An Ontology-based Inquiry Framework?

Abstract

Quality of service (QoS) and citizens satisfaction are primary objectives for any eGovernment project. Quality can be inspected directly through measurements of speci¯c QoS indicators; in the midst of innovation processes it is however more convenient to estimate quality indirectly, through questionnaire submissions to the involved citizens. The eGovernment Inquiry Framework (eGif) has been designed as a key tool to keep innovation projects controlled { also being the ¯rst component of an eGovernment service oriented architecture with semantic capabilities. Written in Java, based on well known open source libraries, exposed as a standard WSDL-de¯ned web service, eGif helps survey campaign designers by keeping semantic information about the statistical variables used and interacting with servers for user identi¯cation. Questionnaire OWL-based ontologies are now investigated as a means to facilitate the creation of reusable survey knowledge base.

Keywords

• eGovernment
• QoS
• Semantic Web
• OWL
• RDF
• service quality
• customer satisfaction

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1.1

Introduction

The Scenario

A simple query on Google with the site: quali¯er can be used to measure the dimension of eGovernment systems in terms of number of pages. American government, identi¯ed by the .gov web domain, shows over thirty million pages; more di±cult is the analysis of the European government web sites, distributed across national web domains and with di®erent administrative and naming rules. A sizing of Italian Regional (the middle level, the others are national, provincial, municipal) eGovernment sites, shows more than ¯ve million pages. The dimensional parameter outline the knowledge-intensive characteristic of governments, complex organizations that are strongly information-related and wider than companies (at least in the European case). Given the dimensions and the value contained, there is a strong (political and functional) interest in making ? Work partially supported by project Laboratorio per l'erogazione e lo sviluppo di portali di servizi ai cittadini e alle imprese sponsored by Regione Veneto { Direzione Sistema Informatico. eGovernment more e®ective through friendlier citizen interfaces, better intergovernment collaborations, newer and smarter technology architectures.

Given the dimension, the complexity of processes, the knowledge focus and the civil and social implications of governments (online) services, application of semantic web (data) models to eGovernment are increasingly investigated. The U.S. have a clearly de¯ned high level eGovernment Strategy [ 4 ]. Europe strongly supports the eGovernment initiatives through the eGovernment Action Plan [ 1 ], accompanied by an e®ort towards interoperability, IDABC [ 2 ], which will be followed by the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) from 2010. The report series e-Governance: transforming Government to build trust and quality monitors eGovernment regarding main European experiences in creating information procedures and online services for citizens (see 2008 report in [ 3 ]). A similar survey, on a wider scale, can be found from United Nations (UN) [ 5 ].

A structured analysis of eGovernment experiences can be found in [ 13 ]; a thoughtful list of requirements for a comprehensive semantic web architecture has been identi¯ed in [ 9 ], where also are listed several eGovernment projects, like German SAGA [ 7 ] and UK eGIF [ 6 ]. In [ 18 ], with the focus on semantically annotating the national digital archives, the Chinese eGovernment projects are reviewed. As suggested in [ 19 ], processes are to be de¯ned according to the di®erent user roles. Leaving out their electronic agents case (which is supposed to operate in a mature semantic web services scenario like the one analyzed in [ 20 ]), we can map their two other processes to front- and back-side of eGovernment.

The front-side is the government-to-citizen (G2C) domain, where web publishing is used to give information to citizens, to report news regarding taxes procedures or laws as well as local information about events; citizens browse the web searching for speci¯c information but have to know in advance the government context where the information is located. The Regione Veneto myPortal project addressed this ¯eld by o®ering to smaller local governments free use of a common portal platform [ 8 ]. Semantic solutions for Italian regional portals have been researched in [ 15 ].

The back-side is the government-to-government (G2G) domain, where up-todate information is circulated internally for service requirements and structured information (frequently documents) is transferred/processed between employees; a variation of this case are cross-agency group collaborations that involve complex multi-level government processes. The Regione Veneto myIntranet project is now addressing this ¯eld by selecting the appropriate technology (web services and semantic web) to enable a services architecture that could better support internal collaborations. We can look at [ 21 ] (Germany, Schleswig-Holstein) and [ 12 ] (The Netherlands) for comparable experiences. 1.2

An Inquiry Framework for Measuring The Quality of Service

Quality, along with its several instances, quality control, quality assurance, quality management, total quality, shows a long and successful history, started in the production, organization and engineering ¯elds. Subsequently, quality models for process improvement were de¯ned, like lean production [ 22 ], six sigma [ 23 ], total quality [ 25 ]; this evolution has been consolidated with the 2000 edition of the widely adopted ISO 9001 standard [ 24 ]. These models are increasingly applied also to immaterial services, where Quality of Service (QoS) has to be measured and established contractually through Service Level Agreements (SLA).

