J. Theor. Appl. Electron. Commer. Res., Volume 6, Issue 1 (April 2011) – 10 articles

The paper describes an approach to semantic interoperability of eGovernment services applied within the 027020 FP6 IST Access-eGov project. The goal of the project was to improve accessibility and connectivity of governmental services for citizens and businesses by means of creating integrated scenarios and providing guidance to users while following this scenario. The scenario helps the user to identify and fulfil any needed electronic or real governmental services in a selected life situation. The Access-eGov project has developed software tools enabling service integration using semantic technologies. In addition to that, a methodology providing guidance to the user-driven process of creating ontologies was developed. Sample ontologies were prepared for trial applications. The developed tools support browsing, discovery, and execution of government services according to a selected life event or goal. The project successfully developed and tested the proposed solutions. The software developed within the project is available as open source software. Full article

A great number of recent studies in the e-government area focus on investigating how technology-induced changes in the public sector connect with the New Public Management (NPM) reform, envisioned by many politicians. Researchers in this field contend that e-government denotes a structural and process-oriented change of governmental organizations, with the objective of getting them to run more efficiently. Adopting this perspective, this paper revisits a well-established business process change (BPC) methodology for the public sector and applies it to analyse the Greek initiative of Citizens Service Centers (CSCs) towards a one-stop hybrid (physical and electronic) government model. Considering the particularities of public organizations, we position our research as dealing fundamentally with ex-ante planned incremental changes at the micro level, being part of either a revolutionary or evolutionary transformation program at the macro level. We argue in favor of extending the six stages of the initially prescribed BPC methodology with an additional stage, named ‘institutionalize change’. This serves the need of applying BPC to implement changes that enable multi-agency collaboration at a national level. Full article

Official documents, and particularly legal ones like law codes, often contain ambiguities and/or inconsistencies, due to linguistic problems like polysemy, as well as ontological problems like underspecification, disagreements and/or false agreements. Such problems can be identified by formalizing the terminology of a domain in terms of an ontology. We show this phenomenon in a particular domain, the definition of different classes of vehicles. Defining accurately these different vehicle types shed light on some of these semantic deficiencies present in two Brazilian legal codes responsible for defining vehicles’ categories in an unambiguous manner for many purposes, e.g. tax calculations, and, more importantly, to make egovernment systems interoperate while taking laws into account in a Semantic Web scenario. In this work, we define a framework linking the linguistic and conceptual problems to semantic deficiencies and show how these deficiencies were identified during the vehicles’ ontology construction. Full article

In the European academic and institutional debate, interoperability is predominantly seen as a means to enable public administrations to collaborate within Members State and across borders. The article presents a conceptual framework for ICT-enabled governance and analyses the role of interoperability in this regard. The article makes a specific reference to the exploratory research project carried out by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre on emerging ICT-enabled governance models in EU cities (EXPGOV). The aim of this project is to study the interplay between ICTs and governance processes at city level and formulate an interdisciplinary framework to assess the various dynamics emerging from the application of ICT-enabled service innovations in European cities. In this regard, the conceptual framework proposed in this article results from an action research perspective and investigation of e-governance experiences carried out in Europe. It aims to elicit the main value drivers that should orient how interoperable systems are implemented, considering the reciprocal influences that occur between these systems and different governance models in their specific context. Full article

Information Systems (IS) interoperability in Public Administration (PA) is a main goal and a major challenge for PA professionals. Achieving interoperability among IS that are technologically disparate and that exist in different organizational contexts is a complex task, being affected by multiple aspects, not yet satisfactorily known and characterized. The aim of this paper is to unveil the forces that influence IS interoperability initiatives in PA. The inquiry was inspired by Lewin’s Field Theory. The data generation process was based on a Delphi study involving 55 experts from PA, IS/IT industry, and academy. A set of 31 forces were identified and ranked based on the level of importance they assume in IS interoperability initiatives. Thirty eight propositions describing restraining and driving influences were also formulated, as well as 24 propositions about forces’ configuration in the current context of Portuguese PA that represent the specific constellation of forces acting in IS interoperability initiatives in that country. The results of this study provide an understanding of the complex of forces acting in IS interoperability, contributing to improve the study, management, and implementation of these initiatives and, consequently, to the establishment of a PA with more adequate, sustained, and sustainable levels of interoperability. Full article

