Semantics in the wild

Abstract

Public service fragmentation across more than 800 digital channels of government administrations in the region of Flanders (Belgium), causes administrative burden and frustrations, as citizens expect a coherent service. Given the autonomy of the various entities, the fragmentation of information and budget constraints, it is not feasible to rewire the entire e-gov ecosystem to a single portal. Therefore, the Flemish Government is building a smart digital assistant, which supports citizens on the governmental portals, by integrating status information of various transactions. This paper outlines our ongoing research on a method for raising semantic interoperability between different information systems and actors. In this approach, semantic agreements are maintained and implemented end-to-end using the design principles of Linked Data. The lessons learned can speed-up the process in other countries that face the complexity of integrating e-government portals.

Dynamic Workflow Composition with OSLO-steps

“…We developed the novel OSLO-steps vocabulary 3 to describe conditional, hierarchical steps of data-driven workflows. OSLO-steps is aligned with the P-Plan ontology 4 , compatible with the Open Standards for Linked Organizations (OSLO) [5], and uses the and W3C's recommended SHapes Constraint Language (SHACL) 5 . Below, we explain and exemplify the concepts and their relation with user data.…”

“…The Linked Data Principles increase data interoperability [4]. Assuming that (personal) interoperable data is available for citizens, we can use this to our advantage, optimizing e-government applications to decrease the individual administrations' implementation burden.…”

Streamlining Governmental Processes by Putting Citizens in Control of Their Personal Data

“…Governments are often the custodian of authoritative personal data, such as a domicile address or medical information, which are administered by public administrations in various information systems. Government administrations in Flanders share and reuse authoritative personal data between their various back-office applications to reduce the administrative burden for citizens [3], which is an implementation of the European 'once-only principle '2 . However, public administrations are struggling to put the citizen in control.…”

“…(European Commission, 2016, Article 43). To put it differently, the relationship between a government and a citizen is commonly considered as an imbalanced relationship, since the government wields more power than their citizens 3 . Therefore, a consent given by a citizen to reuse the authoritative data managed in government information systems in the private sector, cannot be considered as freely given [8,9].…”

“…In this section, we discuss the implementation of our approach into 'Mijn Burgerprofiel' 6 (My Citizen Profile), which is a smart digital assistant for Flemish citizens [3] with an overview of all their authentic information and status information of their interactions with the government. The authentication method of My Citizen Profile depends on whether the citizen is using services that process information under GDPR.…”