Giorgos Lepouras

Wikis in enterprise settings: a survey

The wiki technology is increasingly being used in corporate environments to facilitate a broad range of tasks. This survey examines the use of wikis on a variety of organisational tasks that include the codification of explicit and tacit organisational knowledge and the formulation of corporate communities of practice, as well as more specific processes such as the collaborative information systems development, the interactions of the enterprise with third parties, management activities and organisational response in crisis situations. For each one of the aforementioned corporate functions, the study examines the findings of related research literature to highlight the advantages and concerns raised by the wiki usage and to identify specific solutions addressing them. Finally, based on the above findings, the study discusses various aspects of the wiki usage in the enterprise and identifies trends and future research directions on the field.

A knowledge-based approach for developing multi-channel e-government services

Having realised the benefits resulting from delivering on-line public services in the context of electronic government, administrations strive to extend the spectrum of services offered to citizens and enterprises, as well as to engage multiple communication channels in service delivery, in order to increase the target audience and, consequently, the service effectiveness. Insofar, however, only the web channel has been sufficiently used for service delivery, whereas other channels have not been adequately exploited. One of the main reasons of this lag is the cost incurred for the development and maintenance of multiple versions of an electronic service, each version targeted to a different platform. In this paper, we present an approach and the associated tools for developing and maintaining electronic services that allows the automated production of different versions of the electronic service, each targeted to a specific platform.

SPREADING ACTIVATION OVER ONTOLOGY-BASED RESOURCES: FROM PERSONAL CONTEXT TO WEB SCALE REASONING

This paper describes methods to allow spreading activation to be used on web-scale information resources. Existing work has shown that spreading activation can be used to model context over small personal ontologies, which can be used to assist in various user activities, for example, in auto-completing web forms. This previous work is extended and methods are developed by which large external repositories, including corporate information and the web, can be linked to the users personal ontology and thus allow automated assistance that is able to draw on the entire web of data. The basic idea is to augment the personal ontology with cached data from external repositories, where the choice of data to fetch or discard is related to the level of activation of entities already in the personal ontology or cached data. This relies on the assumption that the working set of highly active entities is relatively small; empirical results are presented, which suggest these assumptions are likely to hold. Implications of the techniques are discussed for user interaction and for the social web. In addition, warm world reasoning is proposed, applying rule-based reasoning over activated entities, potentially merging symbolic and sub-symbolic reasoning over web-scale knowledge bases.

Task-centred information management

The goal of DELOS Task 4.8 Task-centered Information Management is to provide the user with a Task-centered Information Management system (TIM), which automates users most frequent activities, by exploiting the collection of personal documents. In previous work we have explored the issue of managing personal data by enriching them with semantics according to a Personal Ontology, i.e. a user-tailored description of her domain of interest. Moreover, we have proposed a task specification language and a top-down approach to task inference, where the user specifies main aspects of the tasks using forms of declarative scripting. Recently, we have addressed new challenging issues related to TIM users task inference. More precisely, the first main contribution of this paper is the investigation of task inference theoretical issues. In particular, we show how the use of the Personal Ontology helps for computing simple task inference. The second contribution is an architecture for the system that implements simple task inference. In the current phase we are implementing a prototype for TIM whose architecture is the one presented in this paper.

