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Open government data (OGD) is an e-governance practice that aims to increase public resource efficiency and improve service delivery for citizens. Saudi Arabia launched its first open data initiative in 2011, with the goal of maximizing the economic impact of open data locally. This empirical study aimed to assess the effects of the Saudi OGD initiative by conducting a literature review and monitoring the impact of Saudi state-of-the-art open data. After observation and analysis, a systematic Monitor, Analysis, Action, and Review (MAAR) approach was followed to conduct a proposed solution that addresses quality shortcomings that consequently affect open data reusability. The methodology for creating the proposed solution included selecting, formulating, and weighing the quality characteristics that define a valuable OGD. The proposed solution is a framework for assessing the OGD quality using metrics that are compatible with the Saudi Open Data Portal (od.data.gov.sa). To review this proposed quality assessment framework and test whether it achieved its predicted outcomes, the results of the proposed solution were evaluated using local data samples from the Saudi Open Data Portal.

Electronic Government (e-Government) systems constantly provide greater services to people, businesses, organisations, and societies by offering more information, opportunities, and platforms with the support of advances in information and communications technologies. This usually results in increased system complexity and sensitivity, necessitating stricter security and privacy-protection measures. The majority of the existing e-Government systems are centralised, making them vulnerable to privacy and security threats, in addition to suffering from a single point of failure. This study proposes a decentralised e-Government framework with integrated threat detection features to address the aforementioned challenges. In particular, the privacy and security of the proposed e-Government system are realised by the encryption, validation, and immutable mechanisms provided by Blockchain. The insider and external threats associated with blockchain transactions are minimised by the employment of an artificial immune system, which effectively protects the integrity of the Blockchain. The proposed e-Government system was validated and evaluated by using the framework of Ethereum Visualisations of Interactive, Blockchain, Extended Simulations (i.e. eVIBES simulator) with two publicly available datasets. The experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed framework in that it can mitigate insider and external threats in e-Government systems whilst simultaneously preserving the privacy of information.

Context. The electronic government has become a trend for transforming public management to comply with the performance of an efficient, modern state. The processes for public procurement and personnel recruitment represent an essential fraction of a country’s public spending. Objective. Maturity models are tools for assessing different management dimensions resulting in some level of organizational maturity on an ordinal scale which can show null, partial, or total progress towards the desired state. This paper presents an e-government maturity model for public procurement and personnel recruitment processes, based on a literature review to determine the current state of research in the field. Methodology. We have used a known procedural model from Becker to support the design of the proposed model. Later on, we have tested it with government buyers and personnel recruiters. Findings. These initial results show that users understand the questionnaires designed for the study, and their answers allow us to obtain deep validation. A tool with these characteristics can be handy for measuring the degree of transparency in public entities, thus reducing corruption levels in their processes. Conclusion. This proposal describes the complexity of variables that influence the transparency of a socio-technical process in public tenders. We describe five levels of transparency for software procurement through development projects. These classifications enable the maturity levels of the transparency of electronic procedures used by government agencies to be measured in different dimensions. Implications. One of the crucial challenges to increasing a government’s transparency is defining a regulatory or legal framework that regulates its processes and allows the levels of transparency or corruption to be measured in its different departments. Thus instruments and metrics play a crucial role in monitoring the expected change. With direct application in the industry, a model is an essential step for fundamental transparency in electronic governments.

Citizen science has emerged in many countries to contribute to the prompt resolution of individual field problems and has been shifted toward Information System (IS) research. In the domain of IS, a citizen report mechanism has been introduced in many local governments to understand regional problems based on the public participation. The rising of social media enforces many organizations including the local governments to utilize any information from the citizens including texts. Text mining has been utilized in various types of analyses such as sentiment analysis. However, it shows many challenges when it comes to the local context. The local context of words could cause various conflation errors that highly affect the learning task such as classification methods. This study aims to propose a context-based text processing and feed the proposed approach into a machine learning framework to classify the data of citizen reports-. The context-based text preprocessing utilized statistical- and semantic-based measurements to extract the local context and elaborate domain expertise to verify the misinterpretation for further text processing such as feature extractions. Subsequently, the n-gram language models together with the Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency schemes were performed to build the features. The result showed that the context-based text preprocessing improved the classification performance in majority classifiers in about 3% with the combinations of n-gram features.