The mutual interplay between quality and Information Technologies (IT) is increasingly common in the services industry, where quality can be a tool for IT, but also IT can be a tool for quality [ 40 ]. Service providing (as opposed to manufacturing) is really the domain of eGovernment. Quality in eGovernment services has been investigated in [ 27 ], where has been even de¯ned a speci¯c Quality of eGovernment Service (QeGS) ontology; a review of applicable quality models can be found in [ 26 ], where a classi¯cation for external measurements has been also identi¯ed: a) customer satisfaction, b) eGovernment portal quality and c) \technical" QoS. These classes map in our research to:

a) eGif, for multichannel citizen satisfaction surveys, b) interface/technology innovation for better user e®ectiveness, c) eMonitor, for technical and performance-related portal measurements.

The tool eGovernment Inquiry Framework (eGif)1, the ¯rst step in our applied research program, has been realized [ 39 ] to create survey campaigns, submit through di®erent media channels, retrieve the answers, elaborate and report the results. eMonitor should later follow eGif in order to collect, continuously monitor and report a wide set of technical, user-related and performance indicators to enhance eGovernment technical sta® quality control in G2C portal services.

User satisfaction analysis is a required ingredient in service quality management, where there is the need to compare internal measurements with external measurements. In eGovernment user satisfaction sometimes is intended to include some form of deliberative democracy ([ 28 ]; see [ 29 ] for a recent analysis), a model that can have a substantial help from the new web-based communication models; here, however, we focus on the smaller domain of citizen satisfaction for eGovernment (mainly online) services [ 32 ].

Quality measurements based on citizens surveys are by no means easy in order to be objective. Structured methodologies from two main research lines are commonly applied: a) quality-related models like SERVQUAL [ 30 ] and subsequents, mainly applied in the business domain to measure customer satisfaction through the use of suggested indicator classes and an analytical comparison of perceived Vs believed quality; b) social research (see the handbooks [ 33 ], [ 35 ]), where more emphasis is given to a right survey de¯nition and to the social models of interaction, with questionnaires based on quantitative as well as qualitative variables. 1 Our choice of name was perhaps unfortunate, as there is a clash with the UK electronic Government Interoperability Framework (eGIF) [ 6 ]; please note, however, that the scope of our eGif tool is smaller and di®erent from the one of UK eGIF project.

By analyzing the literature and the techniques used, we have seen wide space for improvements by activating synergies between internet technologies and these methodology models, speci¯cally in the b) social research line. Web surveys (see, for instance, [ 38 ]) are relatively new to social research: surveys emerged in an historical context where questionnaires were designed to ¯t in paper forms and computers were mainly used for elaboration purposes. Submission of questionnaires through the web [ 36 ] or email [ 37 ] channel rendered surveys popular and easy to manage; coherent asymmetric combinations of traditional media with web (for acquisition) and email (for submission) can even raise the respondent percentage. New interaction models, as are appearing every year (like interactive forms on digital TV handsets, cellular phone interfaces, instant messengers plug-in, etc, see [ 39 ]), o®er several advantages over paper, but raise also some critical problem. The point is that technology interfaces: (a) are simpler to use and can be software-assisted, (b) facilitate automatic collection of data, (c) can reduce the costs of conventional surveys. On the other side: (1) not all citizens use them, even the simpler web & email { and other technologies are less diffuse, (2) identi¯cation/authentication problems have to be solved, (3) technical problems can inhibit the submission to users in some con¯gurations.

Tools and web-based services for creating and using web/mail surveys are commonly found in internet (for a \survey about surveys", see the detailed comparing grid in [ 41 ]). Such systems however are mainly focused on interface and personalization versatility. Given the critical role of surveys for eGovernment and their near link with deliberative democracy, an e®ort should be done instead to design \intelligent" survey tools. Through interventions in two directions: 1. by strictly linking the statistical core of the survey campaigns with the questionnaires design. The survey tool has to know in advance the statistical characteristics of the variables inspected (being nominal, ordinal, cardinal, in ranges, etc), in order to be able to constrain its user acquisition, to better control the submission channels and to coherently elaborate/report the results; 2. by introducing semantic-web techniques for the accumulation of \usable knowledge" for survey designers, in order to facilitate the construction of \consistent bricks" for surveys to be shared among social researchers. Two kinds of \bags" are necessary: (a) a knowledge library for commonly used variables, their statistical properties, their social semantics, their relations with other variables; (b) an associative memory about common ways for [question + prede¯ned answers] blocks, their social semantics, their relations with other blocks and with the variables. 1.3

