George Gionis

Organising municipal e-government systems: a multi-facet taxonomy of e-services for citizens and businesses

As various e-Government initiatives are being realised throughout the world, policy makers and technology providers start to understand the importance of local administration e-Government systems. Municipalities are often the closest Point of Service for the European citizens and enterprises, having access to all the necessary information and usually providing the final service – a fact that makes their e-Services Portals a very important link in the e-Government chain. After attempting a positioning of municipality systems in the taxonomy of e-government systems, the present paper analyses the set of services that a Municipality Portal should be able to offer, focusing on eEurope – related capabilities. Based on this service directory, a multi-faceted classification mechanism is proposed, leading to an extendible taxonomy of e-Services to be offered by Municipality e-Government systems. A set of facets is analysed for each service, allowing for classification of services based on their main purpose, nature, orientation, means of provision, and various functional characteristics. Through populating, viewing and querying this multi-faceted classification, the design, development, deployment and impact assessment of e-Government systems for Municipalities can be systematically addressed.

Building a local administration services portal for citizens and businesses: service composition, architecture and back-office interoperability issues

Two of the most active research fields in information technology nowadays are Internet Services Portals used by governmental organizations and Interoperability Patterns for achieving the seamless cooperation of heterogeneous existing systems. When referring to e-Government applications in Local Administrations, the above mentioned research fields have to be tackled, as the resulting systems need to be functional, easy to implement and maintain, capable of interconnecting with back-office systems and citizen and employee friendly. This paper shows that the conceptualization, design, implementation and maintenance of Municipality Service Portals can be standardized, following a specific methodology. Piloted in a Greek Municipality with almost 50,000 citizens and 3,000 businesses, the methodology comprises of (a) rapid process modeling with the use of BPMN-aware modeling tools, (b) CCTS-based data modeling (c) stepby-step adaptation of Content Management, Citizen Relationship and Workflow Systems, (d) SoA-enabled interconnections with back-office applications and (e) overall guidance based on Service Composition taxonomies.

Enabling Cross-Organizational Interoperability: A Hybrid e-Business Architecture

The number of enterprises that automate business transactions is constantly growing. Renowned scientists such as Malone cite the relentless march of improvements in the cost-performance ratio of information technology as main driver of this recent development. Benefits of performing transactions electronically include extending market reach, saving time, cutting costs and responding to customer queries agilely. However, significant hurdles must be taken to successfully deploy and operate e-Business solutions: Substantially different standards prevent from a common understanding of both business processes and exchanged data and high cost and complexity of existing solutions impede fast adoption by potential users. In this work, we elaborate on different e-Business architectures that are readily available to businesses and can be considered as either merely Peer-to-Peer (P2P) or server based. Subsequently, we present a novel system that follows a hybrid approach and adheres to principles from both P2P and centrally oriented solutions.

Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: an ontological approach

Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.

Transforming traditional production system transactions to interoperable eBusiness-aware systems with the use of generic process models

Through the years, successful enterprises have been identified as the ones that were able to adapt their processes and ways of conducting business to the needs of their environment and the technological achievements of their times. This statement has not changed during recent years, but today, due to the major breakthrough of the internet and the possibilities it offers for a unified electronic marketplace, enterprises have to take advantage of the new technological tools offered, in order not only to adapt to this new emerging environment, but also to benefit from it and expand their operations in parallel with minimising costs. Achieving interoperability of the various production systems, and not only enabling hard-wired connectivity, seems to be the key that will unlock the gates leading to this newly established global market, and therefore enterprises need to focus more on their already established processes in order to be able to formulate a global standard for executing business transactions and cooperating smoothly with each other.

Promoting electronic participation systems in the Balkans: the case of national press agencies

While e-participation systems are being deployed in many European member states, their operation in converging regions is still a problem. Socio-economic conditions, familiarisation with new democratic processes and low penetration of information technology still pose barriers for these e-participation applications and their successful deployment calls for joint participation and cooperation of citizens and organisational bodies in order to form a unified framework consisting of guidelines and common codes of ethics. This paper presents a case study of the establishment of an e-participation platform based on the cooperation of national news agencies in the converging regions of the Balkans.

Heterogeneous Domains’ e-Business Transactions Interoperability with the use of Generic Process Models

Interoperability is the key factor which will drive e-Business to the next level by offering fully automated transactions among Enterprise Applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning or Supply Chain Management systems. Nowadays, research seems to have dealt with the problem of interoperability in various business domains, however the issue of interoperability in heterogeneous business domains — Enterprises, Governmental and Banking Institutions of different countries (cross-border) or Enterprises of different interests (cross-sector) - remains still a big challenge. This paper presents generic models of the most common business transactions carried out mainly by Small and Medium Enterprises. These models are constructed using state-of-the art notations and methodologies which facilitate the Application-to-Application interconnection and the automated business documents exchange between enterprises, governmental and banking institutions, covering not only national or sector specific business domain transactions but also cross-border and cross-sector processes, which imply different requirements as apart from the differences in the execution way, different legal rules and data entities, are also present.

Meeting the Interoperability Challenges of eTransactions among Heterogeneous Business Partners: The Advantages of Hybrid Architectural Approaches for the Integrating Middleware

Escalating economic and societal demands of today, along with the continuous advancements in ICT, push enterprises and organisations to move towards networked paradigms and leverage electronic transactions in the everyday practice. Although technical solutions providing for the necessary organisational, semantic, and technical interoperability means to enable e-transactions have been rigorously justified during the last years, their adoption and application into the everyday business practice by enterprises and organisations still remains limited. Specific characteristics of the existing solutions, such as inflexible workflows, predefined formats and content for the exchanged documents, hard-coded business and legal rules, use of proprietary technologies and inability to be readily deployed and validated for their efficiency, act as the main inhibitors for any potential users. The present work discusses the needed characteristics of centralized and decentralized architectures for e-transactions among business partners, identifies the weak points of every pattern and proposes a hybrid architectural approach that brings together the best features from both paradigms. Furthermore, specific insights, methodologies and underlying technologies are proposed with an objective to support the effectiveness of the architecture and its components in integrating processes, data and services achieving fully electronic transactions among businesses and governments in many European countries..