In recent years, the spread of information and communication technology has led to the emergence of e-government, which is the electronic replacement of government services. E-government is said to be compatible with blockchain technology, which has led to various studies on the possibility. Notarization, one of the functions of the government, has particularly been examined for the potential adoption of blockchain technology. However, because the notary public must authenticate the document’s contents during the notarization process, they have been difficult to replace with smart contracts. In this study, we focus only on fixed date notarizations and propose a fully automated notarization system by combining a national eID card with Public Key Infrastructure and smart contracts. A fixed date is a notarization that allows a notary public to guarantee that a document existed, regardless of the authenticity of the document’s content. Therefore, it can be replaced by a smart contract. Specifically, our proposed system automatically authenticates the creator and the document for electronic documents signed with a national eID card and uses the transaction receipt generated when the information is stored on the blockchain as a certificate of notarization. Verification of the signed data is done inside the blockchain by smart contracts, which eliminates the need for a verification authority. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in a Japanese use case as proof of concept.

The Notarial Office(NO), working on providing various essential certificates, still relies on manual handling and requires paper materials from other government departments. That brings lots of inconvenience. The Notarial Office rejects non-local paper materials for their lower credibility in the local place and then cannot provide cross-borders services. It also easily cause sensitive information leakage as copies of paper materials have been stored. In this case, a blockchain-based system is suitable to address challenges in this scenario because of its advantages (e.g, decentralized, immutability, transparency, auditability). We implemented this system on top of the Hyperledger Fabric. Moreover, we replace manual operations with smart contracts, set extra ledgers to off-load different types of transactions and provide encryption for private information when needed. In the end, we get an expected result. That is, the modification outperformed the unmodified network in experiments.

Many governments worldwide are engaging into digital transformation initiatives to improve efficiency, effectiveness, cost, and transparency. Collaborative e-government processes offer a way to overcome the typical integration and interoperability issues of existing isolated e-government solutions. A study was conducted to help e-government modelers and architects to know current approaches to modeling collaborative e-government processes that consider integration and interoperability. The research questions are: Which kind of representations (architecture, framework, ontology, meta-model, model or process) are used to model these processes? Which concerns (cost, value, citizen, technology, organization) do they focus on? How do they address collaborative processes concepts (interoperability and collaboration)? This article describes the design, execution and results of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that gathered primary studies from well-known scientific literature databases, and organized them with a novel literature classification schema consisting of model type, model focus, collaboration scheme, and interoperability level. The initial search found 326 publications, of which duplicates removal and exclusion criteria application left only 52 for detailed analysis. Key findings are: literature for this topic proposes Frameworks and (general) Models, but not metamodels or ontologies; most addressed focus has shifted from Technology and Organization, towards Citizen; collaboration studies have shifted from Open Participation towards Data Transparency; and most work that addresses interoperability remains focused on Technical aspects with a smattering of Semantics and Organizational aspects. These findings reinforce the need for proposals that address the problem of collaborative e-government processes as something that lives at the junction of e-government, software architecture description, collaborative work, and interoperability.

