Χαραλαμπίδης Γιάννης

Περίληψη:
Value creation and innovation by a range of stakeholders, including citizens, analysts, journalists, non-profit entities, etc. are the hallmarks of Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives. At the same time, availability and interoperability of datasets are determined as two of the most important factors for value creation. In parallel, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are meant to be realized to attain quality of life through the development of initiatives based on the value creation and innovation provided by the afore-identified stakeholders. Thus, the information provided from the public sector OGD regarding SDGs would help the monitoring of current and the identification of next actions and initiatives. The examination of SDG datasets availability and the assessment of their interoperability would provide valuable insights regarding the extent to which the data are of high-value. In that vein, the availability and the interoperability dimensions of the OGD provisioned via the national OGD portals of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) constituents; viz., Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, are studied based on a semi-automatic methodological approach. In this light, the present study seeks to answer the following research question: “To what extent are the national OGD portals of the GCC region catering for the interoperability dimensions, more specifically, the semantic interoperability, to facilitate value creation and innovation?” To drive home the arguments, semantic interoperability dimensions were investigated via the cosine similarity calculations in Python to understand the extent to which the availability of OGD via the national OGD portals facilitates their interoperability. Findings show that the value creation and innovation initiatives to realize the SDGs’ attainment is dependent upon both the availability and the extent of interoperability for all SDGs. GCC countries present different levels of both factors. This is suggestive of the mismatch of the OGD provision and their attributes which results in low interoperability. Findings from the study are indicators that the GCC countries should develop different strategies regarding the availability and the interoperability of SDG-related OGD in order to stimulate innovation and value creation.

Περίληψη:
The generation of social and economic value from the vast quantities of data opened by governments has been much lower than the initial expectations. It requires the development and cooperation of ecosystems composed of various public, private, and non-profit actors. For the development of these ecosystems in order to generate social and economic value from open government data (OGD), necessary conditions are, on the one hand, the availability of a critical mass of OGD and, on the other hand, the existence of some level of homogeneity and interoperability among the numerous portals and websites providing them, which enables their combined exploitation that increases the potential for value generation from them. This paper focuses on the latter and develops the Technical, Semantic, Legal, and Organizational (TSLO) Interoperability Framework, a conceptual tool designed to provide a structured multi-dimensional assessment of the interoperability capabilities of OGD infrastructures, based on the ‘European Interoperability Framework’ (EIF) as well as relevant OGD literature. This TSLO framework has been applied for the assessment of the above main dimensions of the interoperability of the OGD infrastructures of the Greek local government administration institutions of all three layers (decentralized, regional, and municipal). After this application, nine interviews were conducted with nine municipalities that do not provide OGD in order to gain a deeper understanding of the reasons for this. The results of this first application of TSLO revealed not only the low participation of Greek local government institutions, and especially of the municipalities, in the OGD movement (with only 8 out of the 332 municipalities providing open data on their portals or websites), but also the inconsistent implementation of this, especially with respect to the use of semantic technologies as well as the legal frameworks under which the open data are provided, resulting in low levels of interoperability among them. The interviews that were conducted revealed that the opening of some of their data was not a priority for them, as their limited resources had to be used for the development of internal information systems for increasing their efficiency, as well as e-services for the citizens, enabling them to conduct transactions electronically (through the Internet). Our study makes a contribution to the still limited body of research on OGD ecosystems, examining an important precondition for their development that has not been researched in previous literature; also, our framework can contribute to the increase of interoperability of OGD infrastructures and therefore to the increase of social and economic value generations for the OGD they provide

Περίληψη:
Abstract— Previous political sciences research has revealed that democracy (democratic institutions, consultations with citizens) and technocracy (specialized knowledge of experts) are the main foundations for the development of effective and socially acceptable public policies, and that there should be balance as well as interaction and exchange of knowledge between them. However, there is a lack of e-participation platforms supporting this required ‘duality’: the collection of policy related information, knowledge and opinions from both citizens and experts, as well as the communication and interaction between them. This paper contributes to filling this critical research gap. It describes the development of an innovative e-participation platform, which supports on one hand structured consultation and argumentation between experts/technocrats concerning important social problems and public policies for addressing them, and on the other hand the collection and interrelation of relevant citizensgenerated textual content from numerous external social media. This platform enables the meaningful combination of technocrats’ expertise with public opinion, allowing the technocrats participating in policy related structured consultations to retrieve, understand and get insights from citizens’ perceptions. Evaluation results show that users appreciate the potential of exploiting the synergy of machine and human reasoning enabled by the proposed platform through a combination of data mining and structured consultation/argumentation - collaborative decision-making services.

