Vassilios Peristeras

Towards an enterprise architecture for public adminstration using a top-down approach

The use of Enterprise Architectures is becoming increasingly widespread in the private sector. Borrowing insights from enterprise reference architectures developed during the last decade, IT vendors and companies belonging to specific industries are establishing reference data and process models advancing the standardisation of their businesses and creating a more integrated environment for their activities. Although public administrations share the same problem of non-standardisation, which is being magnified rapidly in a changing and demanding environment, little has been done so far in the direction of integration. This article builds a basis, shows initial directions and attempts to stimulate interest in a PA enterprise framework. Following a top-down approach and employing concepts from the fields of public administration, enterprise integration and generic process and data modeling, the outline of the ArchPad enterprise architecture for Public Administration is presented.

Interlinking the Social Web with Semantics

This paper deals with applying semantic Web technologies to the social Web can lead to a social semantic Web, creating a network of interlinked and semantically rich knowledge. One of the most visible trends on the Web is the emergence of social Web sites, which help people create and gather knowledge by simplifying user contributions via blogs, tagging and folksonomies, wikis, podcasts, and online social networks. The social Web has enabled community-based knowledge acquisition.

Towards a Reference Architecture for Semantically Interoperable Clouds

This paper focuses on the emerging problem of semantic interoperability between heterogeneous cooperating Cloud platforms. We try to pave the way towards a Reference Architecture for Semantically Interoperable Clouds (RASIC). To this end, three fundamental and complementary computing paradigms, namely Cloud computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and lightweight semantics are used as the main building blocks. The open, generic Reference Architecture for Semantically Interoperable Clouds introduces a scalable, reusable and transferable approach for facilitating the design, deployment and execution of resource intensive SOA services on top of semantically interlinked Clouds. In order to support the development of semantically interoperable Cloud systems based on RASIC, the model of a common Cloud API is also specified.

WSMO-PA: Formal Specification of Public Administration Service Model on Semantic Web Service Ontology

In this paper we define a formal model for a public administration service on the basis of the Web service modeling ontology (WSMO). For this purpose we employ the generic public service object model of the governance enterprise architecture (GEA) providing a PA domain specific semantics. We investigate conceptual mappings between PA entities and WSMO elements, and on the real-world use case present the detailed formal PA service model based on the WSMO service model

Transforming E-government and E-participation through IT

This paper dealt with the topic of E-government and E-participation aiming to provide the technologies and tools for more efficient public administration systems and more participatory decision processes. Public administrations are considered the heaviest service industry worldwide. During the last decades, governments all over the world have undertaken huge investments in information and communication technologies (ICT), but they are still far from satisfying their constituents, as they usually operate inefficiently and ineffectively. E-government and E-participation research aims to refocus government on its customers-citizens and businesses and provide the models, technologies, and tools for more effective and efficient public administration systems as well as more participatory decision processes.

Model-driven eGovernment interoperability: A review of the state of the art

This paper reviews the state of the art in the area of enhancing eGovernment interoperability by using common models and/or ontologies. This area has currently become a very active research field. We identify and present a significant number (>40) of relevant efforts. These initiatives are grouped into categories based on the owner, scope and modelling perspective of each project. We then focus on the cases that build generic and universal eGovernment representations and models. We analyse, evaluate and rate them using an additional set of criteria. We end up with conclusions and possible directions for the exploitation and usage of these models.

Enabling interoperability of government data catalogues

Opening public sector information has recently become a trend in many countries around the world. Online government data catalogues with national, regional or local scope act as one-stop data portals providing descriptions of available government datasets. These catalogues though remain isolated. Potential benefits from federating geographically overlapping or thematically complementary catalogues are not realized. We propose an RDF Schema vocabulary as an interchange format among data catalogues and as a way of bringing them into the Web of Linked Data, where they can enjoy interoperability among themselves and with other deployed datasets. The vocabularys design was informed by a survey of seven data catalogues from five different countries, and has been verified by unifying four data catalogues to allow cross-catalogue queries and browsing.

Advancing the Government Enterprise Architecture – GEA: The Service Execution Object Model

In this paper, we propose a detailed object model for the execution phase of the public service provision. The model is part of our general effort to model the domain of the governance system, and to present a coherent Government Enterprise Architecture (GEA). It is based on two higher-level GEA object models, which were developed as part of our previous work, and remains compatible with them.

A publishing pipeline for linked government data

We tackle the challenges involved in converting raw government data into high-quality Linked Government Data (LGD). Our approach is centred around the idea of self-service LGD which shifts the burden of Linked Data conversion towards the data consumer. The self-service LGD is supported by a publishing pipeline that also enables sharing the results with sufficient provenance information. We describe how the publishing pipeline was applied to a local government catalogue in Ireland resulting in a significant amount of Linked Data published.

Public Administration Domain Ontology for a Semantic Web Services EGovernment Framework

In this paper we present a generic public administration (PA) domain ontology. We define a formal model for a public administration service on the basis of the Web service modeling ontology (WSMO). For this purpose we employ the generic public service object model of the governance enterprise architecture (GEA) providing PA domain specific semantics. We describe the ontology using the Web service modeling language (WSML). This domain ontology is implemented in order to be used in semantic Web services architecture for e-government.