No abstract

In most African countries, compared to any other part of the world, the use of information and communication technologies such as those necessary to provide e-Government services is minimal. The continent was once labeled a "technological desert." The contributing factors, among others, are lack of infrastructure, low literacy rates, low economic development, and a variety of cultural factors. Despite these obstacles, most African countries have made noticeable progress during the last couple of decades. Almost all African governments now have some presence on the Web, including fully fledged e-Government web portals, albeit in small numbers. However, the current status of e-Government services in African countries is not well documented in detail. We present results of a comprehensive analysis of 582 e-Government service websites with respect to the type of websites, the services and features available, as well as the level of development of e-Government services. We also compute e-Government indexes, produce e-Government rankings, and compare our rankings to previous ones. A clear picture that emerges from our analysis and results is that although progress has been made, there is a long way to go, to bridge not only the North-South divide when it comes to e-Government services but also among the various sub-regions. In addition, recommendations for future researchers regarding e-Government services in Africa are made.Published by Elsevier Inc.

Web 2.0 and social/collaborative tagging have altered the traditional roles of indexer and user. Traditional indexing tools and systems assume the top-down approach to indexing in which a trained professional is responsible for assigning index terms to information sources with a potential user in mind. However, in today's Web, end users create, organize, index, and search for images and other information sources through social tagging and other collaborative activities. One of the impediments to user-centered indexing had been the cost of soliciting user-generated index terms or tags. Social tagging of images such as those on Flickr, an online photo management and sharing application, presents an opportunity that can be seized by designers of indexing tools and systems to bridge the semantic gap between indexer terms and user vocabularies. Empirical research on the differences and similarities between user-generated tags and index terms based on controlled vocabularies has the potential to inform future design of image indexing tools and systems.Toward this end, a random sample of Flickr images and the tags assigned to them were content analyzed and compared with another sample of index terms from a general image collection using established frameworks for image attributes and contents. The results show that there is a fundamental difference between the types of tags and types of index terms used. In light of this, implications for research into and design of user-centered image indexing tools and systems are discussed.