ESWC 2011 Workshop on «Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling»

Extended Semantic Web Conference 2011

Workshop on «Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling»
May 30, 2011 - Crete, Greece

Topics and Papers
The papers presented in this workshop are targeting novel approaches, methods, practices and tools for turning the public information overload into an opportunity for Governance and Policy Modelling with the help of semantics, open data and Public Sector Information reuse, linked data and visual analytics. Specific importance is placed in multidisciplinary approaches, combining theoretical policy making methodologies, advanced ICT and Government 2.0 collaboration practices.
The workshop provided a stand for real-life application examples, showing how stakeholders can gain insight and take action into complex and unpredictable real-life situations at international, national or local level, including: Semantic components for digital public service definition and provision; Semantics for policy modelling, including policy planning and policy impact assessment; Open, governmental data publication and promotion; Linking of open governmental data; Linked data in government data mash-ups; Collaborative analysis and collective intelligence for policy-making, Semantic annotation of public policy and citizen opinion; Semantic components for public deliberation and argument visualization.

The papers selected among submissions and made publishable in the workshop are following, organized under two sessions, as for presentation. The first session gathers papers in the areas of Open and Linked Data in Governance, including also structural components approaches:

· Fenareti Lampathaki, Yannis Charalabidis, Dimitris Askounis: “Open Linked Data and Visual Analytics in Electronic Governance: State of Play and Perspectives”

· Konstantin Hypponen, Miika Alonen, Sami Korhonen, and Virpi Hotti: “XHTML with RDFa as a Semantic Document Format for CCTS Modelled Documents and its Application for Social Services”

· Kelli de Faria Cordeiro, Maria Luiza Machado Campos, Marcos R. S. Borges: “Empowering Citizens and Government with Collaboration on Linked Open Data”

· Lucas de Ramos Araújo, Pablo N. Mendes, Jairo Francisco de Souza: “Publishing Linked Data from Brazilian Politicians on the Web”

The second part touches upon issues relative to more participative approaches, mainly at the policy support and deliberation areas. As such, Semantically-enriched Policy Making is a new direction for several existing categories of research artefacts, attracting papers such as:

· Riccardo Boero, Enrico Ferro, Michele Osella, Yannis Charalabidis, Euripidis Loukis: “Policy Intelligence in the Era of Social Computing: Towards a Cross-Policy Decision Support System”

· Christos Tsarouchis, Declan O’Sullivan, David Lewis: “Balancing system expressivity and user cognitive load in semantically enhanced policy modeling”

· George Anadiotis, Panos Alexopoulos, Konstantinos Kafentzis, Efrosyni Konstantinou, Milan Stankovic, and Manuel Waeckerle: “Semantics-powered Virtual Communities and Open Innovation for a Structured Deliberation Process”

· Alessio Gugliotta, Franco Alberti, Igor Jogan: “Comelicopedia: a Collaborative, Semantically-enriched Knowledge Base for the Sustainable Development in Mountain Areas”

All presentations and papers available at http://bit.ly/l0J3N6

The workshop speakers and chair, at the ESWC 2011, May 30th 2011

Call for Papers : Special Issue on eParticipation - ISM Journal (ISI)

Call for Papers

INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

An ISI-Indexed Journal - Taylor & Francis Group

Special Issue on:

European Research on Electronic Citizen Participation 
and Engagement in Public Policy Making

Guest  Editors

Euripidis Loukis Assistant Professor University of the Aegean Greece email: eloukis@aegean.gr

Yannis Charalabidis Assistant Professor University of the Aegean Greece email: yannisx@aegean.gr

Jeremy Millard Senior Consultant Danish Technological Institute Denmark email: jrm@teknologisk.dk

