Publications

This paper discovers the research themes of institutes’ research work using analysis of scientific literature. The proposed methodology creates research profiles of the institutes  y aggregating citations of highly cited works and then clusters the documents that cite those works to determine the impact, in that area of the research. Research themes are identified by clustering author defied keywords. The approach is demonstrated on several Japanese institutes in the field of Nanotechnology. The analytical techniques discussed in this paper can discover niche focus of institutes’ research. This information can be very useful for the research administrators, funding agencies, and institutes leaders to understand the research structure of institutes in order to support resource allocation decisions.

 Social media is one of Web 2.0 tools that governments are adopting for interacting with citizens. Through their use, citizens are able to share their views, react to issues of their concern and form opinion. However, despite the infusion of such tools in citizens’ lives, governments face several challenges to fully benefit from their adoption. One technical challenge is the lack of automated intelligent tools for processing citizens’ opinion in government social media. This paper presents a project - DECIDE 2.0, focusing on the provision of a framework, including a software tool, for overcoming such challenge.  The aim of the project is to combine context-based search and argumentation in a collaborative framework for managing (retrieving and publishing) service- and policy-related information in government-use social media tools. For developing the framework, the research work is underpinned by artificial intelligence and software engineering techniques. The developed framework will be applied for the qualitative and quantitative assessment of citizens’ opinion on a specific policy issue. A pilot test of the framework is planned to be carried out in collaboration with a local government. The project is executed by two universities in Argentina and Mexico.

 The ability of governments to develop and effectively manage knowledge assets is now considered a critical capability for electronic governance. Good Knowledge Management (KM) practices in government are usually driven by clear vision and objectives which are part of KM strategies. Developing such government-wide KM vision and objectives requires inputs from individual government agencies and other stakeholders on their needs and priorities (so-called demand-side). However, while there is significant literature on models and tools for measuring KM capabilities (so-called supply-side) and impact of KM practices, very few scholarly work is available on assessment of specific KM needs of individual agencies or other stakeholders. This paper presents an Integrated KM Assessment Model which measures both the demand and supply sides of KM in government. The model was used for assessing the KM needs and capabilities of government agencies in Macao SAR as part of a study for determining the readiness of government as a whole for KM. Results from our study show that innovation in government operations is considered by agencies to be the most KM demanded area, while KM capability for task-specific activities was found to be the weakest KM capability area. In addition, document-intensive and high-volume transaction agencies, such as educational, financial, electronic data interchange agencies have relatively higher KM awareness and capability.

Two relevant recent developments in the area of science and technology (S&T) and related policy-making motivate this article: First, bibliometric data on a specific research area’s performance becomes an increasingly relevant source for S&T policy-making and evaluation. This trend is embedded in wider discussions on evidence-based policy-making. Secondly, the scientific output of Southeast Asian countries is rising, as is the number of international research collaborations with the second area of our interest: Europe. Against this background, we employ basic bibliometric methodology in order to draw a picture of Southeast Asian research strengths as well the amount and focus of S&T cooperation between the countries in Southeast Asia and the European Union. The results can prove useful for an interested public as well as for the scientific community and science, technology and innovation policy-making.

Recognized as a critical factor for the whole-of-government capability, many governments have initiated Enterprise Architectures (EA) programs. However, while there is no shortage of EA frameworks, the understanding of what makes EA practice effective in a government enterprise is limited. This paper presents the results of empirical research aimed at determining the key factors for raising the maturity of the Government Enterprise Architecture (GEA) practice, part of an effort to guide policy-makers of a particular government on how to develop GEA capabilities in its agencies. By analyzing the data from a survey involving 33 agencies, the relative importance of the factors like top management commitment, participation of business units and effectiveness of project governance structures on the maturity of the GEA practice was determined. The results confirm that management commitment and participation of business units are critical factors, which in turn are influenced by the perceived usefulness of the GEA efforts.

