Deirdre Lee

Primary-Context Model and Ontology: A Combined Approach for Pervasive Transportation Services

Advanced pervasive transportation services aim to improve the safety and efficiency of public and private transportation facilities, while reducing operating costs and improving the travel experience for drivers, passengers and other travellers. In order to achieve these goals, such services require access to context information from a myriad of distributed, heterogeneous intelligent transportation systems. A context management scheme that models information in a standard fashion is essential to support information sharing between individual systems, and higher-level information reasoning. This paper presents an ontology-based spatial context model, which takes a combined approach to modelling context information utilised by pervasive transportation services: the primary-context model facilitates interoperation across independent intelligent transportation systems, whereas the primary-context ontology enables pervasive transportation services to reason about shared context information and to react accordingly. The independently defined, distributed information is correlated based on its primary-context: location, time, identity, and quality of service. The primary-context model and ontology have been evaluated by modelling a car park system for a smart parking space locator service

eParticipation in Practice in Europe: The Case of "Puzzled by Policy: Helping You Be Part of EU"

This paper focuses on the case study of “Puzzled by Policy: Helping you be part of EU”, a European e-participation project, which studies the needs of concerned citizens, stakeholders and decision makers, and provides a unique platform for users to learn and discuss about policy at the EU and national level, while finding out what particular policies mean to them on the national level so that they can contribute to policy drafting. The findings of our study suggest that the path to successful e-participation should not only involve ICT, but should first incorporate a conceptual model of e-participation, i.e. questions such as how to model the policy to be debated in the democratic process, how to define the public engagement model, what communication model should be used, and what deliberation methods should be addressed.

Inform-consult-empower: a three-tiered approach to eParticipation

While most existing eParticipation projects have embraced the need for citizen engagement to achieve effective democracy, as of yet only limited success has been achieved. This lack of success stems from many challenges and barriers: in some cases, it is a lack of interest in policy issues and low levels of trust in politicians; in others, it is a lack of vision or awareness about the benefits of citizens participation inside the policy-modelling process. This paper describes a three-tiered approach to eParticipation based on a multi-stream policymaking model with three levels of participation: Inform, Consult, Empower. This approach focuses on the level of participation by the user: what are the goals of participation at each of these levels and how do each of these levels of participation relate to current policy-modelling practices. The Puzzled by Policy project will adopt and implement the Inform-Consult-Empower approach, which shows how the social complexity barriers, political culture barriers, technological barriers and organizational structure barriers can be reduced in order to provide effective participation. A use case of how this model will be used to engage Spanish citizens with immigration policy is presented.

A Comparative Analysis of Tools and Technologies for Policy Making

Latest advancements in information and communication technologies offer great opportunities for modernising policy making, i.e. increasing its efficiency, bringing it closer to all relevant actors, and enhancing its transparency and acceptance levels. In this context, this chapter aims to present, analyse, and discuss emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) tools and technologies presenting the potential to enhance policy making. The methodological approach includes the searching and identification of relevant tools and technologies, their systematic analysis and categorisation, and finally a discussion of potential usage and recommendations for enhancing policy making.

CERA: a collaborative environment reference architecture for interoperable CWE systems

In this paper, we present the collaborative environment reference architecture (CERA) with the aim of supporting collaborative work environment (CWE) interoperability. The vision of CERA is to support users who are engaged in common collaborative spaces with similar work processes to work and collaborate seamlessly together, despite their use of proprietary CWE tools and systems. The underlying CERA concepts, design principles, and models are discussed, as well as the architectural decisions made as a result of the extended requirements analysis exercise. Furthermore, we present results from the Ecospace (http://www.ip-ecospace.org/) project as an example of a CERA instantiation which focuses on facilitating users collaborating across different CWE systems, namely BSCW, NetWeaver, and BC. We conclude with future research and implementation directions.

The WAVE Platform: Utilising Argument Visualisation, Social Networking and Web 2.0 Technologies for eParticipation

The growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) offers governments advanced methods for providing services and governing their constituency. eGovernment research aims to provide the models, technologies, and tools for more effective and efficient public administration systems as well as more participatory decision processes. In particular, eParticipation opens up greater opportunities for consultation and dialogue between government and citizens. Many governments have embraced eParticipation by setting up websites that allow citizens to contribute and have their say on particular issues. Although these sites make use of some of the latest ICT and Web 2.0 technologies, the uptake and sustained usage by citizens is still relatively low. Additionally, when users do participate, there is the issue of how the numerous contributions can be effectively processed and analysed, to avoid the inevitable information overload created by thousands of unstructured comments. The WAVE platform addresses what the authors see as the main barriers to the uptake of eParticipation websites by adopting a holistic and sustained approach of engaging users to participate in public debates. The WAVE platform incorporates argument visualisation, social networking, and Web 2.0 techniques to facilitate users participating in structured visual debates in a community environment.