e-Gif as a Semantic Web Tool Semantic Web has been de¯ned as [ 42 ] \an extension of the current web in which information is given well-de¯ned meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation". As public Institutions are knowledge-intensive organizations, it is a common thinking that semantic web technology should ¯nd natural application in eGovernment. Architecture evolutions are intimately connected to innovations in data representations; the baseline data model for the semantic web architecture has been identi¯ed as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [ 45, 46 ], an highly °exible XML language where statements are triples composed of subject, predicate, object, represented graphically as two nodes connected by an edge. Subject and object are either resources, identi¯ed through an URI, blank nodes or datatype/XML elements.

It appears to us that encoding questionnaires knowledge in RDF should easy the mindful reuse of surveys between designers and could easy the statistical engine interpretation of data and the variables relationships. RDF Schema (RDFS) [ 47 ] gives more expressivity through precise identi¯cation of classes, resources, datatypes, allowing the construction of taxonomies and classi¯cation of resources, properties, variables relating to domains and ranges. With RDFS, we can, for instance (following the guidelines depicted in [ 51 ]): { declare classes like Country, Person, Student and Venetian; { state that Student is a subclass of Person; { state that Padova and Venezia are both instances of the class Comune; { declare Citizenship as a property relating to the classes Person (its domain) and Comune (its range); { state that age is a property with Person as its domain and integer as its range; { state that Mario Rossi is an instance of the class Venetian, and that his age has value 36.

For our needs, RDFS could be su±cient, but we are looking at OWL Web Ontology Language [ 48, 50, 51 ], as the language supports more complex statements that could be needed in order to establish and maintain a reference basis for domain knowledge exchange outside the survey-related eGif framework. Formal speci¯cations of speci¯c domains could be de¯ned through ontologies to help Government operators share information unambiguously and ease computermediated knowledge exchange (see [ 44 ]). Ontologies are to be created on the basis of a a common vocabulary, a set of assumptions for the intended meaning and a consistent set of relationships between concepts { a typical situation for Public Administrations. Common standard vocabularies [ 52, 53 ] can help managing the task. 2

The Inquiry Framework Tool

The Regione Veneto myPortal project [ 8 ], launched in 2003, has de¯ned a common framework for local (province, comuni, comunitaµ montane) government portals. By using the characteristic location-independence of web, it has been possible to active a single technological center (managed by the regional sta® and providers) where portals are technically maintained, leaving the content management to the local government. myPortal uni¯es at the moment a hundred local administrations (in Veneto there are seven \province", 19 \comunitaµ montane", 581 \comuni").

eGif is the ¯rst block of a technology model which exhibits a dual interface towards (a) the G2C local eGovernment Portal myPortal and (b) the G2G local eGovernment web-based collaboration tool myIntranet. Written in Java, it has been based upon a web service (WS) architecture: eGif exposes a WSDLcompliant interface, communicate through SOAP envelopes and can be listed through UDDI compliant registry. Given the role assumed by Regione Veneto for local government portals, the UDDI register model could indeed ¯nd fully appropriate use in this framework; we are also investigating about the adoption of semantic annotation standards (the simpler WSDL-S and the more complete OWL-S); with this respect, in [ 9 ] there are some interesting hints about the model to be identi¯ed.

An e®ort was also done to make eGif capable of managing complex multiindented questionnaire forms. Standard social research commonly uses dependency links between questions to be activated upon speci¯c answers of the interviewed, posing serious di±culties to standard survey tools. We worked with two parallel strategies: 1. by identifying a web user interface that would allow survey designers to manage questionnaires with ease and °exibility. We choose to lay out a graphics interface where the symbols \?" for questions and \!" for answers could ease the packing of information on the screens and could facilitate the user in the creation of questionnaires. We used server-side Echo2 open source GUI libraries; 2. by precisely de¯ning a data structure in XML, that can be validated and remains consistent between changes. We used the eXist open source XMLnative database. As eGif is based on XML data, the planned transition to RDF (an XML derivation) for the transition to the semantic data model will be greatly simpli¯ed. 2.1

Architecture

Several key requirements, both technical and practical, have been taken into account during the design of the eGif tool. As one of the main goals of the system is to serve as an abstract survey platform to many and diverse frontends, a standard service interface and a plugin-oriented architecture are both mandatory features. The service interface is used by a wide number of external applications, such as the analysis and reporting tools and the presentation layer of each of the several channel frontends and user interfaces (see Fig. 1).