Virtual reality in the e-Society

This special issue explores the extent to which virtual reality (VR) is affecting the creation of an electronic society. E-Society is a broad term used to describe a research area covering aspects of digital technologies for large user communities. Recent years have seen the emergence of various electronic services in an attempt to facilitate everyday life and improve the way common tasks are being carried out. E-business and e-learning were of the first areas of e-Society to emerge. E-business refers to the use of information and communication technologies to facilitate transactions between businesses and customers or between businesses. Online shops, often called virtual shops offer customers the possibility to buy products through Internet. E-learning on the other hand encompasses technologies that allow teachers and students to interact either synchronously or asynchronously. E-government is another application of ICT for the benefit of e-Society, aiming to digitise services, informational or transactional offered to citizens and businesses and improve the exchange of information between governmental bodies. E-democracy is tightly coupled with e-voting, e-participation and e-inclusion, and aims to ameliorate and enhance democratic procedures, by providing the means necessary to citizens to participate in decision making and monitor governmental processes. Lastly, e-health describes the use of digital technologies in the health care sector. Services provided range from telemedicine and collaborative systems for patient diagnosis to online systems for medical records. As described, the term e-Society covers a wide range of applications from e-government, e-democracy, and e-business to e-learning and e-health. Although the term ‘‘virtual’’ is used in this context, such as for example in ‘‘virtual e-shops’’ or ‘‘virtual learning environments’’, it has to be stressed that it is has little to do with VR technologies. It is rather used to denote the fact that these ‘‘virtual’’ systems do not occupy space in the real-world. User interfaces for these systems usually fall into the typical windowing, 2D paradigm; thus the potential for using VR technologies in an emerging e-Society is enormous. VR technologies for visualising remotely health data, creating online communities, developing online stores or educating groups of people can contribute to the growth of the e-Society by making it more tangible and real for the users. In order for VR to contribute to the creation and advancement of e-Society, a number of issues have to be tackled. A successful VR system has to find a balance between the hardware requirements, user interaction methods, content presentation and the effort required for development and maintenance. Hardware requirements define to a large degree the extent to which an end-user can afford to execute the VR system at her home. VR systems span from online, G. D. Magoulas (&) School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK e-mail: gmagoulas@dcs.bbk.ac.uk

SmartGov: A Knowledge-Based Platform for Transactional Electronic Services

Public transaction services (such as e-forms) although perceived the future of e-government have not yet realised their full potential. E-forms have a significant role in e-government, as they are the basis for implementing most of the twenty public services that all member states have to provide to their citizens and businesses. The aim of the SmartGov project is to specify, develop, deploy and evaluate a knowledge-based platform to assist public sector employees to generate online transaction services by simplifying their development, maintenance and integration with already installed IT systems. This platform will be evaluated in two European countries (in one Ministry and one Local Authority). This paper outlines key issues in the development of the SmartGov system platform.

Second-Language Help for Windows Applications

This paper describes an approach to the second-language problem for user-support in the context of existing MS-Windows applications. We outline a methodology for deriving foci for support, and present guidelines for the addition of second-language enhancements. Finally, we detail our procedure for implementing such help facilities with examples of enhanced Chinese and Greek second-language support.

It's not Greek to me: terminology and the second language problem

Compares terminology in three different word-processor packages, in their English and Greek language varieties. Offers solutions to problems of the diversity of tanslations and localisation.

Transactional e-Government Services: An Integrated Approach

Although form-based services are fundamental to e-government activities, their widespread does neither meet the citizens expectations, nor the offered technological potential. The main reason for this lag is that traditional software engineering approaches cannot satisfactorily handle all of electronic services lifecycle aspects. In this paper we present experiences from the Greek Ministry of Finances e-services lifecycle, and propose a new approach for handling e-service projects. The proposed approach has been used successfully for extending existing services, as well as developing new ones.

A heuristics-based approach to reverse engineering of electronic services

Since the beginning of the electronic era, public administrations and enterprises have been developing services, through which citizens, businesses and customers can conduct their transactions with the offering entity. Each electronic service contains a substantial amount of knowledge in the form help texts, rules of use or legislation excerpts, examples, validation checks, etc. This knowledge has been extracted from domain experts when the services were developed, especially in the phases of analysis and design, and was subsequently translated into software. In the latter format though, knowledge cannot be readily used in organizational processes, such as knowledge sharing and development of new services. In this paper, we present an approach for reverse engineering electronic services in order to create knowledge items of high levels of abstraction, which can be used in knowledge sharing environments as well as in service development platforms. The proposed approach has been implemented and configured to generate artifacts for the SmartGov service development platform. Finally, an evaluation of the proposed approach is presented to assess its efficiency regarding various aspects of the reverse engineering process.