Migrating Small Governments

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Migrating Small Governments Websites to the
Semantic Web

• Ralf Klischewski
• German University in Cairo

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E-Government Facing the Semantic Challenge
Research in progress

• Integrated services require enhanced computer
  support and cross-organizational information
  management
• Citizen information services (CIS) must draw on
  up-to-date data from many distributed sources to
  serve the users informational needs
• To what extent do the vision and the technologies
  of the Semantic Web provide solutions for
  cross-organizational information management as a
  prerequisite for CIS?

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Today

• Access-eGov research project
• The migration challenge
• Small governments
• E.g. Schleswig-Holstein
• Requirement analysis framework
• Types of administrations stakeholder model
• Migration scenarios
• Technical conceptual support
• Seeking to improve migration approaches

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Interoperability Vision

Pre-Access-eGov world
Post-Access-eGov world
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Objectives

• Access-eGov aims at increasing the accessibility
  of public administration services for citizens
  and business users
• By supporting the interoperability among existing
  electronic as well as traditional government
  services
• Employing Semantic Web technologies

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Access-eGov
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Consortium
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Types of Administrations
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Small Governments Semantic Challenge

• Constitutional, legal, and jurisdictional
  constraints set sharp limits to the extent of
  e-Government integration and interoperation
• Tight budget constraints decisions driven mainly
  by cost-benefit considerations
• Outside actors must help developing required
  knowledge and capabilities

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Auf dem Weg zum übergreifenden Informationsmanagem
ent
Informational needs of citizen

• Service Who is responsible? What do I have to
  know before approaching the responsible agent?
  What are the next steps to do?
• Orientation What authorities or institutions are
  there (in my region)? How do I reach the
  authorities XY (address, telephone, email)? How
  do I find the responsible agent?
• Forms How do I find the right form for
  interacting with the authorities?
• General questions, e.g. Where do I find a
  specific text of law? Where can I file a
  complaint? What job offerings are there?

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Information service mission
The Responsibility Finder Schleswig-Holstein
offers citizens, institutions, and companies
concise and coherent information about the
services of the administration throughout the
state. It informs the information seekers about
who is responsible for his/her/its concern, how
to reach the agency in charge, and what kinds of
documents are required. In many cases form or
leaflets are available for download.
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Responsibility finding as a two step procedure
Detailled description- interaction of citizen
authority- special cases- ...
RF-Appl.
Briefing- service preview- legal
aspects Dialogue
Users concern? ? service? location? authority
Info-Pool
Responsible authority/service- location (plan)-
time- person- media/channel- before after-
cost- alternatives- ...
- region/place- situation- ...
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Implementing a Responsibility Finder in
Schleswig-Holstein
Case Analysis

• German state with less than 3 million people
• structured in eleven counties with more than one
  thousand municipalities, and four cities
• state departments, cities, counties and most
  municipalities run their own technical
  infrastructure
• One IT service provider for S.-H. Hamburg
• Hamburg central IS for responsibility finder
• ? But how to proceed with distributed Web
  information?

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Principle Salient Stakeholders
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Salient Stakeholder Model
Information Consumers
Citizens
Businesses
Administrations
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Access-eGov Requirement Analysis Framework
lt
Migrating E-gov. Websites to the Semantic Web

• Efficiency Gains
• E-gov. Service Improvements

Semantic Web
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Migration Effort/Activities
Migrating E-gov. Websites to the Semantic Web
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Web Content Preparation

• Anna is working full-time for the city of
  Eurocity.
• Following the councils decision about upgrading
  the website to the Semantic Web, Anne received an
  introduction of how the Semantic Web works in
  general, and what her part will be in preparing
  the communal web site for it.
• A number of decisions have to be made. For
  example, she must decide which content should be
  prepared for automated information sharing
  (including priorities). She also must decide if
  the content should be rephrased, rearranged, and
  / or enhanced in order to facilitate the
  annotation process.
• Most likely, she will have to negotiate these
  aspects with some of her colleagues in her own
  administration as well as across the region.

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Web Content Annotation

• Anna opens the template module of the CMS and
  selects the template called Event Publication for
  editing in the template editor. The system
  presents her with a new prompt for a template
  type.
• Anne has already learned that every template of
  the CMS has to be assigned a special type, which
  must be taken from the predefined catalogue of
  template types. Therefore, she needs to select a
  predefined template type from the graphically
  presented catalogue.

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Web Content Annotation

• Anna knows from the training that she also has
  to add another field to the template (for the
  events location).
• After doing so, she has to mark each field with
  appropriate meta-data . She does so by
  selecting each field and then assigning it a
  special type which she looks up in the catalogue
  of predefined field types. For example, the field
  for the events title is assigned the type Title
  of Event, the field with the description is
  assigned the type Event Description, and so on.

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Web Content Publication

• Today Anne needs to add a page for the local
  firefighters to the web site.
• She starts the content editing module of the CMS.
  Here she selects to create a new page based on
  the template called Online business card for
  communal authority. This action opens a page
  editor where she can enter the information into a
  number of fields.
• She enters Firefighters of Eurocity into the
  field named Title of authority. She copies and
  pastes the rest of the information one-by-one
  directly from the email first the street, then
  the zip-code, the name of the city, then the
  description .

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Technical Support
Migrating E-gov. Websites to the Semantic Web
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Conceptual Support
Migrating E-gov. Websites to the Semantic Web
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Seeking to Improve Migration Approaches
Is it that easy?

• Take web pages to be annotated and a domain
  ontology as inputs
• Extract instances from web pages
• Perform a set of heuristics for mapping
• Generate and store the annotations that
  ontology-aware machine agents can process

? Great diversity of e-gov web content ? Success
factors of web content migration beyond scope of
existing approaches
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Guiding Hypothesis

• Migration methods and tools for small
  administrations must be tailored comprehensive
• Lowering effort in conceptual decision making and
  in changing the local IT infrastructure
  (?minimizing resources)
• Migration methods and tools should be provided by
  trusted stakeholders
• Small governments must be able to draw on
  external expertise experience