Responding to the issues of complexity, relevance, cost and risk of Electronic Governance (EGOV), we witness a specialization of the roles responsible for EGOV development and operation, professionalization of the personnel playing such roles, and utilization of the EGOV services and information to fulfill citizen needs. In order to build competencies required by such (managerial, professional, technician and user) roles, education becomes a key success factor, and a growing variety of EGOV learning opportunities emerges. However, lacking conceptual underpinnings for EGOV education, the discovery, analysis and integration of such opportunities is difficult. To address this need, the paper develops a theoretical construct for EGOV education; applies six measures to this construct: who - learners, why - roles, what - competencies, how - programs, where - schools, and when - prerequisites; and validates it through a landscaping exercise focusing on EGOV university programs. 

Special Issue of Government Information Quarterly with selected papers submitted to the 5^th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV2010, Beijing, China, October 2010, focusing on Government Information Networks. 

Facing economic pressure, social tensions, global competition and low public confidence, governments can no longer afford to address increasingly complex and interdependent public goals alone or step back and rely on the markets. Instead, they have to work through networks of state and non-state actors to organize existing resources, knowledge and capabilities in the pursuit of public goals. The new paradigm increasingly relies on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to connect actors to the network and to build, manage and sustain relationships between them. We refer to such ICT-enabled networks as Government Information Networks. This article serves as an introduction to the current issue of Government Information Quarterly on Government Information Networks. The issue comprises twelve cases of such networks selected from the papers submitted to the 5^th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV2010, held in Beijing, China in October 2010. The article also presents a conceptual framework for public administration networks, and applies the framework to describe, analyze and compare the cases, thus relating the volume to the Public Administration literature.

Recognized as a critical factor for the whole-of-government capability, many governments have initiated Enterprise Architectures (EA) programs. However, while there is no shortage of EA frameworks, the understanding of what makes EA practice effective in a government enterprise is limited. This paper presents the results of empirical research aimed at determining the key factors for raising the maturity of the Government Enterprise Architecture (GEA) practice, part of an effort to guide policy-makers of a particular government on how to develop GEA capabilities in its agencies. By analyzing data from a survey involving 33 agencies, the relative importance of factors like top management commitment, participation of business units and effectiveness of project governance structures on the maturity of the GEA practice was determined. The results confirm that management commitment and participation of business units are critical factors, which in turn are influenced by the perceived usefulness of the GEA efforts.

Model-driven architecture (MDA) has become a main stream technology for software-intensive system design. The main engineering principle behind it is that the inherent complexity of software development can only be mastered by building, analyzing and manipulating system models. MDA also deals with system complexity by providing component-based design techniques, allowing independent component design, implementation and deployment, and then system integration and reconfiguration based on component interfaces. The model of a system in any stage is an integration of models of different viewpoints. Therefore, for a model-driven method to be applied effectively, it must provide a body of techniques and an integrated suite of tools for model construction, validation, and transformation. This requires a number of modeling notations for the specification of different concerns and viewpoints of the system. These notations should have formally defined syntaxes and a unified theory of semantics. The underlying theory of the method is needed to underpin the development of tools and correct use of tools in software development, as well as to formally verify and reason about properties of systems in mission-critical applications. The modeling notations, techniques, and tools must be designed so that they can be used seamlessly in supporting development activities and documentation of artifacts in software design processes. This article presents such a method, called the rCOS, focusing on the models of a system at different stages in a software development process, their semantic integration, and how they are constructed, analyzed, transformed, validated, and verified.

Consider a requirements model with a set of interfaces representing use cases, and a set of system sequence diagrams specifying the scenarios of the interfaces, this paper discusses how to automatically transform such a model into an inial design model by generating a protocol state machine for each interface from its sequence diagrams, and deriving a controller class as an implementation of the interface. The generated model can be severed as the starting point for the detailed object-oriented design. The contracts of the controller class ensure that the behaviour defined by the sequence diagrams is fully complied with through pre/post-conditions. The transformation takes into account the concurrency and critical area of the respective diagrams. We present the design and implementation of the transformation, which is specified using the graphical notation of QVT Relations and integrated into a CASE tool.

As a standard high-level model transformation language, QVT Relations defines a graphical notation, which provides a concise, intuitive way to specify transformations. However, QVT Relations relies only on the textual language OCL for model querying, leading to verbose and complicated OCL expressions.  To cope with the problem, we present a graphical model query facility based on the checking semantics and pattern matching of QVT Relations. The query facility borrows from QVT Relations the graphical notation. In addition we propose an approach to map the queries into XSLT to facilitate their execution. We have developed a tool for designing the queries and automatically generating the XSLT programs.