Περίληψη:
The application of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2016/679/EC, the Regulation for the protection of personal data, is a challenge and must be seen as an opportunity for the redesign of the systems that are being used for the processing of personal data. An unexplored area where systems are being used to collect and process personal data are the e-Participation environment. The latest generations of such environments refer to sociotechnical systems based on the exploitation of the increasing use of Social Media, by using them as valuable tools, able to provide answers and decision support in public policy formulation. This work explores the privacy requirements that GDPR imposes in such environments, contributing to the identification of challenges that e-Participation approaches have to deal with, with regard to privacy protection.

Περίληψη:
One of the most promising developments comes with the use of innovative technologies and thus with the availability of novel services. The combination of text mining with legal elements may contribute to the development of many innovative legal IS. Moreover, in the case of public administrations and governments, the distribution, availability, and access towards legal information are essential and urgent. On the other hand, legal data and law texts are a potential open Government data category in order for innovation to be achieved, regarding the development of new, better, and more cost-effective services for citizens. Those data need to be available 24/7 basis and compliant towards a standard. Yet, there exist some severe issues at the moment regarding this access. This, in turn, makes the use of automated crawling and analysis more than difficult. This paper describes the "Peri Nomou" system: an innovative legal information system for Greek laws utilising text mining techniques to indexing legal documents, identifying correlations and dividing legal documents into their articles.

Περίληψη:
Driven by ‘success stories’ reported by private sector firms, government agencies have also started adopting various Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in diverse domains (e.g. health, taxation, and education); however, extensive research is required in order to exploit the full potential of AI in the public sector, and leverage various AI technologies to address important problems/needs. This paper makes a contribution in this direction: it presents a novel approach, as well as the architecture of an ICT platform supporting it, for the advanced exploitation of a specific AI technology, namely chatbots, in the public sector in order to address a crucial issue: the improvement of communication between government and citizens (which has for long time been problematic). The proposed approach builds on natural language processing, machine learning and data mining technologies, and leverages existing data of various forms (such as documents containing legislation and directives, structured data from government agencies' operational systems, social media data, etc.), in order to develop a new digital channel of communication between citizens and government. Making use of appropriately structured and semantically annotated data, this channel enables ‘richer’ and more expressive interaction of citizens with government in everyday language, facilitating and advancing both information seeking and conducting of transactions. Compared to existing digital channels, the proposed approach is appropriate for a wider range of citizens' interactions, with higher levels of complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty. In close co-operation with three Greek government agencies (the Ministry of Finance, a social security organization, and a big local government organization), this approach has been validated through a series of application scenarios.

Περίληψη:
Open government data (OGD) initiatives have proliferated over the last years in many countries all over the world as the result of a long-standing movement towards the ‘open government’ paradigm. These initiatives have been launched and maintained by a variety of government organizations with different strategies and technical capacities, and under different social, political and legal conditions. As a result, the OGD sources (defined as various types of portals enabling access to government datasets by the public through the Internet and providing various capabilities/functionalities in this direction) developed through these initiatives demonstrate a great diversity in both content, functionality and technology. However, limited research has been conducted on these OGD sources for understanding better their main characteristics from various perspectives, and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by presenting an analysis of the thematic, functional, semantic and technological characteristics of OGD sources in Greece. Sixty OGD sources have analysed from these perspectives and statistical analysis of relevant characteristics have been performed. Interesting conclusions have been drawn from this analysis, and based on them recommendations have been formulated for government policy makers, in order to enhance OGD provision in Greece, and increase the social and economic value that can be generated from them.