Aims and Scope

The rapid development and the growing penetration of digital technologies provide rich opportunities for more extensive participation and engagement of citizens in public policy and decision making and in general for increasing the influence of society on government. They offer possibilities for strengthening political deliberation and establishing new participatory models of governance through electronic means which reduce existing limitations associated with time, location, cost and physical presence.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have the potential to support the provision of information concerning government activities, decisions and public policies, and also to increase both the quantity and quality of consultation with the citizens. Also, ICT has the potential to support both top-down government initiatives and ground-up civil society ones, both aiming at enhancing public participation in the decision processes and improving interaction between society and government. ICT enable the collection of huge amounts of citizens’ knowledge on the problems and needs that public policies attempt to address, and on proposed courses of government action and legislation. At the same time ICT also enable the exploitation of this knowledge for the assessment of the impact of various policy options on society, so that governments can make better and more informed decisions.

However, it is necessary investigate to what extent this potential is actually exploited, what is the impact of the existing exploitation, and which contextual factors affect positively or negatively this impact. Furthermore, it is important to discover new ways of exploiting this huge potential and using ICT for increasing citizens’ participation and engagement in public policy making, and to proceed to pilot applications of them in ‘real-life’ cases and conditions in order to assess their value, and if necessary improve and optimize them.

Especially in Europe, due to its long tradition of social state characterized by strong interaction with the society and intervention in order to secure social welfare and support of weak groups (European Social Model), there is a strong interest in the above ideas. For this reason in the last ten years there has been extensive financial support by several institutions, such as the European Commission and the National and Local Governments, of research in this domain of ICT-supported/mediated citizen participation and engagement in public policy making for investigating the above research questions. It is quite interesting to reflect on the results and conclusions of this research, and attempt to exploit them both in Europe and in other parts of the world, probably with adaptations to local histories and political traditions.    

This Special Issue of ‘Information Systems Management’ solicits original high quality papers presenting this ‘European Research on Electronic Citizen Participation and Engagement in Public Policy Making’. Topics of interest in this area include, but are not limited to:

•            Innovative forms of ICT use for supporting and enhancing citizens’ participation

•            Advanced systems for structured high quality deliberation

•            Social media platforms and their applications for supporting citizens’ participation

•            Textual analysis technologies, ontologies and taxonomies

•            Opinion mining and sentiment analysis

•            Data and argument visualization technologies

•            Federated content syndication systems for public participation

•            Trend monitoring and policy analysis

•            Policy modeling and impact assessment

•            Data-powered collective intelligence and action

•            Studying the impact and the overall value proposition of e-Participation

•      Methods for the evaluation of e-Participation      

•      Serious Games, simulation and virtual worlds for supporting policy making

•            Case studies from e-Participation and e-Consultation

•      Theoretical aspects towards a scientific base for ICT enabled Governance

Submission

Authors are invited to prepare original manuscripts of around 7500 words, exclusive of exhibits, according to the ‘Instructions for Authors’ web-page of the Journal:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1058-0530&linktype=44

Papers should be written in grammatically correct and coherent English. Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers will be refereed through a peer review process. All submissions must provide:

•            Abstract (maximum of 75 words)

•            At least 3 keywords

•            Full author names and affiliations

•            Brief author bios

•            Email address of the corresponding author

Prospective authors are welcome to submit an abstract to the Guest Editors for preliminary feedback on the appropriateness of their planned manuscript.

Send your manuscript to the corresponding Guest Editor, Prof. Euripidis N. Loukis (eloukis@aegean.gr)

Schedule

•            Full Paper Submission: September 30, 2011

•            Notifications to Authors: November 30, 2011

•            Camera-ready Submission: March 30, 2012

•            Tentative Publication: Fall 2012

More info at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10580530.asp

Workshop on Open Data in IFIP eGOV Conference

Call for Contributions

IFIP e-government conference  EGOV 2011

28th August – 2nd September 2011, Delft, The Netherlands

Workshop on

« Open Governmental Data: from Governments to Science and Society»

Background of the Workshop / The ENGAGE project

Information and Communication Technologies have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of citizens and have long been recognized as a key strategic tool to enable reforms in the public sector. During the last years, this potential of ICT has started to be dealt with in a multi-disciplinary way, giving birth to new research communities dealing with governance and policy modelling, modelling and simulation of complex systems, public administration information systems, open governance and social media. However, to this day, this potential has been exploited only non-systematically, as there are significant barriers that hinder the effective exploration, management and distribution of the vast amounts of available public sector data towards the research communities. 

