HICSS 2013 Minitrack on E-Government Cloud Services and Interoperability

Call For Papers

E-Government Cloud Services and Interoperability at HICSS46

Within the 46th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), we organise a minitrack on Cloud Services and Interoperability in the Public Sector. The 46th HICSS, one of the most prominent Conferences on Information Sciences worldwide, will be held on January 7-10, 2013, in Maui, Hawaii (http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu).

BACKGROUND

Public organizations are joining-up and collaborating with each other and with the public. All these efforts require vertical and horizontal interoperability and need to be supported by the next generation of digital government infrastructures. By overcoming the fragmentation, public organizations can exchange information and benefit from each other facilities. The creation of an interoperable government faces challenges at the technical, organizational, managerial and strategic level.

Interoperability is the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together and covers a mixture of technical and organizational aspects. Infrastructures are generic facilities facilitating organizational collaborating, service provisioning and business processes. Cloud services are a new way of providing and using ICT based on virtualized resources meeting security, privacy and scalability requirements. Clouds provide the opportunity to share resources and provide shared services over the Internet, so that administrations, enterprises and citizens can benefit from open data and shared services.

This minitrack is aimed at discussing theories, methodologies, experience reports, literature and case studies in the field of cloud services and interoperability. We solicit for papers covering technical and organizational aspects and combining theory and practice. Papers in the field of government cloud, integration, agile development, information exchange, enterprise architecture, cloud computing, ICT-(shared) services and Software as a Service (SaaS) are strongly encouraged. We promote a diversity of research methods to study the challenges of this multifaceted discipline focusing on various aspects of interoperability and also theoretical papers and papers from developing countries.

POSSIBLE TOPICS

·     System development, implementation and agility for digital public services

·     System, user data- and process-based integration

·     Information infrastructures, cloud infrastructures, reuse and quality in digital public services

·     Semantic ontologies, web services and modeling for governmental infrastructures

·     Cloud computing, ICT-services, scalability, reliability, flexibility

·     Software as service (SaaS), utility computing, shared services, cloud providers

·     Cross-organizational modeling and visualization ranging from the organizational to technical level

·     Infrastructure, interoperability and enterprise architecture planning, alignment, strategies and governance

·     Interoperability and architecture standards, principles and frameworks

·     Technical, semantic, organizational, managerial and legal/policy aspects of interoperability

·     Organizational and/or policy perspectives on the dynamics of the infrastructure and interoperability process and barriers to interoperability

·     Service-oriented architectures, web services, semantic web services, orchestration and composition

·     Linked data, meta-data and semantic technologies leading to enhanced digital public services

·     Best practices and case studies and longitudinal studies

·     Theoretical contributions and contributions from developing countries

MINITRACK CHAIRS
Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, m.f.w.h.a.janssen@tudelft.nl (primary contact)

Yannis Charalabidis,  University of the Aegean, Greece, yannisx@aegean.gr

Helmur Krcmar, Technische Universität München, Germany, Krcmar@in.tum.de

IMPORTANT DATES

June 15            Submission full manuscripts

Aug 15            Acceptance Notifications

Sept 15            Submission camera-ready paper

Oct 1               Early Registration fee deadline

More info: http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu

ENGAGE Project call on Open Data

 CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS ON

Open Data for Science and Society

Forward-Looking, Visionary Approaches for Public Sector Information Sharing and Utilisation

AN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Open data provide an unprecedented opportunity for societies to move towards transparency, evidence-based decisions, enhanced cohesion, public engagement and trust. Public sector information may be offered as ”open data” in many forms and through different media: from simple datasets describing traffic or unemployment, to web services linking and mashing information from different sources, to interactive visualization of complex phenomena, to citizen-based data gathering and transmission. This way, new information is made available to scientists, citizens and enterprises for developing and offering value-adding services, thus forming a supply chain around publicly available open data.

In this context, the ENGAGE project (http://www.engage-project.eu ), funded by the European Commission under the e-Infrastructures Programme, aims at 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.