Περίληψη:
Motivated by the multiple ‘success stories’ of the open innovation paradigm in the private sector, and also by the increasing complexity of social problems and needs, the public sector has started moving in this direction,attempting to exploit the extensive knowledge of citizens for the development of innovations in public policies and services. As the direct transfer of open innovation methods from the private sector to the public sector is not possible, it is necessary to develop effective ‘citizen-sourcing’ methods, which address the specific needs of the public sector, and then analyze and evaluate them from various political and management sciences' perspectives. This paper makes a two-fold contribution in this direction: i) It evaluates a novel method of monitoring relevant social media (e.g. political blogs, news websites, and also Facebook, Twitter, etc. accounts) by government agencies, by retrieving and making advanced processing of their content, and extracting from it external knowledge about specific domains of government activity or public policies of interest, in order to promote and support open innovation; ii) For this purpose it develops a multi-perspective evaluation framework, based on sound theoretical foundations from the political and management sciences, which can be of wide applicability; it includes three evaluation perspectives: a political perspective (based on the ‘wicked’ social problems theory from the political sciences), a crowd-sourcing perspective (based on previous management sciences research on crowdsourcing) and a diffusion perspective (based on Roger's diffusion of innovation theory from management sciences). The above evaluation provides interesting insights into this novel method of promoting and supporting open innovation in the public sector through social media monitoring, revealing its capabilities and strengths, and at the same time its problems and weaknesses as well, and also ways/interventions for addressing the latter.

Περίληψη:
Business incubation aims at stimulating entrepreneurship and nurturing ideas to transform them to viable ventures and drive economic growth. Since the emergence of the concept, some decades ago, the incubation process and its underlying services have been evolved, while incubators around the world are continuously increasing. These incubators vary according to their type, operation model and specialisation. The aim of this paper is to define a comprehensive framework that serves as a basis for the categorisation of all services that can be part of the incubation process. The proposed taxonomy, comprised of 8 core service categories, has then been applied on ten University associated incubators from the Mediterranean region, since the various socio-economic conditions encountered there, cause particular interest in the prospect of entrepreneurship. An indicative sample of five European, Middle East and North African countries (i.e. Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt) has been defined, with the Mediterranean Sea uniting them and shaping their unique characteristics. We selected to focus on the University incubators from this area as they bridge the innovation potential of research and academia communities with the real business world and can underpin a sustainable and robust entrepreneurship model. By mapping the sample with the categories of services they offer, we intended to find out how they differentiate from other types of incubators. It was concluded that University incubators fall shorter only in the provision of administrative services in relation to the typical incubators. However, the purpose of this framework is to be further used as a tool both for policy makers’ and support their resource allocation decisions and help the internal stakeholders of incubator activities identify and adopt best practice models.

Περίληψη:
Motivated by the multiple ‘success stories’ of the open innovation paradigmin the private sector, and also by the\r\nincreasing complexity of social problems and needs, the public sector has started moving in this direction,\r\nattempting to exploit the extensive knowledge of citizens for the development of innovations in public policies\r\nand services. As the direct transfer of open innovation methods from the private sector to the public sector is\r\nnot possible, it is necessary to develop effective ‘citizen-sourcing’ methods, which address the specific needs of\r\nthe public sector, and then analyze and evaluate themfromvarious political and management sciences\' perspectives.\r\nThis papermakes a two-fold contribution in this direction: i) It evaluates a novel method of monitoring relevant\r\nsocial media (e.g. political blogs, news websites, and also Facebook, Twitter, etc. accounts) by government\r\nagencies, by retrieving and making advanced processing of their content, and extracting from it external knowledge\r\nabout specific domains of government activity or public policies of interest, in order to promote and support\r\nopen innovation; ii) For this purpose it develops amulti-perspective evaluation framework, based on sound theoretical\r\nfoundations from the political and management sciences, which can be of wide applicability; it includes\r\nthree evaluation perspectives: a political perspective (based on the ‘wicked’ social problems theory fromthe political\r\nsciences), a crowd-sourcing perspective (based on previous management sciences research on crowdsourcing)\r\nand a diffusion perspective (based on Roger\'s diffusion of innovation theory from management sciences).\r\nThe above evaluation provides interesting insights into this novel method of promoting and supporting\r\nopen innovation in the public sector through social media monitoring, revealing its capabilities and strengths,\r\nand at the same time its problems andweaknesses aswell, and also ways/interventions for addressing the latter.

Περίληψη:
Government agencies all over the world are making big investments for developing information systems that open important data they possess to the society, in order to be used for scientific, commercial and political purposes. It is important to understand what value they create and how, and at the same time – since this is a relatively new type of information systems (IS) – to identify the main improvements they require. This paper contributes in this direction by presenting a methodology for determining the value generation mechanism of open government data (OGD) systems and also priorities for their improvement. It is based on the estimation of a ‗value model‘ of the OGD system under evaluation from users‘ ratings, which consists of several value dimensions and their corresponding value measures, organized in three ‗value layers‘, and also the relations among them. The proposed methodology has been successfully applied to an OGD system developed as part of the European project ENGAGE (‗An Infrastructure for Open, Linked Governmental Data Provision towards Research Communities and Citizens‘), and provided interesting insights and improvement priorities. This first application provides evidence that our methodology can be a useful decision support tool for important ODG systems investment, management and improvement decisions.

