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The requirement of integrating, sharing and reusing legislative information is a research issue gaining priority for governments and institutions. The legal world is complex, heterogeneous and wide in scope. Therefore, we find convenient to define ontologies as a tool to decrease this complexity inherent to the legal domain. This paper is based on the Parliamentary Integrated Management System (SIAP) built for the Asamblea of Madrid and that is successfully running since 1999. In this context, we describe how SIAP manages the Legislative Initiative (LI) that arrives to a Parliament. Later, we propose an ontology in order to describe the LI, called Legislative Ontology (LO). This LO conceptually models theLI including the structure of the Emendations to this LI and is connected with the act of making and passing laws. So, this LO makes easier the organizing task in the LI and, in general, all the Legislative procedural steps. Besides, this ontology could be offered as a basis for other parliamentary systems (asSIAP) to improve their LI procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The size and growth of Italian healthcare spending for goods and services ask for prompt rationalization programs, with novel purchasing approaches (e-procurement), capable to provide significant reductions in purchasing and administration costs. If several interventions have not yet delivered the expected results, that's due to lack of problem segmentation and resistance to change of public structures. Health-related purchases require a segmented approach, to take into account the specific needs of different spending items and foster coherent organizational changes. It is therefore of interest to examine the e-procurement project undertaken by the ASL of Viterbo, for its scope, consistence and brilliant resultsThe gist of this paper is somehow similar to that of a recent article in bibliography [16].. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a web-based architecture to support participation in group decision making. Emphasis is placed on security aspects related with our architecture, designed to enhance trust on the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how abstract governmental eProcurement policies are translated into practice. We adopt a social constructionist perspective on policy and argue that the processes of eProcurement in public sector organizations are interwoven in broader policy processes and heterogeneous networks. Using the case study method we provide an empirical illustration of how this perspective could be drawn upon to make sense of eProcurement in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many claims about the benefits of Open Source Software (OSS). However, these claims are seldom supported by empirical evidence, while on the other hand there are several impediment factors which might overcome the advantages deriving from the use of OSS in a corporate environment: cost of transition, personnel training and, interoperability and integration with existing technologies. These factors are often used by OSS opponents. In this paper we first report of a small-scale deployment of OSS for office automation in Public Administration bodies. We describe the environment, the process and the problems encountered. Next, we describe a proposal for a future experiment for empirically assessing OSS impediment factors, focusing in particular on personnel productivity. We again propose the deployment of OSS office automation tools in Public Administration bodies and we describe a system for monitoring the effect of the use of OSS on personnel productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a web-based system to support groups in elaborating participatory budgets. Rather than using physical meetings with voting mechanisms, we promote virtual meetings with explicit preference elicitation, guided negotiations and, only if consensus is not reached, voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In considering good practice in relation to e-Government, this paper contributes to critical discussion on the value placed on methodologies in implementing e-Government programmes. Assessments are made regarding institutional, technological and organisational factors within the public sector, and the manner in which methodologies have been and are currently being applied. An exploration is made of emergent e-Government driven methodologies, and in drawing on the work of Wastell, Newman and Kawalek (2002) perceptions of e-Government good practice are illustrated by implementing agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a structured framework for calculating the cost of e-Government services, based on the complementary application of the IDEF0 modelling tool and the Activity-Based Costing technique. The motivation for this research effort was derived by the need to use an alternative method for the annual cost calculation of the TAXISnet e-Government services, since the relevant report published from the Greek Ministry of Finance in 2003 was based on traditional accounting approaches. The first step of the proposed methodology is the IDEF0-supported identification of the activities corresponding to the e-Government services and their initial classification as value-added or non value-added. Data collection follows, concerning cost elements and their activities using Activity-Based Costing. The paper concludes with a discussion concerning the added value of the proposed methodology framework and further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing complexity of the data and processes to be managed, as well as the transition from strict governmental regulation towards autonomy make academic institutions a significant consumer of advanced software solutions. Strategic management requires a comprehensive analysis of large data volumes from heterogeneous sources, often imprecise and incomplete. Our aim is to assist university policy-makers in building strategic action plans in the field of resource distribution and teaching capacity utilization through explicit modeling and testing of diverse development strategies. The proposed decision support system (DSS), called UNICAP (acronym for university's capacity planning), is aimed at optimizing the academic decision making by allowing simulation and evaluation of strategic plans. We conclude by presenting a case study, carried by the planning experts of our university who used UNICAP filled with "real" university's data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last years, governmental organizations have invested considerable effort and financial resources in the development and adoption of e-government services. In order to sustain the quality of their services, governmental organizations need to solve the problem of efficient and secure electronic exchange and processing of governmental documents and data. A major difficulty in this distributed deployment is the fact that these interconnected systems are heterogeneous and they may operate in multiple organisational domains. This paper demonstrates how the ISO/RM-ODP standard offers a general framework to design and develop an open distributed system attuned to e-government environments. This is subsequently supported by a high level case study of how this standard can be applied in the case of a