Search

In this Chapter, we discuss the case of the instantiation and development of a methodology for e-Government initiatives design and planning in the specific context of Mediterranean Countries. The methodology aims to support the definition of strategy implementation roadmaps that consider the fitting of e-Government vision principles, policies and the context of intervention. Moreover, the methodology aims to provide a contribution to design science research on a societal scale, by dealing with the obstacles that Simon recognized as a “budget of obstacles or alternatively as a budget of planning requirements”, even with restraint and simplification typical of a complex decision making process. Taking these issues into account, the Chapter discusses the case of the methodology application to an information systems integration initiative of the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources in 2008-2009. The focus of the case is on problem representation and organizations in social design as challenges for information systems design on a societal scale

In this paper we discuss the main issues considered in data and information quality and several factors influencing these issues. The main goal of the paper is exploratory, aiming to identify basic or key issues characterizing information quality (IQ) research and their impact on future information quality research perspectives in a context where information is increasingly diverse and represented according to several data models. The investigation considers several relevant topics related to data and information representation, access, and usage. We conclude the paper by discussing how philosophical studies on knowledge and truth can contribute to a better understanding of some key foundational problems that emerged in our analysis

Information growth asks Public Administrations for an effective control over their information asset. Furthermore, having a global representation of the core concepts of such an asset implies to manage large set of conceptual schemas. At the state of the art, the use of repositories of conceptual schemas aims to provide a structured, global and scalable representation of the core concepts managed in complex large scale information systems. In this paperwe discuss several quality properties of repositories, analyzing them within a real, large scale experience.

PoliMaR-Web provides experts and ordinary Web users with a tool to discover suitable Web APIs among the ones published in repositories. Given a set of constraints, either soft or hard, semantic descriptions are extracted from repositories and heterogeneous sources available on the Web, and then matchmade to deliver a personalized ranked list of APIs. PoliMaR-Web performs at run time to ensure up-to-date answers

The composition of Web APIs provides a great opportunity to Web engineers that can reuse existing software components available on the Web. Finding the best API, ful lling a set of user requirements, among the many described on the Web is a key step in order to de- velop an e ective Web application; however, Web engineers have little support in solving this problem due to poor search mechanisms and to the heterogeneity of sources and descriptions. Semantic technologies and matching algorithms provide accurate methods to match user require- ments against a set of descriptions. Nonetheless, semantic descriptions of APIs are not available in practice. In this paper, we propose a method to extract information on Web APIs published in several Web sources and create semantic descriptions that can be then fused to deliver com- prehensive descriptions associated with APIs. During the extraction pro- cess, we take into account that collected information has di erent levels of accuracy, currency, and trustworthiness to state a con dence level of the results. The method is based on the evaluation of the quality of the involved sources, the extracted values, and the overall descriptions. The resulting semantic descriptions are then matched with expressive user requirements to address the API selection problem.

Repositories of conceptual schemas have been proposed in literature to represent data managed in complex large scale information systems. In this paper we discuss concepts, constructs, methods and quality dimensions for repositories of conceptual schemas. In particular, the paper considers the two main state of the art paradigms to organize huge amounts of heterogeneous data: integration, to catch the resolution of heterogeneities among data, and abstraction, to enable representation of data at different levels of synthesis. Furthermore, in this paper we provide a formalization of all these issues, and investigate several quality dimensions of a repository.

The paper discusses two concepts that have been associated with various approaches to data and information, namely capacity and value, focusing on data base architectures, and on two types of technologies diffusely used in integration projects, namely data integration, in the area of Enterprise Information Integration, and publish & subscribe, in the area of Enterprise Application Integration. Furthermore, the paper proposes and discusses a unifying model for information capacity and value, that considers also quality constraints and run time costs of the data base architecture.

Planning activities are a relevant instrument to carry out sustainable and valuable eGovernment initiatives. The set of expertise needed for the design of eGovernment systems ranges from social to legal, economic, organizational, and technological perspectives, which have to be faced in a unique framework. The aim of the eG4M framework is to bring out these issues with an integrated approach. In this paper we focus in particular on legal issues in the strategic planning phase, aiming to show their relevance for the choice of appropriate solutions in terms of legal framework and enterprise architecture for service provision. The paper provides an example of application of the framework on experiences carried out in Italy, Planning activities are a relevant instrument to carry out sustainable and valuable eGovernment initiatives. The set of expertise needed for the design of eGovernment systems ranges from social to legal, economic, organizational, and technological perspectives, which have to be faced in a unique framework. The aim of the eG4M framework is to bring out these issues with an integrated approach. In this paper we focus in particular on legal issues in the strategic planning phase, aiming to show their relevance for the choice of appropriate solutions in terms of legal framework and enterprise architecture for service provision. The paper provides an example of application of the framework on experiences carried out in Italy. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.