When a disaster occurs, the rapid gathering and sharing of crucial information among public safety agencies, emergency response units, and the public can save lives and reduce the scope of the problem; yet, this is seldom achieved. The lack of interoperability hinders effective collaboration across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. In this article, we propose a general architecture for emergency communications that incorporates (1) an information broker, (2) events and event-driven processes, and (3) interoperability. This general architecture addresses the question of how an information broker can overcome obstacles, breach boundaries for seamless communication, and empower the public to become active participants in emergency communications. Our research is based on qualitative case studies on emergency communications, workshops with public safety agencies, and a comparative analysis of interoperability issues in the European public sector. This article features a conceptual approach toward proposing a way in which public safety agencies can achieve optimal interoperability and thereby enable seamless communication and crowdsourcing in emergency prevention and response. Full article

Research has revealed the entanglement of e-government strategy and information infrastructure and that the control of infrastructures often remains an illusion as actual development and implementation is challenged by a constant drift. However, guidelines for public sector CIOs how to deal with these challenges remain scarce: Are governments well advised using architectures and other conceptualizations as tools in a top-down implementation of an infrastructure based on a preset interoperability strategy? Or should governments rather develop contextual strategies that build on the understanding of the actual drift of infrastructures and employ selected architectures only as facilitators for stakeholder communication during the next phase of interoperability achievement? In view of nowadays available theoretical reflections, the case of Egypt is analyzed to examine the role of service-oriented architecture in the control and drift of the G2G infrastructure. Findings reveal that what at first seemed to be an immature vendor-driven “technology-first” approach with a clear absence of IT governance strategy, in retrospect can be considered as the appropriate choice of architecture because it has successfully impacted agendas of most local stakeholder to move into the direction of e-government interoperability. Attempting to generalize, it is suggested that strategies towards e-government interoperability should select architectures based on reflection of the specific implementation context: to embrace existing infrastructure components, to be comprehensible and acceptable by the stakeholders involved, to be suitable for designing and standardizing the next generation of component interfaces, and to provide a timelimited frame for “tinkering,” i.e. allowing stakeholders to find their own way of embracing and implementing the concepts in focus. Full article

This paper presents an IT infrastructure based on an event driven architecture with the objective to decrease the turnaround time for urban planning. Most urban planning takes a long time, not only to get all stakeholders involved, but also to assess various scenarios on several aspects according to (inter)national laws and regulations. By supporting urban planning with IT, the turnaround time is expected to decrease dramatically and supports the possibility to explore more scenarios without an extra burden on duration and personnel. The IT infrastructure developed integrates various data resources and calculation models for analyzing different scenarios. An event service bus and a data store for sharing data between computational models is the basis of the infrastructure. Various computational models are able to read and write to the data store and publish and subscribe to events. Based on a case study, the paper illustrates that indeed decision making is improved leading to better and possibly cheaper urban plans for all relevant stakeholders. The paper will also show that a closed environment, as currently available, is one of the major thresholds for acceptance by end-users. Endusers would like to apply their computational models, which can not yet be plugged into the infrastructure. Further extensions are foreseen in applying open standards and open link data for data collection and sharing. Thus, interoperability is a prerequisite for our IT infrastructure. Full article

Regulators and actors in international trade are facing a difficult challenge of increasing control and security while at the same time lowering the administrative burden for traders. As a tentative response, the European Commission has introduced the concept of “trusted traders”: certified traders that are in control of their business. Trusted traders are entitled to trade facilitations, faster border crossing, and fewer physical inspections. To enable the use of trusted traders, changes are required to the information infrastructure (II) of international trade. This article complements existing works on e-Government interoperability by a theoretically driven approach with theoretical development of the II concept and how II can be modified as additional focus. Following the principles of IS design research, this paper presents a design proposition for the II of international trade. Using theories of II development and change as kernel theory, our proposition presents a redesign of IT, organizational, human, and change and collaboration elements. The design proposition was evaluated and verified with proof of concept installations and a stakeholder value assessment. The paper contributes to the domain of II and how they may be changed to meet new requirements. Full article