Objectives of the Call:

With this call for contributions, ENGAGE aims to attract high-quality innovative contributions, in the form of short papers that depict sound positions and views for advancing the provision, usage and final utilization of open data by scientists of all scientific domains, citizens and businesses. Topics of this call include but are not fully limited to the following:

·         Justification of requirements for public sector information, orienting from any scientific domain

·         Examples and best practices of open data utilization for scientific purposes

·         Visionary ideas on open data utilization within society

·         Metadata schemas for open and linked data management

·         Methods and tools for open data acquisition, curation, management and publication

·         Methods and tools for integrating and combining open data from distributed heterogeneous sources

·         Methods and tools for combining linked open data with in-house or open structured information systems in the ‘deep web’

·         Information systems and services for open data gathering and provision

·         New approaches for public sector information visualization

·         Collaborative governance approaches involving the use of open data

·         Open data and citizen participation in information gathering / crowdsourcing

·         New governance and business models for open data

·         Legal provisions and open issues at national and European level, regarding re-use of governmental data

·         International cooperation in the field of open and linked data

Excellent contributors should provide multi-disciplinary approaches, possibly combining information science with social sciences, management, finance, engineering or law, to allow uptake of open data by diverse scientific domains, for modeling or solving complex societal problems.

Award Scheme:

Up to 5 authors of the best papers submitted under this call will be invited to join the ENGAGE Experts Scientific Committee. Members of this committee have a key role in providing their expertise in specific research areas, in participating in the workshops that will be conducted during the project, and in presenting their comments and feedback to the project deliverables.

Beside the prestige and the opportunity to shape the EU research agenda on Open Data, each member of the Expert Scientific Committee will receive a sum of 2,500 EUR to fund participation in the activities of the project.

Submission Guidelines:

All submissions must be between 2,000 and 3,000 words, following the LNCS format: http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/word.zip?SGWID=0-0-45-72919-0

Submissions by more than one author are welcome; however only the coordinating author (as indicated in the submission) of the selected paper will be invited to join the ENGAGE Expert Scientific Committee.

Please submit your contribution via e-mail to contact@engage-project.eu together with a short biography of 150 words for each of the authors. All selected contributions will be published in the ENGAGE website after the announcement of results.

Important Dates:

Deadline for submission of position papers: 15^th March 2012

Announcement of results and best papers: 15^th  April 2012

More information can be found at www.engage-project.eu

CFC Editing and Review Committee

Yannis Charalabidis, University of Aegean, Greece

Matthias Fluegge, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany

Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Keith Jeffery, Science and Technology Facility Council, UK

Nikos Houssos, EuroCRIS, The Netherlands

Fotis Karayannis, Microsoft Innovation Centre, Greece

Euripidis Loukis, University of Aegean, Greece

Spyros Mouzakitis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

John Psarras, National Technical University of Athens (coordinator), Greece

Antonis Ramfos, Intrasoft International, Belgium

Avi Yaeli, IBM Research Haifa, Israel

Anneke Zuiderwijk, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

More information can be found at www.engage-project.eu

NOMAD - Research in text analysis for policy making

University of Aegean and Google in a new research project

The NOMAD project “Policy Formulation and Validation through non-Moderated Crowdsourcing” is an FP7 project started January 2012, aiming to stimulate significant progress in the domain of ICT-enabled policy making.  NOMAD aims to assist policy makers, organizations and citizens to compose and validate new policy through analyzing information available in the cloud.  NOMAD uses intelligent text acquisition and processing tools, new visualization methods and an overall collaborative framework, going beyond the currently available platforms and services.

The NOMAD consortium, lead by the Information Systems Laboratory of the information and Communications systems department of the University of Aegean, comprises Google, Fraunhofer IGD, Athens Technology Centre, NCSR Demokritos, Critical Publics, Qwentes and the Greek and Austrian parliaments as final users.

In today’s public internet, where collaboration and crowdsourcing are becoming realities, NOMAD will use novel methods to analyse internet data, giving insight to information at multiple stages of the policy-life cycle, thus supporting the definition of the political agenda, the creation, the implementation and the monitoring of policy proposals.

With NOMAD developments, modern politicians could test, detect and understand how citizens perceive their own political agendas, and also stimulate the emergence of discussions and contributions on the informal web (e.g. forums, social networks, blogs, newsgroups and wikis), so as to gather useful feedback for immediate action. In this way, politicians can create a stable feedback loop between information gathered on the Web and the definition of their political agendas based on this contribution. The ability to leverage the vast amount of user-generated content for supporting governments in their political decisions requires new ICT tools that will be able to analyze and classify the opinions expressed on the informal Web, or stimulate responses, as well as to put data from sources as diverse as blogs, online opinion polls and government reports to an effective use.

To this end, NOMAD aims to introduce these different new dimensions into the experience of policy making by providing decision-makers with fully automated solutions for content search, selection, acquisition, categorisation and visualisation that work in a collaborative form in the policy-making arena.

The NOMAD team in Athens, February 2012