The main goal of the ENGAGE project is the deployment and use of an advanced service infrastructure, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information resources as well as data curation, semantic annotation and visualisation tools, capable of supporting scientific collaboration and governance-related research from multi-disciplinary scientific communities, while also empowering the deployment of open governmental data towards citizens. 

Topics of the Workshop

The workshop is focussed on discussing the scientific base of ICT-enabled governance, based on open and linked data from the Public Sector. Various members will provide their view on open data and value-adding examples will be shown. Information and Communication Technologies have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of citizens and have long been recognized as a key strategic tool to enable reforms in the public sector. New insights can be gained by combining data from different sources which are opened up. The opening of data and sharing of information from different sources can provide fresh insights and utilize the crowd not only in analyzing data, but also in interpreting it and creating original solutions. Yet, this potential is to this day non-systematically exploited, as there are significant barriers that hinder the effective exploration, management and distribution of the vast amounts of available public sector data towards the research communities. Governments at all levels are developing strategies that EU Regions and Member States are implementing when publishing public data on the web. The new European e-Government Action Plan 2011-2015  dedicates specific actions to Open Government and identifies two main sources of potential benefits: transparency and data re-use (Commission, 2010).

The main topics of the workshop are structured around the state of the art, the visionary scenarios, the research gaps and the future research challenges in the area of ICT for governance and public sector’s open data.  Specific topics to be addressed are, but not limited to:

·         Re-use of Public Sector Information

·         Open and Linked Linked Data

·         Open government information & intelligence for transparency

·         Improvement of Transparency

·         Citizens engagement and inclusion

·         Future internet for collaborative governance

·         Social networks and means of mass citizen participation

·         Identity, privacy and trust in governance

·         Collaborative Production of Services based on Open Data

·         EU-wide implementation of cross-border services

·         Other scientific approaches to ICT for governance and public sector’s open data

Target audience

·         eGovernance Research Project Members

·         European Commission, National Governments and Local Administration Officers

·         Industry representatives, interested in cutting-edge advancements on eGovernance research

·         Other registered participants from Industry and Academia

Submission and Selection Process

The workshop will accommodate both presentations and short position papers.

·         Presentations should not exceed 12 slides, be delivered in MS Powerpoint and be accompanied by an 1 page text in MS Word (title, authors and abstract) in  LNCS format guidelines available at:  http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0.  Open Data or relevant project presentations are welcome.

·         Short position papers should not exceed 4 pages, including figures and references, and be delivered in MS Word (title, authors and abstract) in  LNCS format guidelines available at:  http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0. 

All submissions should be made via email to the workshop corresponding chair, by 15th June 2011.

All accepted submissions to be published online by the ENGAGE project.

Important dates

Paper or presentation-abstract submission: 15th June 2011

Notification of acceptance: 1st July 2011

Days of the Conference: 28th August – 2nd September 2011

Workshop Chairs

Yannis Charalabidis (corresponding), University of Aegean, Greece, yannisx@aegean.gr

Sunil Choenni, Ministry of Justice, the Netherlands, r.choenni@minjus.nl

Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, m.f.w.h.a.janssen@tudelft.nl

Workshop Programme Committee

Peter Bak, IBM Research Israel, Haifa Research Lab
Nils Barnickel, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany

