Abstract
Governments are currently struggling with huge information overloads, with new and emerging ICT capabilities, and with a shortage of information management skills and human expertise. How can ontologies and KM facilities (such as search, retrieval, visualisation, text mining, and intelligent reasoning) be exploited to achieve information quality and economy, and to support KM processes in eGovernment settings?
Keywords
Information and knowledge management, intelligent reasoning, ontologies
Description
Grounding the research on Ontologies and intelligent information and knowledge management (KM)
The public sector is dealing with a significant amount of information and knowledge resources. This knowledge has to be appropriately managed and smoothly integrated. Especially in policy formulation, the activities and results of action are of information and knowledge by nature. Yet, we still lack a clear understanding of what kind of knowledge and information we are treating in eGovernment and eParticipation, what purposes and rationale lay behind investigations and activities, and which tools and technologies of data and knowledge engineering can support eGovernment and e-participation.
Laws and special features of information and knowledge play an important role in the core tasks of public administration, i.e. decision-making in non-routine cases. Especially decision-making bears a big variety of information and knowledge, depending on the complexity and the circumstances of both the policies at stake and the individual case. Pioneers in eGovernment developments such as Lenk and Traunmüller have developed a process model proper to public administration, which tries to combine two views: processes as production processes, which obviously is a perspective owing much to Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) ; and decision-making which draws on the classical account of administrative behaviour by Herbert Simon, and administrative procedure as it is conceptualised in procedural legislation, the administrative acts (e.g. the US (Federal) Administrative Procedure Act or the German Verwaltungsverfahrensgesetze).
In an Information Society using modern ICT, several problems and challenges have to be solved: information overload, new means of search and retrieval of information and services, advanced facilities to support intelligent reasoning, self-service and high automation in electronic service provision or citizen participation. The challenge of future research is to develop proper methods, technologies and tools to achieve such objectives widely. Deficiencies of current research are, on the one hand, that new technologies and tools are not yet mature enough for their wide application in real contexts. Core technology and applied research is needed in these areas in order to overcome the limitations of current emerging technologies and to bring forward new concepts that better suit the needs of advanced and intelligent public services supported by information and knowledge management.
Another point is common ontologies in the field: A reference model has to capture the main concepts in the domain and their relationships as the basis for development, analysis and management of e-government systems, processes and structures. We are lacking such a common ground of e-government and e-participation (an overall ontology). However, we do not share the understanding of the concepts, we do not collaborate in developing such an ontology, glossary and taxonomy management. Consequently, this leads to a lack of interoperability and lack of collaboration among each others solutions.
Since ontologies and the semantic web services, web 2.0, tagging, etc. are still part of core technology research, applicability of these concepts and tools in the field of e-government and e-participation is still not investigated.
Research question
Research with a specific focus on the application in the public sector is needed to investigate the applicability of such new technologies and concepts in eGovernment contexts such as:
- Information retrieval, knowledge extraction, data mining, text mining, retrieving valuable knowledge from unstructured and dispersed knowledge bases and information sources;
- interoperability of systems, cross-systems data and information access and computation;
- intelligent reasoning, expert systems in sector-specific areas;
- visualization, cognitive knowledge models accessible for all, intelligent interfaces for all;
- structuring information and knowledge thereby using ontology concepts and other advanced methods of mapping and merging information and knowledge appropriately;
- Building a foundation of common reference models (ontology) for e-government and e-participation
- securing and assessing data and information quality, understanding information economy and the impact of advanced information and knowledge management tools and concepts in eGovernment to governments, market and society,
- supporting the knowledge management process, especially dissemination of knowledge, accessibility of knowledge.
Such research needs to include as well the development of new methods and frameworks for holistic development of tools and technologies of information and knowledge management for their application in eGovernment contexts.
Link to the final eight scenarios
In several scenarios (e.g. orchestrating government, individualized society, ambient government, empowering state), experts address information overload, new means of search and retrieval of information and services, advanced facilities to support intelligent reasoning, self-service and high automation in electronic service provision or citizen participation.
Link to the gaps and gaps storyline
Gap analysis elicited a lack of methods, technologies and tools to enrich government activity with knowledge management. Deficiencies of current research are, on the one hand, that new technologies and tools are not yet mature enough for their wide application in real contexts (weaknesses identified especially in the gap category "Government & Society & ICT & Economics" : information and knowledge management, ontology and semantic web, ubiquitous systems, etc.).
Link to the roadmapping workshops
Themes of research, which have been expressed in the workshops of roadmapping, are among others long-term archiving technologies, mechanisms to secure readability and authentication, as well as forensic mechanisms and validation of digital documents.