According to the best practices about services oriented architectures, the services can be exposed through an UDDI registry and their semantic is explained through WSDL descriptors. In this way, third party applications or eGif extensions are able to connect to the eGif backend and take advantage of the function they require in a fully decoupled and well documented fashion. The services exposed belong to the domain of user authentication, survey repository access (both for publication or analysis purposes), campaign creation and so on.

A large part of the design e®ort was devoted to the de¯nition of a deployment system capable to deal with a wide array of di®erent media channels. The goal has been reached by providing a plugin-based multichannel engine; di®erent plugin types are available for the di®erent tasks needed to reach true independence from the publication media. We experimented with plugins for web, email, digital TV set-top boxes and mobile phones. Specialized plugins are built to interoperate with media channels by exchanging demographic variables, such as the age or sex of the respondents.

eGif stores all its data in XML ¯les: the role of XML is not limited to the surveys serialization, but also to user pro¯les, con¯gurations and all the other data are stored in hierarchical structured repositories. Flexible data structure is a key point for eGif variable management. 2.2

Question/Answers Taxonomies

A common scheme used in social research distinguishes between three kinds of variables (see Fig. 2): 1. demographic/census data, like age, sex, name, location and other ¯xed attributes of the respondent. These are standard independent variables required for classi¯cation purposes; 2. objective (i.e., linked to actions) data, like common habits or information about past events/experiences, where variability is narrower, being data related to facts. These can be used as (model-speci¯c) independent variables; 3. subjective (i.e., linked to preferences) data, like religious or political preferences, taste, interests, motivations, judgements, where variability is wider, being data related to opinions. These are commonly the (model-speci¯c) dependent variables.

This classi¯cation can ease the path towards the construction of questionnaires ontologies, as the categories are related to use domains and to variables properties. Commonly used demographic variables can be de¯ned and their relations stored in appropriate ontologies easing to questionnaire designers the task of identifying the demographic dimensions of the surveys; a similar approach can be used for non-demographic variables. Further ontology attributions can be found by using higher-level domain-related information, by connecting the variables to areas like Education, Health, Transports, Administration and so on.

Questionnaires, as experimental tools, are built as sequence of questions to be submitted to users in order to have an instance of the variables inspected; depending on the designer's choice, we can have open or closed-format answers, the latter being preferred for quantitative research; depending on the choice, a variable can be inspected in di®erent ways through di®erent sets of answers.

In eGif, descriptive statistics is used to (pre-)classify the variables:

1. nominal variables { only classi¯cation can be applied;

2. ordinal variables { they can be ordered; 3. cardinal variables { common operations can also be applied.

This variable classi¯cation brings several implications on the statistical operations that can be applied and on the graphics representations that can be used (see Fig. 3); it will also ease the de¯nition of variable-based ontologies. Operational

Classes

Property States

Operating Procedure

Admissible Operations

Central Trend

Measure ) iittvae l"sbae nominal separated classification lau tu q ("m ordinal ordered ordering iitttvane li)"sbae cardinal a r

a qu ("v discrete

counting continuous measurement = = > < + x : mode median mean

Dispersion Measures homogeneity

index interquartile difference standard deviation The service oriented interface exposed by eGif can be used in order to exploit all the functions of the system, including the uploading and retrieval of surveys. Nevertheless, for the sake of ease of use, a fully working web-based frontend has been included in the system. This frontend o®ers a modern and practical interface to perform tasks such as users creation, plugin management and system monitoring. In addition to this tasks a full-°edged survey editor has been added, that allows designers to build an arbitrary complex survey structure, including multiple choices, indented questions and di®erent choices for statistical variables. 3

Conclusions

A research applied to eGovernment through new ontology- and semantic-based technology has been conducted. The project has been developed on-top of a common web platform named \myPortal" based on open source technologies. The Inquiry Tool eGif is now available in all myPortal-served local administrations in Veneto. Documentation and source code are available at http: //grifo.dsi.unive.it/egif/.

At the moment, the results of questionnaires and polls are not yet provided in RDF/OWL format: this will be the next step, leading to meta-surveys integrating results coming from di®erent channels and campaigns.

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