Editorial

The tutorial aims to introduce to the complexity of strategic planning of information systems (IS) for eGovernment services in countries characterized by different culture, technological readiness, and legal framework. Another goal, is to raise awareness on the role of IS modelling in strategic planning in its interaction with socio-economic, organizational, and legal framework analyses. A major objective is to provide a comprehensive perspective on the challenges, opportunities, and decisions involved in the effective strategic and operational planning of information systems in eGovernment. Usually, public administrators' culture is a mix of legal and administrative knowledge, while lacking a deep organizational and technological, in a word, information systems culture. Our aim is to bridge this gap, providing the necessary (and sufficient) background to allow administrators to play an active role in eGovernment strategic and operational decisions. Due to these issues, we will discuss a methodology called eG4M in comparison with other approaches to information systems planning and engineering in eGovernment. Comparison criteria encompass the objectives considered, the problems addressed, the main concepts introduced, the phases and steps, the target applications. © 2011 Authors.

The study of Y chromosome variation has helped reconstruct demographic events associated with the spread of languages, agriculture, and pastoralism in sub-Saharan Africa, but little attention has been given to the early history of the continent. In order to overcome this lack of knowledge, we carried out a phylogeographic analysis of haplogroups A and B in a broad data set of sub-Saharan populations. These two lineages are particularly suitable for this objective because they are the two most deeply rooted branches of the Y chromosome genealogy. Their distribution is almost exclusively restricted to sub-Saharan Africa where their frequency peaks at 65% in groups of foragers. The combined high-resolution single nucleotide polymorphism analysis with short tandem repeats variation of their subclades reveals strong geographic and population structure for both haplogroups. This has allowed us to identify specific lineages related to regional preagricultural dynamics in different areas of sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, we observed signatures of relatively recent contact, both among Pygmies and between them and Khoisan speaker groups from southern Africa, thus contributing to the understanding of the complex evolutionary relationships among African hunter-gatherers. Finally, by revising the phylogeography of the very early human Y chromosome lineages, we have obtained support for the role of southern Africa as a sink, rather than a source, of the first migrations of modern humans from eastern and central parts of the continent. These results open new perspectives on the early history of Homo sapiens in Africa, with particular attention to areas of the continent where human fossil remains and archaeological data are scant.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive methodology for service-oriented information systems planning, with special emphasis on eGovernment initiatives. They present the eG4M methodology which structurally supports the development of optimal eGovernment plans, considering technological, organizational, legal, economic and social aspects alike. The approach is focused on two pillars: the quality of the provided services and related processes, and the quality of the data managed in the administrative processes and services. The book is written for public administrators, decision-makers, practitioners, ICT professionals and graduate students, providing a comprehensive perspective of the challenges, opportunities and decisions related to strategic and operational planning of service-oriented information systems in eGovernment

Integrated repositories of conceptual schemas provide organizations dealing with a large amount of data sources with an integrated view on the information they manage. Making schema repositories compliant with the Web and with the Web knowledge technologies has become crucial today. In this paper we present an approach to conceptual metadata management based on the design and the publication of repositories of linked Web schemas organized by abstraction. Schemas and schema mappings are represented in the repositories by means of a SKOS extension defined in the paper. The language makes the schemas reciprocally crosslinked, providing native Web-based browsing and search functionalities. Abstraction-based schema integration primitives provide the building blocks for the organization of the repositories: loose schema mappings are based on abstraction relations and the repository is organized into levels of abstraction; the design of the repository is based on the progressive abstraction and integration of source schemas. The approach is compliant with state-of-the-art tools developed in the semanticWeb, which provide tool support for the design and publication on theWeb of repositories of linked schemas. Copyright 2010 ACM.