system designed for small to medium sized European municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to provide citizens with quality services, respecting public administrations autonomy, we propose a new concept of eGovernment Service Marketplace (eGovSM). This paper presents an overview of the architecture and implementation of eGovSM easing the automatisation of administrative process involving several administrations and allowing the reuse of data. This architecture facilitates citizens' interaction with different public administrations by providing them a single and personalized access point to services. The eGovSM is formalized using a set of XML Schema models in order to support the realization of an interoperable and open system. The architecture is based on four main functional modules: UNICITIDM (UNIiversal CITizen IDentifier Manager) a module for the creation and management of citizen unique identifiers, LEM (Life Event Manager) for the management of all citizen interactions with the marketplace, DM (Document Manager) for the management of administrative process execution and SM (Service Manager) for the management of all public administrations interactions with eGovSM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the goal of ShanghaiGrid and its sub-project E-government on the Grid. The main existing problem of the E-government is how to integrate each government agency's resources to form cross-agency services for citizens. Grid technique provides an ideal way to solve this problem. The workflow middleware, transaction middleware, and the real-name citizen mailbox are discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few years the e-Government discipline has attracted a growing attention both from practitioners and academics. Although the high number of action plan, projects and conferences spread all over Europe seems sanctioning the achievement of its maturity stage, several organizational and technological issues related with the modernization of service delivery are still far from a comprehensive solution and still require significant efforts. In this paper, the approach followed and the results so far achieved within the Eu-Publi.com research project, are presented. The discussion on the conceptual and design architectures of the Eu-Publi.com distributed, peer-to-peer system is enriched with results about the experimentation conducted on one of its core components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A big challenge for governments all over the world is to improve the service provisioning to their clients, citizens and businesses. One way of improving service-provisioning is by means of a a one-stop-shop that integrates services that are performed by different semi autonomous agencies. This requires the coordination of service-delivery processes that run across different agencies. This is also called process orchestration. As little is known about process orchestrators, governmental decision-makers need support in designing them. This paper investigates the applicability of existing reference models from domains that are closely related to process orchestration, the Workflow Reference Model and the extended SOA reference model, to governmental decision-makers for implementing process orchestration in e-government, and identifies several main requirements for a reference mode for process orchestration, based on a case study performed at a business counter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As software processes for developing eGovernment services become more complex, it is necessary to provide computer-based tools to support the software engineering process. Furthermore, actions should be taken to limit the loss of critical knowledge during the life cycle of eGovernment services. In this paper we first illustrate the overall architecture of ONTOGOV, an under-development software engineering environment for developing and managing the life-cycle of eGovernment services. We then outline two ontologies upon which ONTOGOV is based. Finally, an application scenario is described and the paper concludes with the identification of further steps and research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens have never had complete and up-to-date information on all the laws, regulations and opportunities that concern them. Although the law does not excuse ignorance, information-publishing techniques, usually Official Gazettes on paper, make effective knowledge and awareness virtually impossible. One of the greatest opportunities of e-government is to overcome this information gap and to supply timely and complete information to everybody. The electronic availability of information is but a minor aspect of this problem. Rather, effective, timely and accurate ways of disseminating information must be found. We discuss several solutions, ranging from text retrieval to ontologies and agents, and focus on dynamic taxonomies, a model recently proposed for the intelligent exploration of heterogeneous information bases, that can provide guided browsing and personalized exploration for complex laws and regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model Driven Architecture is an approach to increase the quality of complex software systems by creating high-level system models and automatically generating system architectures and components out of these models. We show how this paradigm can be applied to what we call Model Driven Security for inter-organizational workflows in e-government. Our focus is on the realization of security-critical inter-organizational workflows in the context of web services and web service orchestration. Security requirements are specified at an abstract level using UML diagrams. Out of this specification security relevant artifacts are created for the target reference architecture based on upcoming web service security standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-polling systems are a fundamental component of any e-democracy system as they represent the most appropriate tool for fostering citizens participation to public debates. Contrarily to e-voting protocols, they are characterized by less stringent security requirements in particular they can tolerate errors affecting a small percentage of votes, without the compromision of the final result. Thus the construction of accurate and privacy respectful e-polling protocols is an objective which should be pursued by the research community as it is more close than the construction of practical e-voting protocols. However so far all the research efforts have been spent on the construction of e-voting protocols and the existing e-polling protocols are not respectful of the most elementary security and privacy rules. In this paper we propose a simple protocol for an accurate and anonymous e-polling system. More precisely our protocol satisfies the following properties: a vote cannot be altered, duplicated, or removed without being detected, votes remain anonymous. Moreover voters will be able to measure the level of trust of the process and its accuracy by verifying that their own votes have been counted correctly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a methodology for proving in Zero Knowledge the validity of selecting a subset of a set belonging to predefined family of sets. We apply this methodology in electronic voting to provide for extended