds.): Social Media for Government Services,Springer, pp.169–196.Penads, M.C., Martí, P., Canós, J.H. and Gómez, A. (2014) ‘Product line-based customizationof e-Government documents’, Proceedings of PEGOV 2014: Personalization in eGovernmentServices, Data and Applications, co-located with UMAP’14 (Vol. 1181), CEUR-WS, Aalborg,Denmark, pp.38–47.Peristeras, V., Goudos, S.K., Loutas, N. and Tarabanis, K. (2009) ‘Ontology-based search foreGovernment services using citizen profile information’, Journal of Web Engineering, Vol. 8,No. 3, pp.245–267.Torsello, M.A., Iaquinta, L. and Comerio, M. (2014) ‘A fuzzy model for service value assessment’,Proceedings of PEGOV 2014: Personalization in eGovernment Services, Data and Applications,co-located with UMAP’14 (Vol. 1181), CEUR-WS, Aalborg, Denmark, pp.48–57.Vicente-López, E., de Campos, L.M., Fernández-Luna, J.M. and Huete, J.F. (2014) ‘Personalizationof parliamentary document retrieval using different user profiles’, Proceedings of PEGOV 2014:Personalization in eGovernment Services, Data and Applications, co-located with UMAP’14(Vol. 1181), CEUR-WS, Aalborg, Denmark, pp.28–37.Villena-Román, J., Luna-Cobos, A. and González-Cristóbal, J.C. (2014) ‘TweetAlert: semanticanalytics in social networks for citizen opinion mining in the city of the future’, Proceedingsof PEGOV 2014: Personalization in eGovernment Services, Data and Applications, co-locatedwith UMAP’14 (Vol. 1181), CEUR-WS, Aalborg, Denmark, pp.7–11.

Special Issue on: Personalisation in E-Government and Smart Cities

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Special Issue on: Personalisation in E-Government and Smart Cities

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