Ubiquitous Participation Platform for POLicy Makings (UbiPOL)

Abstract

The purpose of UbiPOL project is to develop a ubiquitous platform that allows citizens be involved in Policy Making Processes (PMPs) regardless of their current locations and time. However, literature highlights one of the foremost reasons that make citizens de-motivated in engaging themselves in policy making—the ignorance of germane policies and PMPs within the government organisations. It is highly suggested that while more citizens find connections between their everyday life activities and pertinent government policies, the more they become pro-active or motivated to be involved in PMPs. For this reason, UbiPOL aims to provide ‘context aware knowledge’ provision with regards to policy making, i.e. through UbiPOL enabling citizens in identifying any relevant policies along with other citizens’ opinion ‘whenever they want’ ‘wherever they are’ according to their everyday life pattern. As a result of this platform, citizens are anticipated to be more acquainted with the newest relevant policies and PMPs for their participation during their routine life activities. Moreover, this platform is also anticipated to provide policy tracking functionality through a ‘workflow engine’ and ‘opinion tag’ concept to improve the transparency of PMPs. As a final point, the platform intends to facilitate policy makers to collect citizen opinions more efficiently as the opinions are collected as soon as they are created in the middle of citizen’s everyday life. UbiPOL provides security and identity management facility to ensure only authorised citizens can have access to relevant policies according to their roles in PMPs. The delivery of the opinion and policy data over the wireless network is secure as the platform use leading edge encryption algorithm in its communication kernels. UbiPOL is a scalable platform ensuring at least 100,000 citizens can use the system at the same time (e.g., for e-Voting applications) through its well proven automatic load balancing mechanisms. The privacy ensuring opinion mining engine prevents unwanted revealing of citizen identities and the mining engine prevents any unrelated commercial advertisements are included in the opinion base to minimise the misuse of the system.

35 th Bled eConference Digital Restructuring and Human (Re)action

“…Even if eParticipation in general is an area that has already been extensively researched (Medaglia, 2012;Saebø et al, 2008;Susha & Grönlund, 2012), digital participation platforms are still a largely unexplored subject of research. Initial research results can P. Abel, R. Schlimbach, V. Glimmann, J. Schwarz, M. Simon & S. Robra-Bissantz: Designing Urban Participation Platforms -Model for Goal-oriented Classification of Participation Mechanisms be found in the field of political platforms (Irani et al, 2012) and in the context of urban design Gün, Demir, & Pak, 2019). It remains to question the application of these research results, the generalizability of the findings and the transfer to individual sub-areas of participation and to demand an adapted model (Panopoulou, Tambouris, & Tarabanis, 2014).…”

Ontology Supported Policy Modeling in Opinion Mining Process

“…Ubiquitous Participation Platform for Policy-making (UbiPOL) project aimed to provide a ubiquitous participation platform that allows citizens to participate in the policy making process during their everyday life through providing relevant policies and others opinions that a affect their life wherever they are located. The specific objectives of UbiPOL are to [6]:…”