The rapid spread of smart mobile technology is transforming the way how governments provide information and services to their citizens. We all are rely more on our devices, namely smartphones, laptops, or desktop to get information and a wide range of services from government websites. Such heavy usage of government websites results in an increased need for efficient and effective delivery of government services. Therefore, mobile government websites’ usability and accessibility are essential dimensions that determine the quality and accessibility of mobile e-government. The main objective of this research is to analyze the accessibility and usability aspects of selected public sector websites in Saudi Arabia. This study investigates how well the Saudi mobile e-government websites comply with usability standards and accessibility guidelines recommended in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Websites assessments were conducted using manual evaluation and complemented by different automated analysis tools. This study applies a number of evaluation techniques to assess Saudi government websites accessed from desktop or mobile devices, such as an automated website testing technique, mobile-friendliness testing, and content observation technique. Various tools have been used for site evaluation, such as GTmetrix (PageSpeed Score, YSlow Score), WAVE, Google mobile-friendly test, and Dareboost for mobile websites. The study uncovers shortcomings regarding non-compliance to international web standards recommendations. The findings revealed usability and accessibility problems that affect the performance of government websites. In order to improve these websites within these aspects, several recommendations were suggested for improving the usability and accessibility of websites in Saudi Arabia that will make sure different groups of citizens are satisfied with the website features and services provided by them.

To investigate whether and how e-government affects corruption, this study collects longitudinal data (2006-2015) from 29 Chinese provinces for empirical analysis by adopting Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) and Panel Threshold Regression (PTR) model. The results of analysis show that e-government has a restraining effect on corruption and presents a significant threshold characteristics. Specifically, the restraining effect of e-government on corruption shows a dynamic non-linear characteristic, with a trend of first rising and then declining. Besides, the restraining effect is more obvious in provinces with lower e-government level.

The recent evolution of smart cities research has initiated a holistic dialogue for the integration of past initiatives promoting e-government at European Union Level. At the same moment Future Smart Cities research, is justified as a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research domain. Within this context this research work provides insights for the integration of Economics, E-government, Information Systems, and Social Sciences. The study addresses the e-government process as one of the most important application of smart cities in our current societies. More specifically, we have examined the existence of β -convergence between EU member states in terms of e-government services, confirming the hypothesis that low performance countries record higher growth rate than developed countries. In order to move closer to the factors with high impact on e-government development, we have analyzed other variables for testing the differences between countries, in terms of education, digital skills and access to internet for controlling the hypothesis that countries initially have different development conditions and they will not probably converge to the same steady state. We found that the opportunity of using e-services, particularly e-government services, is less accessible to citizens with low overall digital skills and, as is technically normal, to those with low access to internet access. In this context, at EU level it is needed to rethink and design the e-government services in order to be adapted not only to needs of the citizens, but also to their digital skills. The main contribution of this research is two-fold: From one side provides an integrated study with emphasis on the impact of social sciences and economics research to Future Smart Cities Research and from the other side it brings forward several soft factors for the adoption of Smart Cities services in the context of government transformation and provision of ubiquitous e-services to citizens.

The recent political, economic, and social situation has given rise to question on the part of citizens regarding their own space for political participation. Social movements in the form of protests are an example of this growing need for society's participation. One thing that can expand these possibilities is technology. It is correct to affirm that the advancement of smart city and popularization of technology - more specifically, of social media - has established new opportunities to expand these virtual spaces. In line with this scenario, there are several initiatives whose objective is to develop tools that facilitate or promote citizen participation. However, there are still many issues that need to be investigated in order for the use of these tools to be effective. The objective of this work was to propose a tool that facilitates the discussion of societal problems by citizens. In the analysis of the results - obtained through an experiment with users to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool - it could be seen that, although the majority of users agreed that the discussion model and the proposed problem register can contribute to the real solution of the problem, it could also be seen that citizens still lack motivation and engagement - something that needs to be studied and improved.