 We present a new automata-based interface model describing the
  interaction behavior of software components. Contrary to earlier
  component- or in\-terface-based approaches, the interface model we
  propose specifies all the non-blockable interaction  behaviors of a
  component with any environment. To this end, we develop an algorithm
  to compute the unblockable interaction behavior, called the
  \emph{interface model of a component}, from its execution
  model. Based on this model, we introduce composition
  operators for the components and prove important
  compositionality results, showing the conditions under which
  composition of interface models preserves unblockable sequences of
  provided services.

 In prime event structures with binary con°icts (pes-bc)3 a branching cell [1] is a subset of events closed under downward causalityand immediate con°ict relations. This means that no event outside the branching cell can be in con°ict with or enable any event inside the branching cell. It bears a strong resemblance to stubborn sets, a partial order reduction method on transition systems. A stubborn set (at a given state) is a subset of actions such that no execution consisting entirely of actions outside the stubborn set can be in con°ict with or enable actions that are inside the stubborn set.

A rigorous study of the relationship between the two ideas, however, is not straightforward due to the facts that 1) stubborn sets utilise sophis-ticated causality and con°ict relations that invalidate the stability and coherence of event structures [18], 2) without stability it becomes very di±cult to de¯ne concepts like pre¯xes and branching cells, which pre-require a clear notion of causality, and 3) it is challenging to devise a technique for identifying `proper' subsets of transitions as `events' such that the induced event-based system captures exactly the causality and con°ict information needed by stubborn sets.

A promising strategy to promote good governance is harnessing the opportunities provided by the use of mobile phones, widely accessible to most segments of the society, for delivering public information and services and for decision-making by government. This paper investigates the design and implementation of mobile governance (MGOV) strategies for development (MGOV4D). Specifically, it presents an MGOV4D strategy framework to
support mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for development (MICT4D) projects in meeting their development objectives. The paper consists of four parts. First, it
presents a framework for determining the governance and related MGOV requirements for MICT4D initiatives. Second, it applies the framework to determine the MGOV4D requirements for a concrete case study of migrant head porters – local micro-logistic service providers from Ghana, involving the use of mobile phones to meet the porters’ livelihood needs. Third, based on the identified requirements, it presents a set of MICT4D initiatives that could be developed into MGOV4D programs to address the requirements. Fourth, it synthesizes the MGOV4D strategies that can support the inclusion objectives for the head porters and similar vulnerable groups. In the conclusions, the paper discusses how these results can support policy efforts for achieving the Millennium Development Goal 1 – Poverty Alleviation, and 3 –  Gender (specifically Women Empowerment). 

 Service integration is central to joined-up government initiatives and requires information on the collaborators and the services they offer, roles of different actors, the resources required, and their goals (individual and shared). These information are largely available in unstructured forms on government portals, publications and other textural sources. This paper explores semantic text mining for extracting service-related information from such sources using Natural Language Processing techniques supported by Service-Oriented Process Ontologies. Our solution framework consists of the following steps: (1) creating domain and service-oriented process ontology, (2) extracting service-related information from textual sources based on the ontology, and finally (3) mining relationship among the services based on the extracted information in Step 2 linked with a pre-defined hierarchy of service delivery goals specifying the objective(s) to be achieved among the orchestrated services. We describe our approach to these tasks and discuss the progress of the work, our experiences and the challenges encountered so far.

The 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV2011, took place in Tallinn, Estonia from the 26th to the 28th of October 2011, under the patronage of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication of the Republic of Estonia. The conference was co-organized by: e-Governance Academy in close partnership with Enterprise Estonia, Estonia; and Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York, USA. Part of the ICEGOV conference series, ICEGOV2011 was supported by the series coordinator – UNU-IIST (United Nations University – International Institute for Software Technology) Center for Electronic Governance, Macao SAR, China. The conference took place in the framework of the Nordic IT Week and various ICEGOV2011-collocated events were organized as part of this framework on the 29th of September 2011.