Fotis Draganidis, Microsoft Innovation Centre, Greece

Matthias Fluegge, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany

Christos Georgousopoulos, INTRASOFT International, Luxembourg

Dimitris Gkanatsios, Microsoft Innovation Centre, Greece

Thomas F. Gordon, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany 

Heiko Hartenstein, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany

Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Keith Jeffery, Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK

Brigitte Jörg, Current Research Information Systems, Netherlands

Jens Klessmann, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Germany

Harrie Lalieu, Current Research Information Systems, Netherlands

Fenareti Lampathaki, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Euripidis Loukis, University of the Aegean, Greece

Lydia Morazzani, Microsoft Innovation Centre, Greece

John Psarras, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Antonis Ramfos, INTRASOFT International, Luxembourg

Simon Robinson, INTRASOFT International, Luxembourg

Yao-Hua Tan, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Alexander Verbraeck, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Avi Yaeli, IBM Research Israel, Haifa Research Lab

Join the ENGAGE project group at: 

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ENGAGE-eInfrastructures-Project-3867416

See more on the IFIP EGOV 2011 conference at:

http://www.egov-conference.org/egov-2011

Antonis Ramfos visits Uni Aegean, in Samos

One day in Samos, at the Information and Communication Systems Engineering Department

It was our pleasure at the department and the Information Systems lab, to host Antonis Ramfos, Principal of Research & Innovation Department at INTRASOFT International, for "One Day in Samos", to lecture and discuss with students.

Leaving with the early (06:00 AM) flight for Samos, Antonis arrived on time to have a breakfast at the main square of Karlovassi, set the agenda and then participate in the course "E-Business Technologies and Apps" - in the 4th of the 5 years pregraduate programme. Assessing progress and discussing students projects (around 30 innovative internet sites/prototypes expected), outlasted the 3-hour morning slot.

Then, at the ISLab we spent the rest of the afternoon doing work (connected via the Aegean 1-Gb GRNET node, with some issues concerning buidlings WiFi, though), reviewing students theses and discussing future collaboration opportunities, in the middle (or less ?) of the crisis, for Greece.

Afternoon was free for our guest, but a 2-hr dinner with MSc students with questions on carrier paths, market situation, research and development, employment tactics, ended the day.  Another couple of diploma theses might be related to real-world problems, this summer.

Antonis, taking the early flight from Samos, arrived a little earlier than usual in the office, the next day. 

    

ESWC Workshop on «Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling»

Extended Semantic Web Conference 2011
Workshop on «Semantics in Governance and Policy Modelling»
May 30, 2011 - Crete, Greece

Preface

Today, Governments struggle to regulate an increasingly interconnected, complex, fast-evolving and unpredictable world, as the recent financial crisis has shown. At the same time, the amount of data available to any interested stakeholder for making sense of the socio-economic environment has increased exponentially, provided either through sensors in the Internet of Objects and “crowdsourced” citizens’ reports in Social Media, or with the help of open government initiatives that have already started to emerge and impact governments’ operation, efficiency and reputation.

Moving in the strategic directions of the “Research Roadmap in ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling” prepared by the CROSSROAD Project (http://www.crossroad-eu.net), data-powered collective intelligence and action has been unanimously recognized as a key challenge towards a better, evidence-based, timely, truly transparent and participative decision making process. In such a Collaborative Governance vision, citizens are engaged in all the phases of policy making: in collecting available data through open linked data and participatory sensing techniques; in analyzing the data through data mining, information visualization and visual analytics tools; and in acting on relevant data upon conducting interactive simulations and serious games experimentations that accompany and stimulate government policies.

Semantics are bound to play an important role in these new governance grand challenges, supporting policy modeling, citizen opinion mining, data visualization, automated and personalized service provision.