In medium-big enterprise it is quite typical that the database architecture is defined through a sequence of projects and realizations that result a number of different and sometime overlapping data sources. This trend is worsened by merger and acquisition activities that add in existing data archi-tecture new data sources from external organizations. Data fragmentation reduces significantly the possibility to exploit organizational information assets and it needs the building of a data integration architecture. This architecture allows the organization to access to data stored by heterogeneous data sources and to manage updates through a unified view of this data. In this paper we present an original framework able to support the evolution of data architecture by identi-fying the optimal solution that maximize the quality of the overall architecture within a given cost threshold. In partic-ular, we focus on Publish and Subscribe as solution for data architecture. Copyright 2010 ACM.

Traditional data quality engineering techniques, often used and deployed within a single enterprise environment, are inadequate to cope with the rapid change of data, with a multitude of quality degrees, to be used in contemporary business models. The emerging cloud computing paradigm could potentially offer high-quality, composable data and techniques, under the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Data-asa-Service (DaaS) and crowdsourcing models, for data quality engineering and data publishing. However, so far how to utilize the potential of cloud computing models for data quality engineering has not been discussed. In this paper, we analyze requirements of data quality engineering and quality-aware data publishing processes in the cloud and we provide a conceptual architecture utilizing and supporting the SaaS, DaaS and crowdsourcing models for the realization of such processes.

In large organizations the database architecture is typically built through a series of projects and realizations that result in a number of heterogeneous and overlapping data sources. This trend is worsened by merger and acquisition activities that add new data sources from external organizations to the existing data architecture. Data fragmentation significantly reduces the possibility for an organization to exploit its information assets. A technology that partially alleviates these problems is data integration middleware that allows users to read-only access data stored in heterogeneous data sources through the presentation of a unified view of these data. In this paper we introduce a new concept to measure the improvement in information capacity enabled by data integration solutions, and propose an original framework which can support the evolution of the organization data architecture by identifying the optimal solution that maximizes such improvement within a given cost threshold.

A conceptual framework for the automatic discovery of dependencies between data quality dimensions is described. Dependency discovery consists in recovering the dependency structure for a set of data quality dimensions measured on attributes of a database. This task is accomplished through the data mining methodology, by learning a Bayesian Network from a database. The Bayesian Network is used to analyze dependency between data quality dimensions associated with different attributes. The proposed framework is instantiated on a real world database. The task of dependency discovery is presented in the case when the following data quality dimensions are considered; accuracy, completeness, and consistency. The Bayesian Network model shows how data quality can be improved while satisfying budget constraints. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.

In this paper we discuss the GovQual methodology for planning eGovernment initiatives in public administrations. In particular, the paper describes an application of the GovQual methodology for information systems integration at the Tunisian Ministry of agriculture and hydraulic resources. The key elements of the methodology are the multidisciplinary approach, which considers social, economical, organizational, juridical and technological issues in the identification and ranking of eGovernment projects, and the quality-driven strategy which considers the assessment of actual and future target quality values for services, processes, organizational systems, and technologies. GovQual aims to satisfy the requirements of the context where the methodology has been developed and tested such as e.g. the requirements of the countries involved in the methodology application during the eGovernment for Mediterranean Countries (eG4M) project and former preliminary experiences in the Italian Public Administrations

In this study, we report the genetic variation of autosomal and Y-chromosomal microsatellites in a large Cameroon population dataset (a total of 11 populations) and jointly analyze novel and previous genetic data (mitochondrial DNA and protein coding loci) taking geographic and cultural factors into consideration. The complex pattern of genetic variation of Cameroon can in part be described by contrasting two geographic areas (corresponding to the northern and southern part of the country), which differ substantially in environmental, biological, and cultural aspects. Northern Cameroon populations show a greater within- and among-group diversity, a finding that reflects the complex migratory patterns and the linguistic heterogeneity of this area. A striking reduction of Y-chromosomal genetic diversity was observed in some populations of the northern part of the country (Podokwo and Uldeme), a result that seems to be related to their demographic history rather than to sampling issues. By exploring patterns of genetic, geographic, and linguistic variation, we detect a preferential correlation between genetics and geography for mtDNA. This finding could reflect a female matrimonial mobility that is less constrained by linguistic factors than in males. Finally, we apply the island model to mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal data and obtain a female-to-male migration Nnu ratio that was more than double in the northern part of the country. The combined effect of the propensity to inter-populational admixture of females, favored by cultural contacts, and of genetic drift acting on Y-chromosomal diversity could account for the peculiar genetic pattern observed in northern Cameroon.

