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The provision of integrated public services (IPS) results in increased citizens’ satisfaction and is a prerequisite for achieving important eGovernment goals, like one-stop government. However, currently relevant policies, research and practice is fragmented. As a result, current research practices (such as on IPS co-creation) and technologies (e.g. mobile) have not yet fed relevant policy, such as the European Interoperability Framework. In this poster, inGov project is outlined, which is a research and innovation project funded by the EU under Horizon2020 to overcome this problem. The vision of inGov project is to provide innovative ICT-supported governance models as well as mobile apps including chatbots, which will enable stakeholders’ collaboration in co-producing inclusive and accessible IPS. The project results will be piloted in Malta, Austria, Greece and Croatia. We aim to feed the results back to EU policies hence achieving alignment between policies, research and practice.

A main objective of eGovernment is the provision of user-centric public services (PS) in a personalized and user-friendly way. Life events (LE) have been proposed as an intuitive method for personalised and integrated PS provision. A technology that could be employed for providing personalised PS and LE information is chatbots, which however is currently unexploited. The aim of this paper is twofold: (a) to present an architecture for the integration of chatbot technology and LE for better PS information provision and (b) to implement a proof-of-concept chatbot prototype that exploits LE information available at the Greek eGovernment portal ERMIS. As a result, we propose a layered architecture consisting of four layers, namely graphical user interface, chatbot engine, application programming interface and linked data repositories. A chatbot pilot is implemented based on the proposed architecture. Two usage scenarios of this pilot are demonstrated and evaluated using a TAM based questionnaire. Benefits and challenges are also discussed.

Open Data initiatives worldwide are boosting with an aim to increase transparency and contribute to economic growth. With a global annual economic potential value estimated to $3 trillion, this boost seems justified. Current progress however is not satisfactory. We believe a main reason is the lack of relevant skills and competencies. Current education and training activities are scarce and do not exploit practice-oriented learning methods such as Problem Based Learning (PBL) or novel assessment opportunities such as Learning Analytics (LA). As a result, stakeholders are missing skills related to publishing and reusing Open Data. The aim of this tutorial is to introduce to the audience Open Data education and training based on the PBL strategy and by exploiting LA for performance assessment. We will present a curriculum structure and learning content on Open Data for academia, business and the public sector that can be reused by all interested stakeholders. We will also demonstrate a university and a VET course model that have been designed in order to facilitate innovative and data-driven Open Data education and training. Finally, we will share lessons learnt from the practical application of the above in universities and businesses across multiple European countries.

In the last years, a number of government led initiatives have been launched worldwide aiming at making government data freely available to everyone, without limiting restrictions. Linked Data has been employed by some of these as a paradigm that allows for the provision of structured, semantically enabled and linkable data on the Web. The objective of this article is to discuss how Linked Data has been used in government data provision so far and to describe an architecture that will enable the provision of integrated government data around real-world things in a decentralized manner. Moreover, an implementation of the specific architecture is described in detail employing a hypothetical use case scenario that involves real world public agencies and schools. This implementation includes among others the publishing of Linked Data on top of a relational database and inline the HTML code of a web page as well as the linking of data from distributed sources at the instance level.

Online provision of public services (such as passport issuance and establishing a new business) is a priority of eGovernment worldwide for over a decade. Public service provision consists of two phases: informative and performative. During the informative phase, citizens or businesses obtain information before actually invoking a public service. This information includes required documents to be submitted, cost, responsible authority etc. The informative phase, although significant, has been overlooked at eGovernment literature. In this paper we present a notation for modeling the informative phase of public services as well as a set of indicators for measuring quantitative and qualitative characteristics of public services. We further present a prototype platform than enables modeling the informative phase of public services and automatically creating online dialogues to be used by citizens for obtaining personalized information on public services. We finally demonstrate the use of the platform by using the passport issuance public service.

Today, public authorities need to provide better services with fewer resources. Citizens require accessible, user-friendly, personalized, and integrated public services (IPS) that match their needs and circumstances. At the same time, trust in the public sector deteriorates. In Europe, for many years, the EU is devising relevant policies and practical advice, such as the European Interoperability Framework (EIF). These, however, are no longer sufficient as they do not consider the latest research and practice, e.g. in public service co-creation and mobile technologies. The aim of this paper is to propose an approach towards inclusive IPS co-creation and provision and new technologies exploitation. For this purpose, the EIF conceptual model for IPS will be used as a basis. Areas of improvement will be identified, relevant literature per area will be reviewed and guidelines for future work will be provided. When this research will be concluded, it is anticipated that its results would provide guidance to policy makers, researchers and practitioners interested in IPS co-creation and new technologies.

The number of open data available for reuse is rapidly increasing. A large number of these data are numerical thus can be easily visualized. Linked open data technology enables easy reuse and linking of data residing in different locations. In this workshop, we will present a number of technologies and tools that are currently under development for visualizing linked open statistical data. We will demonstrate the use of these technologies and tools to visualize open data obtained from various European Union Member States ministries and other organizations. We will also give the workshop participants the opportunity to use these tools thus obtaining a personal experience on their capabilities.