Topics and Papers
The papers presented in this workshop are targeting novel approaches, methods, practices and tools for turning the public information overload into an opportunity for Governance and Policy Modelling with the help of semantics, open data and Public Sector Information reuse, linked data and visual analytics. Specific importance is placed in multidisciplinary approaches, combining theoretical policy making methodologies, advanced ICT and Government 2.0 collaboration practices.
The workshop provided a stand for real-life application examples, showing how stakeholders can gain insight and take action into complex and unpredictable real-life situations at international, national or local level, including: Semantic components for digital public service definition and provision; Semantics for policy modelling, including policy planning and policy impact assessment; Open, governmental data publication and promotion; Linking of open governmental data; Linked data in government data mash-ups; Collaborative analysis and collective intelligence for policy-making, Semantic annotation of public policy and citizen opinion; Semantic components for public deliberation and argument visualization.

The papers selected among submissions and made publishable in the workshop are following, organized under two sessions, as for presentation. The first session gathers papers in the areas of Open and Linked Data in Governance, including also structural components approaches:

· Fenareti Lampathaki, Yannis Charalabidis, Dimitris Askounis: “Open Linked Data and Visual Analytics in Electronic Governance: State of Play and Perspectives”

· Konstantin Hypponen, Miika Alonen, Sami Korhonen, and Virpi Hotti: “XHTML with RDFa as a Semantic Document Format for CCTS Modelled Documents and its Application for Social Services”

· Kelli de Faria Cordeiro, Maria Luiza Machado Campos, Marcos R. S. Borges: “Empowering Citizens and Government with Collaboration on Linked Open Data”

· Lucas de Ramos Araújo, Pablo N. Mendes, Jairo Francisco de Souza: “Publishing Linked Data from Brazilian Politicians on the Web”

The second part touches upon issues relative to more participative approaches, mainly at the policy support and deliberation areas. As such, Semantically-enriched Policy Making is a new direction for several existing categories of research artefacts, attracting papers such as:

· Riccardo Boero, Enrico Ferro, Michele Osella, Yannis Charalabidis, Euripidis Loukis: “Policy Intelligence in the Era of Social Computing: Towards a Cross-Policy Decision Support System”

· Christos Tsarouchis, Declan O’Sullivan, David Lewis: “Balancing system expressivity and user cognitive load in semantically enhanced policy modeling”

· George Anadiotis, Panos Alexopoulos, Konstantinos Kafentzis, Efrosyni Konstantinou, Milan Stankovic, and Manuel Waeckerle: “Semantics-powered Virtual Communities and Open Innovation for a Structured Deliberation Process”

· Alessio Gugliotta, Franco Alberti, Igor Jogan: “Comelicopedia: a Collaborative, Semantically-enriched Knowledge Base for the Sustainable Development in Mountain Areas”

All presentations and papers available at http://bit.ly/l0J3N6


Audience, Organisers
The audience of the workshop includes researchers and practitioners spanning the domains of Semantic Web, Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling, university students and professors of Computer, Management, Social and Public Administration sciences, ICT industry staff engaged in relevant projects and solutions, policy makers and decision drivers at local, national or international levels, public administration officials and industry executives, engaged both in organisational design and ICT deployment.

Workshop Chairs
Yannis Charalabidis (Corresponding Chair), University of Aegean, yannisx@aegean.gr
Fenareti Lampathaki, National Technical University of Athens, flamp@epu.ntua.gr
Gianluca Misuraca, JRC - European Commission, IPTS, Spain, Gianluca.MISURACA@ec.europa.eu

Workshop Programme Committee
Dimitris Askounis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Enrico Ferro, ISMB, Italy
Marko Grobelnik, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Euripidis Loukis, University of Aegean, Greece
Michele Missikoff, IASI-CNR, Italy
David Osimo, Tech4i2, Belgium
Maria Wimmer, University Koblenz-Landau, Germany

MIS responsible needed, industry in Athens

Large Greek Industry based in Athens is looking for an IT executive in financial department (MIS responsible), to enter at junior level. Training provided. Salary re-negotiation based on achievements, in 6-9 monthts.

Come back if interested and up to the task - yannis at aegean.gr