Euripidis N. Loukis

Policy making 2.0: From theory to practice

Abstract Government agencies are gradually moving from simpler towards more sophisticated and complex practices of social media use, which are characterized by important innovations at the technological, political and organizational level. This paper intends to provide two contributions to the current discourse about such advanced approaches to social media exploitation. The first is of practical nature and has to do with assessing the potential and the challenges of a centralized cross-platform approach to social media by government agencies in their policy making processes. The second contribution is of theoretical nature and consists in the development of a multi-dimensional framework for an integrated evaluation of such advanced practices of social media exploitation in public policy making from technological, political and organizational perspectives, drawing from theoretical constructs from different domains. The proposed framework is applied for the evaluation of a pilot consultation campaign conducted in Italy using multiple social media and concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program.

Computer‐supported G2G collaboration for public policy and decision‐making

Purpose – This paper investigates whether and how G2G collaboration for policy and decision‐making can be effectively supported by an appropriately developed information system.Design/methodology/approach – The research method adopted in this paper follows the “Design Science Paradigm”, which has been extensively used in information systems research.Findings – As resulted from the case study described in this paper, the proposed system has significant potential for supporting G2G collaboration for policy and decision‐making. It can support the collaborative understanding of social problems and needs, and the development of alternative actions or solutions for them. In addition, it can support the collaborative development of detailed action plans for the selected alternative(s). During the implementation of these actions, the system can be used for the collaborative monitoring of them, the identification of implementation problems and issues, and the development of alternatives for managing them. Finally,...

Passive crowdsourcing in government using social media

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to develop a novel approach to e-participation, which is based on “passive crowdsourcing” by government agencies, exploiting the extensive political content continuously created in numerous Web 2.0 social media (e.g. political blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites and online forums) by citizens without government stimulation, to understand better their needs, issues, opinions, proposals and arguments concerning a particular domain of government activity or public policy. Design/methodology/approach – This approach is developed and elaborated through cooperation with potential users experienced in the design of public policies from three countries (Austria, Greece and the UK), using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques: co-operative development of application scenarios, questionnaire surveys, focus groups and workshops and, finally, in-depth interviews. Findings – A process model for the application of the proposed passive crowdsourcing approach...

Using decision tree algorithms as a basis for a heart sound diagnosis decision support system

Decision trees algorithms were used with promising results in various critical problems, concerning heart sound diagnosis. In general this diagnostic problem can be divided in many sub problems, each one dealing either with one morphological characteristic of the heart sound or with difficult to distinguish heart diseases. The sub problems of the discrimination of aortic stenosis from mitral regurgitation and the discrimination between the second heart sound split, opening snap and third heart sound, are used as case studies. Using signal-processing methods, we extracted the heart sound feature vector. Relevance analysis was performed using the uncertainty coefficient. Then for each heart sound diagnosis sub problem, a specific decision tree (DT) was constructed. decision tree pruning was also investigated. Finally, a general decision support system architecture for the heart sound diagnosis problem, is proposed. The partial diagnosis, given by these DT, can be combined using arbitration rules to give the final diagnosis. These rules can be implemented by another DT, or can be based on different methods, algorithms, or even on expert knowledge. All these can lead to an integrated decision support system architecture for heart sound diagnosis.

Designing a Second Generation of Open Data Platforms: Integrating Open Data and Social Media

Two important trends in government that are emerging in the recent years have been on one hand the exploitation of the Web 2.0 social media, supporting a more extensive interaction and collaboration with citizens, and on the other hand the opening of government data to the citizens through the Internet, in order to be used for scientific, commercial and political purposes. However, there has been limited attempt of integrating them. Using a design science approach a second generation of open government data (OGD) platforms has been developed, which offer to the users both the ‘classical’ first generation functionalities, and also a comprehensive set of additional novel Web 2.0 features. The latter aim to provide support to the users in order to generate value from ODG. They enable users to become ‘prosumers’, both producing and consuming data. These novel capabilities for performing various types of processing, information and knowledge exchange, and collaboration were found to be useful and valuable by users in a first evaluation.

Barriers to the Adoption of B2B e-Marketplaces by Large Enterprises: Lessons Learned From the Hellenic Aerospace Industry

This article investigates the main barriers to the adoption of B2B e-marketplaces by large enterprises and at the same time the expected benefits that push in the opposite direction towards the adoption, through a case study conducted at the Hellenic Aerospace Industry (HAI), one of the largest industrial enterprises of Greece. The evidence collected from this case has been analyzed using various frameworks from the literature and also the innovation diffusion theory of Rogers, and shed light on the specificity of the large enterprises concerning e-marketplaces adoption.