ballot options. Our proposed voting scheme supports multiple parties and the selection of a number of candidates from one and only one of these parties. We have implemented this system and provide measures of its computational and communication complexity. We prove that the complexity is linear with respect to the total number of candidates and the number of parties participating in the election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The State of the Art in Electronic Government is the delivering of public services to the Citizen by means of integrated web portals, comprising the public agencies in the different levels of government, aiming to hide from the final user the complexity of the State bureaucracy. Ideally, these portals should be designed according to the mental patterns of the individuals, with their navigation oriented by the life events, and not by the logic of bureaucracy. Besides, the services to be provided must match both the Citizen's and the State's interests. Considering that many e-Government portals do not follow these principles, this article proposes an inversion in the policy of access to public services. By breaking paradigms, it presents the organized society as the drive engine behind the construction of integrated portals, with contents and shape to match citizen's interests, rather than waiting for the government action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative study on digital divide between a region and its main metropolitan area. The exercise shows how barriers to technology access and usage may vary in terms of both nature and intensity. The paper also proposes a taxonomy of the different types of digital divides that may be present inside a region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments often embrace the Web as a means of delivering joined-up, citizen-centric services efficiently and cost-effectively. In the UK, despite significant investment both provision and usage of e-services have fallen short of target. In this article the current status of UK e-government is analysed in relation to ‘New Labour' Third Way governance. It is concluded that the inherent contradictions of Third Way ideology and the government's favoured command and control style are hindering the development of egovernment. It is proposed that greater devolution to local councils may accelerate the provision of participatory, partnership-based e-services. If this is to be successful however, central government must move beyond the popularly prescribed model of transaction-based, bilateral e-services and reconceptualise e-government as an instrument of devolved, communitarian governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition process from E-government to e-democracy involves a number of complex government changes, among which one of the important reforms for China, lies in the fundamental transform of its public finance regime from a "secret tradition" which has been holding for centuries long, towards a modern democratic open process. From 2003, Chinese government decided to release the Audit Report of its central and local budget to the public; this unprecedented event had stirred a so-called "Audit Storm" in the country. This paper therefore explores the significant meaning of fiscal transparence in China, analyzes the relationship between fiscal transparency and government accountability. Hereby argues that fiscal transparence can service as a catalyst both to e-government and open government process. Finally the paper points out China should follow the Code of Good Practices on Fiscal Transparency edited by IMF, enhancing e-democracy via fiscal transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential of the internet has been recognised to enhance government initiated citizen communication. Despite limited experience so far, some lessons for designing online-participation have been learned: Ensuring the external and internal relevance of online consultation processes seems crucial. Some measurements to ensure the external and internal relevance will be set out in a description of an e-participation process in Esslingen, Germany, the first project to use web-based discussion forums as an instrument to inform and consult the public about the municipal budget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy is based on freedom of voting but also on meaningful discussions about matters that are put to the vote or about people who wish to be elected. E-democracy cannot therefore be reduced to e-voting. It should also include Internet-based services that facilitate online interaction between voters, candidates and supporters of various opinions. This paper presents a series of interactive tools that can be used to support such a virtual dialogue. A matrix is proposed to categorize these tools. Examples of such tools used in Switzerland are given. The most sophisticated tools and websites recently developed for Swiss elections or referendums are described in some detail. Possible future research on the impact of these tools is outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public participatory geographic information systems (PP GIS) aim at enlarging citizen's involvement and participation in decision-making processes. In this paper we review existing online PP GIS applications and present the framework of our analysis. We concentrate on the aspects of interactivity of such applications and the GIS functionalities needed for their operation. First results of ongoing research exhibit that a vast majority of applications only deliver information to the citizen in a one-way communication process. Although the technology is available, only few applications fulfill criteria of our analysis to be classified as two-way communication tools. We conclude the paper with directions for our further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the important aspect of democracy at the local community level and the need for e-democracy tools. Communities require easy to use ways of accessing and sharing information and ideas, responding to consultations and participating in policy formulation. In this paper we focus on Community Councils which are the smallest local tier of the statutory framework of democracy in Scotland. The councillors live in the community they serve, know personally many of the issues and can readily judge the impact of new or changed policies and suggestions from government. Currently they represent their communities as best they can, relying on word-of-mouth and may therefore not be as inclusive as they otherwise might be. The rapidly expanding public access to the internet and the increasing popularity of weblogs offer an opportunity for both the councillors and the communities to discuss issues together and lobby government for policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research in e-democracy has so far focused on the early stages of political decision making. Information- and communication technology (ICT) has been shown to facilitate participation in agenda setting and alternative selection. But ICT also has the potential to facilitate evaluation of existing policies. This paper examines policy evaluation from local politicians view. What web-based tools are useful for policy evaluation, and what kind of information do these tools provide? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]