Digitization and lightning expansions in digital technology have made it possible to collect data on almost anything, making it easier to quantify and integrate the collected data. The diffusion of IoT technologies has fostered the government-citizen relationship, creating a powerful argument for public value creation. Thus, IoT service orchestration can influence the development and trustworthiness of intention to use behavior. This study aims to explore the success factors of IoT service orchestration to create public value in smart government by integrating ISST and cognitive trust into TAM. Based on the literature and research outcomes, a comprehensive IoT-based Public Value Model (IoT-PVM) was developed to provide a complete picture of system success. This conceptual model is validated analytically through a quantitative method using PLS-SEM. The findings highlight that IoT service orchestration can enable the government to deliver public value, just as public trust has a parental role in building citizens' positive behavior intentions towards the use of IoT in e-government services. The model explains 71.8% variance in perceived ease of use, 59.7% in public trust, 62.6% in perceived usefulness, 61.9% in usage behavior intention, and 69.8% of public value creation. The study results and discussion offer valuable insights regarding the public value creation of IoT-empowered public services and also contribute to academic research literature and are practically helpful for policymakers for designing IoT service orchestration and making government smarter, more transparent, and responsive to citizens.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently advanced the state-of-art results in an ever-growing number of domains. However, it still faces several challenges that hinder its deployment in the e-government applications-both for improving the e-government systems and the e-government-citizens interactions. In this paper, we address the challenges of e-government systems and propose a framework that utilizes AI technologies to automate and facilitate e-government services. Specifically, we first outline a framework for the management of e-government information resources. Second, we develop a set of deep learning models that aim to automate several e-government services. Third, we propose a smart e-government platform architecture that supports the development and implementation of AI applications of e-government. Our overarching goal is to utilize trustworthy AI techniques in advancing the current state of e-government services in order to minimize processing times, reduce costs, and improve citizens' satisfaction.

The means through which governments deliver services and the way they operate may be considerably enhanced through cloud computing. It can help to address e-government implementation challenges and revolutionize e-government systems in terms of cost savings and the professional use of resources. The aim of this paper is to analyze the importance and performance of the factors that influence the fitness of cloud computing fore-government implementation. This paper integrates the task technology fit model with the diffusion of innovation theory to address this issue. Yemeni public institutions were identified as sources for data collection and 292 information technology employees participated as sample respondents for a structured questionnaire. Security, compatibility, relative advantage, and tasks were the variables found to affect the fitness of cloud computing for e-government activities. However, no impact was seen from the standpoints of trialability and complexity of the technology. In terms of assessing the fitness of cloud computing for e-government services, a greater understanding among policy formulators was sought through the importance-performance matrix analysis (IPMA). The results of IPMA can help identifying areas for strategic focus to assess cloud computing as an alternative technology to implement e-government services.

With the continuous development of distributed ledger and blockchain technologies, new use cases apart from cryptocurrencies have come into the spotlight. In this article, we evaluate whether an e-government service could be a suitable candidate for a blockchain transformation. We selected as a reference test system an existing cross-border e-government service that is used for supporting goods exchanges across the European Union. We show how such an indicative paradigm can be transformed into a blockchain system. In order to do so, we deployed it in an emulated architecture for evaluating its performance under various realistic conditions. Our results show that the deployed system is able to meet the requirements, both in terms of throughput and transaction speed. Moreover, it shows clear advantages in terms of usability and synchronization between all entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 3-D Shenzhen City Web platform based on the Web virtual reality geographical information system is presented. A 3-D global browser is employed to load multiple types of demand data from the city, such as 3-D building model data, residents' information, and real-time and historical traffic data. Using these data, a 3-D analysis and visualization of the city's information are conducted on a platform. The amount of information that can be visualized with this platform is very large, and the GIS-based navigational scheme enables great flexibility to access different available data sources. All the presented functions of the platform are extracted from the customers' practical demand. The system design considers some existing geographic human-computer interaction research results.

Sharing data via information and communications technology is a fundamental goal of e-government, but data fusion and data mining could reveal sensitive personal information. A proposed cryptographic protocol guarantees citizens' privacy through data aggregation and fosters e-participation in a scalable and interoperable way. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/xTcHNhC3cHw is an audio recording of Computer magazine Editor in Chief Sumi Helal interviewing Constantinos Patsakis about a cryptographic protocol that guarantees citizens privacy through data aggregation and fosters e-participation in a scalable and interoperable way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]