Spiros Mouzakitis

Paving the Way to eGovernment Transformation: Interoperability Registry Infrastructure Development

During the last decades eGovernment has been a vivid, dynamic research and development area. As services are being transformed, electronic documents and web services appear every day in many countries, the involved stakeholders are in urgent need for an instrument to structure governmental administration processes, service composition and provision - in a way that eGovernment transformation can be constantly managed. This paper presents the creation of an eGovernment ontology, and the development of a knowledge-based registry of governmental services in Greece. This Registry is an advanced web portal, devoted to the formal description, composition and publishing of traditional, electronic and web services, including the relevant electronic documents, information systems and as well the process descriptions and the work-flow models in an integrated knowledge base. Through such a repository, the discovery of services by users or systems has been automated, resulting in an important tool for achieving interoperable eGovernment transformation.

Effects of Enterprise Interoperability on Integration Efforts in Supply Chains

Despite their business value and return on investment, multi-enterprise integration projects are unbearably costly for many companies. With a view to realizing lower integration costs and resources, enterprises are seeking partner attributes that display the ease of B2B collaboration. This paper examines the relationship of B2B interoperability to integration effort. It breaks down enterprise interoperability into five layers (network, data, process, application, business) and investigates the particularity and effect of each. The research model is validated by a field study using data from 239 firms. Interoperability at the business, process, and data levels is found to be significantly but negatively associated with integration efforts. Interoperability at the application level showed little relation to integration efforts, and interoperability at the network level had a nonsignificant positive relationship with integration efforts. The research model and findings are a starting point for assessing interoperability with a potential partner at each layer and for estimating the involved integration effort, with a view to aiding e-partnership decisions and B2B integration management.

Towards the government transformation: An ontology-based government knowledge repository

Government transformation is a new term used to signify practices undertaken by governments in order to change their processes and services towards the electronic automation. As services are being transformed every day in many countries, the involved stakeholders are in urgent need for introducing and utilizing powerful instruments to facilitate and organize service composition and provision. This paper presents the inspiration of a conceptual model capable to originate an effective, scalable e-Government ontology and further on, the implementation of an ontology-based repository for designing, modelling and even reengineering of governmental services; pilot tested in the Greek Government.

A state-of-the-art analysis of the current public data landscape from a functional, semantic and technical perspective

Open Government Data initiatives and particularly Open Government Data portals have proliferated since the late 2000s. A comprehensive analysis of the capabilities and potential of these initiatives is currently missing from the recent research literature. In order to address this gap, the paper at hand aims towards analyzing the landscape of Open Governmental Data in the European Union from a functional, semantic and technical perspective. Our research focused on the collection and categorization of an indicative number of public data sources for each of the 27 European Union country-members through investigating their services and characteristics. By modeling and classifying the data sources according to their key attributes, we were able to proceed to their statistical analysis and assessment in terms of their content, licensing, multilingual support, acquisition, ease of access, provision and data format. Our results portray the current quality of Public Sector Information infrastructures and highlight what still needs to be done in order to make public data truly open and readily available for researchers, citizens, companies and innovation in general.

A core component-based modelling approach for achieving e-business semantics interoperability

The adoption of advanced integration technologies that enable private and public organizations to seamlessly execute their business transactions electronically is still relatively low, especially among governmental bodies and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Current solutions often lack a common understanding of the underlying business document semantics and most existing approaches are not able to cope with the huge variety of business document formats, stemming from highly diverse requirements of the different stakeholders. Developed and applied in the course of the EU-funded research project GENESIS, this paper presents a comprehensive core component-based business document modelling approach that builds upon existing standards such as the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) and the UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS). These standards are extended by introducing the concept of generic business document templates out of which specific documents can be derived according to the actual users needs. Key principle to achieve this flexibility is the integration of business context information that allows for modelling standard-based but at the same time customized business documents. The resulting modelling framework ranges from (tool-supported) graphical data models to the technical representation of the business documents as XML schema documents designed in compliance with the UN/CEFACT XML schema Naming and Design Rules (NDR).

A Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Outranking Approach in Support of Business Angels’ Decision Analysis Process for the Assessment of Companies as Investment Opportunities

In this paper, a multi-criteria method is presented for the evaluation and ranking of a selected set of companies as investment opportunities in aid of the relevant decision-analysis process of business angels. The multi-criteria methodology is based on the PROMETHEE method, which is further extended to deal with fuzzy input data in order to address the data imprecision and uncertainty of the decision process. The paper concludes by suggesting a web-based system implementation of the proposed methodology, which will significantly enhance modern business angels networks.

Challenges and opportunities in renovating public sector information by enabling linked data and analytics

Linked Data has become the current W3C recommended approach for publishing data on the World Wide Web as it is sharable, extensible, and easily re-usable. An ecosystem of linked data hubs in the Public Sector has the potential to offer significant benefits to its consumers (other public offices and ministries, as well as researchers, citizens and SMEs), such as increased accessibility and re-use value of their data through the use of web-scale identifiers and easy interlinking with datasets of other public data providers. The power and flexibility of the schema-defying Linked Data, however, is counterbalanced by inborn factors that diminish the potential for cost-effective and efficient adoption by the Public Sector. The paper analyzes these challenges in view of the current state-of-the-art in linked data technologies and proposes a technical framework that aims to hide the underlying complexity of linked data while maintaining and promoting the interlinking capabilities enabled by the Linked Data Paradigm. The paper presents the innovations behind our proposed solutions as well as their advantages, especially for the non-expert users.

Exploiting Linked Data Towards the Production of Added-Value Business Analytics and Vice-versa

The majority of enterprises are in the process of recognizing that business data analytics have the potential to transform their daily operations and make them extremely effective at addressing business challenges, identifying new market trends and embracing new ways to engage customers. Such analytics are in most cases related with the processing of data coming from various data sources that include structured and unstructured data. In order to get insight through the analysis results, appropriate input has to be provided that in many cases has to combine data from cross-sectorial and heterogeneous public or private data sources. Thus, there is inherent a need for applying novel techniques in order to harvest complex and heterogeneous datasets, turn them into insights and make decisions. In this paper, we present an approach for the production of added-value business analytics through the consumption of interlinked versions of data and the exploitation of linked data principles. Such interlinked data constitute valuable input for the initiation of an analytics extraction process and can lead to the realization of analysis that was not envisaged in the past. In addition to the production of analytics based on the consumption of linked data, the proposed approach supports the interlinking of the produced results with the associated input data, increasing in this way the value of the produced data and making them discoverable for further use in the future. The designed business analytics and data mining component is described in detail, along with an indicative application scenario combining data from the governmental, societal and health sectors.

User Involvement in Software Development Processes

Abstract Costs of software development and deployment are decreasing due to numerous open source projects and novel Cloud-based services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), but competition increases due to lowering entry barriers. The need to bring developers closer to their customer becomes vital for success, especially involving users into the very early stages of software development. This allows detecting flaws of conceptual and design nature, minimize unnecessary development costs, and warrant relevance for customers. This paper presents the CloudTeams methodology and platform that aim to bridge this gap, based on an existing groupware system supporting the notion of collaborative software development.