Conceptual schema integration can be exploited at the conceptual metadata level to provide organizations that deal with a large amount of data sources with an integrated view on the overall information managed. In this paper we discuss the kind of language that can be exploited for such conceptual-level integration tasks in the large, and we introduce the ER dialect called Abstract ERIA (AERIA). The introduction of such a language is based on theoretical considerations and on past experiences in conceptual schema integration. The language is provided with a Web compliant front-end concrete syntax based on OWL-DL to support the compact design of the schema and the definition of integration and abstraction relations between the schema elements. A formal semantic interpretation of the AERIA language is discussed; this interpretation allows for a translation of AERIA schemas into standard Web ontologies to support model reuse and exchange. Copyright 2009 ACM.

Semantic Web model representation and integration can be exploited to provide organizations that deal with a large amount of data sources with an integrated view on the overall information managed. In order to support semantic Web model representation and integration in the large users must be provided with light-weight languages to represent and integrate the models, in particular avoiding the design of complex Tbox axioms. Assuming to adopt at the frontend level graph-based Concept-to-Concept Relationship (CCR) representations, in this paper we question about two semantic issues. First, we inquire whether light-weight semantic Web languages such as RDFS and DL-Lite can be used to provide the semantics of individual CCR models. Second, we inquire whether these languages can be used to provide appropriate semantics for the mappings needed for model integration. Discussing a case study in the eGovernment domain we claim that both the answer are negative. Therefore, we propose a new semantic interpretation for CCR models and we define three main classes of integration and abstraction relations defining their semantics.

Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is a Knowledge Management approach that consists in the development of decision support systems where problem are solved by analogy with similar problem solved in the past. In this way, the system supports users in finding solutions without starting from scratch. CBR has become a very important research topic in Artificial Intelligence, with the definition of methodologies and architectural patterns for supporting developers in the design and implementation of case–based systems. The paper presents one of this frameworks, namely CReP, an on–going research project of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (L.Int.Ar.) of University of Milan–Bicocca. Moreover, its application in the SMMART project is described.

Recognizer P systems with active membranes have proven to be able to solve computationally hard problems in a polynomial time. Hence it is interesting to investigate what features, such as electrical charges (polarizations) associated to membranes, evolution rules, communication rules, and strong or weak forms of division rules, are needed to achieve such a computational power. In this paper we show that polarizationless recognizer P systems with active membranes can solve the PSPACE-complete decision problem Quantified 3-sat, working in the maximally parallel way, by using only dissolution rules and a form of controlled strong division for non–elementary membranes.

We present a multidisciplinary methodology for E-Government project planning. The set of expertise needed for the design of E-Government systems includes social, juridical, economic, organizational, and technological perspectives. To properly address such a broad range of influences requires a unique vision. Our long-term aim is to use an integrated approach to examine a number of issues which currently present challenges in many E-Government projects. This paper in particular focuses on social and technological aspects of E-Government. The methodology has four phases: (1) state reconstruction, (2) quality assessment, (3) new quality targets definition, and (4) preliminary operational planning. A case study provides evidence of the feasibility and effectiveness of the methodology. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The literature provides a wide range of techniques to assess and improve the quality of data. Due to the diversity and complexity of these techniques, research has recently focused on defining methodologies that help the selection, customization, and application of data qualityassessment and improvement techniques. The goal of this article is to provide a systematic and comparative description of suchmethodologies. Methodologies are compared along several dimensions, including the methodological phases and steps, the strategies and techniques, the data quality dimensions, the types of data, and, finally, the types of information systems addressed by each methodology. The article concludes with a summary description of each methodology.

Inter-organization business processes involve the exchange of structured data across information systems. We assume that data are exchanged under given condition of quality (offered or required) and prices. Data offer may include bundling schemes, whereby different types of data are offered together with a single associated price and quality. We describe a brokering algorithm for obtaining data from peers, by minimizing the overall cost under quality requirements constraints. The algorithm extends query processing techniques over multiple database schemas to automatically derive an integer linear programming problem that returns an optimal matching of data providers to data consumers under realistic economic cost models.