An ontology for G2G collaboration in public policy making, implementation and evaluation

This paper concerns the development and use of ontologies for electronically supporting and structuring the highest-level function of government: the design, implementation and evaluation of public policies for the big and complex problems that modern societies face. This critical government function usually necessitates extensive interaction and collaboration among many heterogeneous government organizations (G2G collaboration) with different backgrounds, mentalities, values, interests and expectations, so it can greatly benefit from the use of ontologies. In this direction initially an ontology of public policy making, implementation and evaluation is described, which has been developed as part of the project ICTE-PAN of the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme of the European Commission, based on sound theoretical foundations mainly from the public policy analysis domain and contributions of experts from the public administrations of four European Union countries (Denmark, Germany, Greece and Italy). It is a ‘horizontal’ ontology that can be used for electronically supporting and structuring the whole lifecycle of a public policy in any vertical (thematic) area of government activity; it can also be combined with ‘vertical’ ontologies of the specific vertical (thematic) area of government activity we are dealing with. In this paper is also described the use of this ontology for electronically supporting and structuring the collaborative public policy making, implementation and evaluation through ‘structured electronic forums’, ‘extended workflows’, ‘public policy stages with specific sub-ontologies’, etc., and also for the semantic annotation, organization, indexing and integration of the contributions of the participants of these forums, which enable the development of advanced semantic web capabilities in this area.

Public Policy Formulation through Non Moderated Crowdsourcing in Social Media

The emergence of web 2.0 social media enables the gradual emergence of a second generation of e-participation characterized by more citizens’ control, in which government agencies post content (e.g. short or longer text, images, video) to various social media and then analyze citizens’ interactions with it (e.g. views, likes/dislikes, comments, etc.). In this paper we propose an even more citizens controlled third generation of e-participation exploiting web 2.0 social media as well, but in a different manner. It is based on the search by government agencies for content on a public policy under formulation, which has been created in a large set of web 2.0 sources (e.g. blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites, online forums) by citizens freely, without any initiation, stimulation or moderation through government postings. This content undergoes advanced processing in order to extract from it arguments, opinions, issues and proposals on the particular policy, identify their sentiments (positive or negative), and finally summarize and visualize them. This approach allows the exploitation of the vast amount of user-generated content created in numerous web 2.0 social media for supporting governments to understand better the needs, wishes and beliefs of citizens, and create better and more socially rooted policies.

An empirical investigation of information systems interoperability business value in European firms

It is widely believed that the establishment of interoperability of the information systems (IS) of a firm with those of its collaborators (e.g. customers, suppliers, and business partners) can generate significant business value. However, this has been empirically investigated only to a very limited extent. This paper contributes to filling this research gap by presenting an empirical study of the effect of adopting the three main types of IS interoperability standards (industry-specific, proprietary and XML-based ones) on the four important perspectives/dimensions of business performance proposed by the balanced scorecard approach (financial, customers, internal business processes, learning and innovation). Our study is based on a large dataset from 14,065 European firms (from 25 countries and 10 sectors) collected through the e-Business Watch Survey of the European Commission. It is concluded that all three examined types of IS interoperability standards increase considerably the positive impact of firms information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure on the above four perspectives/dimensions of business performance; however, their effects differ significantly. The adoption of industry-specific interoperability standards has the highest positive effects, while XML-based and proprietary standards have similar lower positive effects. Furthermore, these effects of the industry-specific IS interoperability standards are quite strong, as they are of similar magnitude with the corresponding effects of the degree of development of firms intra-organizational/internal IS, and of higher magnitude than the corresponding effects of the degree of development of firms e-sales IS. These conclusions provide valuable empirical evidence of the multidimensional business value generated by IS interoperability, its big magnitude and its strong dependence on the type of IS interoperability standards adopted.

A taxonomy of open government data research areas and topics

ABSTRACT The opening of government data, in order to have both social and economic value generated from them, has attracted the attention and interest of both researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, such as information systems, management sciences, political and social sciences, and law. Despite the rapid growth of this multidisciplinary research domain, which has led to the emergence and continuous evolution of technologies and management approaches for open government data (OGD), a detailed analysis of the specific areas and topics of this research is still missing. In this article, a detailed taxonomy of research areas and corresponding research topics of the OGD domain is presented: it includes four main research areas (ODG management and policies, infrastructures, interoperability and usage and value), which are further analyzed into 35 research topics. An important advantage of this taxonomy, beyond its high level of detail, is that it has been developed through extraction and a combination of relevant knowledge from three different sources: important relevant government policy documents, research literature, and experts. For each of the 35 research topics we have identified, its research literature is summarized and main research objectives and directions are highlighted. Based on the taxonomy, an extension of the extant OGD lifecycle is advanced; also, under-researched topics that require further research are identified.