The semantic public service portal (S-PSP)

One of governments responsibilities is the provision of public services to its citizens, for example, education, health, transportation, and social services. Additionally, with the explosion of the Internet in the past 20 years, many citizens have moved online as their main method of communication and learning. Therefore, a logical step for governments is to move the provision of public services online. However, public services have a complex structure and may span across multiple, disparate public agencies. Moreover, the legislation that governs a public service is usually difficult for a layman to understand. Despite this, governments have created online portals to enable citizens to find out about and utilise specific public services. While this is positive, most portals fail to engage citizens because they do not manage to hide the complexity of public services from users. Many also fail to address the specific needs of users, providing instead only information about the most general use-case. In this paper we present the Semantic Public Service Portal (S-PSP), which structures and stores detailed public-services semantically, so that they may be presented to citizens on-demand in a relevant, yet uncomplicated, manner. This ontologybased approach enables automated and logical decision-making to take place semantically in the application layer of the portal, while the user remains blissfully unaware of its complexities. An additional benefit of this approach is that the eligibility of a citizen for a particular public service may be identified early. The S-PSP provides a rich, structured and personalised public service description to the citizen, with which he/she can consume the public service as directed. In this paper, a use-case of the S-PSP in a rural community in Greece is described, demonstrating how its use can directly reduce the administrative burden on a citizen, in this case is a rural Small and Medium Enterprise (SME).

Engaging Citizens in Policy Issues: Multidimensional Approach, Evidence and Lessons Learned

E-participation offers individuals, groups and non-governmental institutions the opportunity to learn about and discuss policy so they can make more informed choices in their personal lives as citizens, and to contribute to policy drafting as an instrument to strengthen the quality of decision-makers’ actions. Although a growing body of literature has been devoted to the main benefits and opportunities that ICT can offer in e-participation, little is known about the driving forces that foster public participation and citizens’ active engagement. This paper describes a multidimensional engagement approach, supported by an inform-consult-empower framework, to strengthen the foundation for participatory policy-making. This approach addresses the following key issues: public participation, public involvement, deliberative democracy, and collaborative governance. This approach has been designed, investigated and applied in the context of the European Commission project “Puzzled by Policy: Helping you be part of the EU”. The findings suggest that the use of a multidimensional engagement approach with a user-centric focus from the outset is essential to foster social participation, raise trust between citizens and government, and promote constructive narratives to put into the policy-making process.

ICOM: A Framework for Integrated Collaborative Work Environments

Collaboration is an important activity that is increasingly using technology to improve the productivity of the participants. The Integrated Collaboration Object Model (ICOM) is a proposed OASIS standard for interoperation among collaboration services. ICOM is intended to be a framework for integrating a broad range of domain models for collaboration environments. The intention is to encourage independent software vendors and open source communities to create common collaboration clients that interoperate with integrated collaboration platforms and standalone collaboration services across enterprise boundaries. This paper provides an overview of ICOM that covers the high-level concepts, directory, space, access control, metadata, content management, and unified message models. ICOM is represented in several formats: the Java Persistence API, XML Schema, RDF and OWL. We also describe an example application based on ICOM.

Reusing the SIOC Ontology to Facilitate Semantic CWE Interoperability

Due to the increasingly large volumes of data that todays businesses handle, effective data management is a key issue to be addressed. An important aspect of data management is data interoperability, or the ability of information systems to exchange data and knowledge. Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) are fundamental tools for supporting data interoperability within the scope of a particular project or within a team of eProfessionals collaborating together. However CWE users may partake in multiple projects hosted on different platforms, or a particular project may be distributed over multiple CWE platforms. Therefore, it would be advantageous to be able to share and combine data from several independent CWEs. Currently, CWE platforms remain informational islands, with data expressed in a proprietary format. To address this data heterogeneity challenge and enable CWE interoperation, data must be structured in a semantically interpretable format. In this paper, we propose to reuse Semantically Interlinked Online Community (SIOC) to facilitate semantic CWE interoperability. Once proprietary CWE data is annotated with the SIOC ontology, it becomes interpretable by external CWEs. Based on this, the CWE Interoperability Architecture has been designed. Following this architecture, we developed the SIOC4CWE Toolkit, which allows the exporting, importing, and utilization of SIOC data.