Περίληψη:
The opening of government data, in order to have both social and economic value generated from them, has attracted the attention and interest of both researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, such as information systems, management sciences, political and social sciences and law. Despite the rapid growth of this multidisciplinary research domain, which has led to the emergence and continuous evolution of technologies and management approaches for open government data (OGD), a detailed analysis of the specific areas and topics of this research is still missing. In this paper, a detailed taxonomy of research areas and corresponding research topics of the OGD domain is presented: it includes 4 main research areas (ODG management & policies, infrastructures, interoperability and usage & value), which are further analysed into 35 research topics. An important advantage of this taxonomy, beyond its high level of detail, is that it has been developed through extraction and combination of relevant knowledge from three different kinds of sources: important relevant government policy documents, research literature and experts. For each of these 35 research topics we identified, its research literature has been summarized and main research objectives and directions have been highlighted. Based on the above taxonomy, an extension of the existing in the literature OGD lifecycle has been proposed; also, under-researched topics that require further research have been identified. Our OGD research taxonomy extends and elaborates previous research taxonomies for the ‘ICT-enabled Governance’ and ‘Policy Making 2.0’ domains, which have been developed in the European projects CROSSROAD and CROSSOVER.

Περίληψη:
One essential characteristic of open data ecosystems is their development through feedback loops, discussions and dynamic data suppliers - user interactions. These user-centric features communicate the users’ needs to the open data community, as well to the public sector organizations responsible for data publication. Addressing these needs by the corresponding public sector organizations, or even by utilising the power of the community as ENGAGE supports, can significantly promote and accelerate innovation. However, such elements appear barely to be part of existing open data practices in the public sector. A survey we conducted has shown that professional open data users find the feedback and discussion on open data infrastructures from their users to their providers as highly useful and important, but they state that they do not know at least one open data infrastructure that provides various types of discussion, and feedback mechanisms. In this paper we describe and discuss an open data platform, which contributes to filling this gap and also present a usage scenario of it, explaining the sequence of using its functionality. The discussed open data infrastructure combines functionalities that aim to close the feedback loop and to return information to public authorities that can be useful for better government data opening and publication, as well as establishing communication channels between all stakeholders. This may effectively lead to the stimulation and facilitation of value generation from open data, as such functionality positions the user at the centre of the open data publication process.

Περίληψη:
Purpose – This paper aims to develop and evaluate, in “real-life” pilot applications, a framework for advanced social media exploitation by government agencies in their policy-making processes to promote public participation and conduct crowdsourcing. Design/methodology/approach – This framework has been developed through cooperation with public sector employees experienced in public policy-making, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques: semi-structured focus group discussions, scenarios development and questionnaire surveys. The evaluation of the framework has been conducted through semi-structured focus group discussions with public sector employees involved in the pilot applications. Findings – A framework has been developed for advanced social media exploitation by government agencies, which is based on the automated posting of policy-related content to multiple social media, and then retrieval and processing of citizens’ interactions with it (e.g. views, likes, comments and retweets), using the application programming interfaces (API) of these social media. Furthermore, a supporting information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure and an application process model for it were developed. Its evaluation, based on “real-life” pilot applications, leads to useful insights concerning its capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. Research limitations/implications – The proposed framework has been evaluated in a small number of pilot applications, so further evaluation of it is required, in various types of government agencies and for different kinds of policy consultations. Practical/Implications – The above framework enables government agencies to communicate with wider and more heterogeneous audiences in a short time and at a low cost, increase public participation in their policy-making processes, collect useful knowledge, ideas and opinions from citizens and, finally, design better, more socially rooted, balanced and realistic policies. Originality/value – This research contributes to the development of knowledge concerning advanced practices for effective social media exploitation in government (which is currently limited, despite the considerable relevant knowledge developed in this area for the private sector), by developing and evaluating a framework for advanced and highly automated exploitation of multiple social media by government agencies. Furthermore, an evaluation methodology for such practices has been developed, which is based on sound theoretical foundations.

Περίληψη:
Social innovation requires extensive networking, communication, and collaboration among various social actors. This article presents an approach to fostering and supporting social innovation through the combined exploitation of multiple social media. Furthermore, a methodology is developed for evaluating this approach, based on sound theoretical foundations: The wicked problems theory and the diffusion of innovation theory. This methodology is used for evaluating three pilot applications of this approach, organized in cooperation with members of the European Parliament.

Περίληψη:
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to develop a novel approach to e-participation, which is based on “passive crowdsourcing” by government agencies, exploiting the extensive political content continuously created in numerous Web 2.0 social media (e.g. political blogs and microblogs, news sharing sites and online forums) by citizens without government stimulation, to understand better their needs, issues, opinions, proposals and arguments concerning a particular domain of government activity or public policy. Design/methodology/approach – This approach is developed and elaborated through cooperation with potential users experienced in the design of public policies from three countries (Austria, Greece and the UK), using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques: co-operative development of application scenarios, questionnaire surveys, focus groups and workshops and, finally, in-depth interviews. Findings – A process model for the application of the proposed passive crowdsourcing approach has been developed, which is quite different from the one of the usual active crowdsourcing. Based on it, the functional architecture of the required supporting information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure has been formulated, and then its technological architecture has been designed, addressing the conflicting requirements: low response time and, at the same time, provision of sufficiently “fresh” content for policymakers. Practical implications – Taking into account that traditionally government agencies monitor what the press writes about them, our research provides a basis for extending efficiently these activities in the new electronic media world (e.g. newspapers websites, blogs and microblogs, online forums, etc.) to understand better the needs, issues, opinions, arguments and proposals raised by the society with respect to important domains of government activity and public policies. Social implications – The proposed approach provides a new channel for the “voice” of the society to be directly communicated to the government so that the latter can design its policies and activities based on the social needs and realities and not on oversimplified models and stereotypes. Originality/value – Our paper proposes a novel approach to e-participation, which exploits the Web 2.0 social media – but in a quite different way from previous approaches – for conducting “passive crowdsourcing”, and elaborates it: it develops an application process model for it and also an ICT infrastructure for supporting it, which are quite different from the ones of the existing “active crowdsourcing” approaches.

Περίληψη:
Government agencies are gradually moving from simpler towards more sophisticated and complex practices of social media use, which are characterized by important innovations at the technological, political and organizational level. This paper intends to provide two contributions to the current discourse about such advanced approaches to social media exploitation. The first is of practical nature and has to do with assessing the strengths and the potential and at the same time the weaknesses and the challenges, of a centralized cross-platform approach to social media exploitation by government agencies in their policy making processes. The second contribution is of theoretical nature and consists in the development of a multi-dimensional framework for an integrated evaluation of such advanced practices of social media exploitation in public policy making processes from technological, political and organizational perspectives, which is based on theoretical foundations from various different domains. The proposed framework is applied for the evaluation of a pilot consultation campaign conducted in Italy using multiple social media based on the above approach, concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program, in the context of an international research project named PADGETS (‘Policy Gadgets Mashing Underlying Group Knowledge in Web 2.0 Media’), and leading to interesting insights.

Περίληψη:
It is widely believed that the establishment of interoperability of the information systems (IS) of a firm with those of its collaborators (e.g. customers, suppliers, business partners) can generate significant business value. However, this has been empirically investigated only to a very limited extent. This paper contributes to filling this research gap by presenting an empirical study of the effect of adopting the three main types of IS interoperability standards (industry-specific, proprietary and XML-based ones) on the four important perspectives/dimensions of business performance proposed by the Balanced Scorecard approach (financial, customers, internal business processes, learning and innovation). Our study is based on a large dataset from 14065 European firms (from 25 countries and 10 sectors) collected through the e-Business Watch Survey of the European Commission. It is concluded that all three examined types of IS interoperability standards increase considerably the positive impact of firm’s information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure on the above four perspectives/dimensions of business performance; however, their effects differ significantly. The adoption of industry-specific interoperability standards has the highest positive effects, while XML-based and proprietary standards have similar lower positive effects. Furthermore, these effects of the industry-specific IS interoperability standards are quite strong, as they are of similar magnitude with the corresponding effects of the degree of development of firm’s intra-organizational/internal IS, and of higher magnitude than the corresponding effects of the degree of development of firm’s e-sales IS. These conclusions provide valuable empirical evidence of the multidimensional business value generated by IS interoperability, its big magnitude and its strong dependence on the type of IS interoperability standards adopted.

Περίληψη:
There has been significant research and practice oriented towards the rational exploitation of the rapidly expanding social media by private sector enterprises. However, much less research and practice have been done in this area with respect to the public sector. This paper explores advanced forms of rational exploitation of social media in government policy-making processes, aiming to strengthen and widen participation of and interaction with citizens, concerning new or existing public policies and services. The proposed approach is based on a platform, which can publish policy-related content and micro-applications towards multiple social media simultaneously, also collect data on citizens’ interaction with them (e.g. views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.), using the application programming interfaces (API) of the targeted social media. The information gathered through social media will then undergo various types of advanced processing (e.g. access analytics, opinion mining, simulation modelling) in order to extract synthetic conclusions from them and provide substantial support to government policy-makers, always respecting data privacy guidelines. In addition, an extension of this ‘stimulated/ guided crowdsourcing’ approach is presented, based on ‘nonmoderated crowdsourcing’ by government agencies. The above approaches allow a more advanced and rational exploitation of social media by government for supporting evidence-based decision and policy making.

Περίληψη:
This paper describes the research concerning the systematic, intensive and centralized web 2.0 social media exploitation by government agencies for widening and enhancing participative public policy making, which is conducted as part of the research project PADGETS (‘Policy Gadgets Mashing Underlying Group Knowledge in Web 2.0 Media’) partially funded by the European Commission. The proposed approach is based on a central system, which publishes various types of policy-related content (e.g., short text long text, images, video) and micro-applications in multiple social media simultaneously, and also collects from them and processes data on citizens’ interactions (e.g., views, comments, ratings, votes, etc.). This poses difficult research questions and challenges, both technical (analysis and exploitation of social media application programming interfaces (APIs), appropriate design of the central system architecture, processing and integrating the large amounts of collected citizens’ interaction data) and also non-technical (investigation of the value generated by this approach, preconditions for its effective application by government agencies), which are researched in the project. Some first findings on them are presented and discussed.

Περίληψη:
This paper presents an empirical study of the risk factors of large governmental information systems (IS) projects. For this purpose the Official Decisions of the Greek Government Information Technology Projects Advisory Committee (ITPAC) concerning 80 large IS projects have been analyzed and interviews with its members have been conducted. From this analysis 21 risk factors have been identified, and further elaborated and associated with inherent particular characteristics of the public sector, extending existing approaches in the literature. A categorization of them with respect to origin revealed that they are associated with the management, the processes, and the content of these projects. Results show that behind the identified risk factors there are political factors, which are associated with intra-organizational and inter-organizational politics and competition, and can be regarded as ‘second level’ risk sources. The risk factors identified in this study are compared with the ones found by similar studies conducted in Hong Kong, Finland, and the United States, and also with the ones mentioned by OECD reports. Similarities and differences are discussed.

Περίληψη:
E-participation is a relatively new approach, so it is necessary to evaluate it carefully so that we can improve e-participation practice. This paper describes a framework that has been developed for evaluating a number of e-participation pilots in the legislation development processes of parliaments. The framework is based on the objectives and basic characteristics of ‘traditional’ public participation, e-participation and the legislation development processes, as well as the existing frameworks for the evaluation of Information Systems (ISs), e-participation and traditional public participation. It includes three perspectives: process, system and outcomes evaluation; each of them is analysed into a number of evaluation criteria.

Περίληψη:
During the last few years, research and practice worldwide have shown that enhancing interoperability among organizations, systems or software applications is a multi-disciplinary issue of critical importance, touching upon processes, data and technical standardization. Fortunately, researchers and practitioners have started to realize the impact of interoperability in achieving true one-stop service provision for citizens and businesses, in fostering collaboration between enterprises or in minimizing the needed investment for maintaining complex systems. Current research results show that there exist common practices to be shared among public sector organisations and private sector enterprises, in attempts related with aligning organisation and processes, tackling semantic and technical shortcomings, building relevant architectures and finally achieving the legal interconnection and co-operation of systems. The identification of such common areas between eBusiness and eGovernment can then lead to a joint exploration, enhance reuse of the real paradigms and real exploitation of results by enterprises and administrations. Also future interoperability research directions, as emerging from relevant strategies and research roadmaps of important stakeholders, and also from relevant research workshops, are outlined. Furthermore, it is argued that interoperability research should be extended towards ‘knowledge interoperability’ as well, and deal with the development of methods and architectures enabling the exchange of knowledge among co-operating organizations.