Αλεξόπουλος Χαράλαμπος

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:
Purpose – This study aims to underline the possible influence of the moderator, information systems (IS) infusion, on Open Government Data (OGD) adoption and usage. Design/methodology/approach – Using the partial least squares-structural equation modeling methodological approach, the adapted unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model has been used for understanding the role of the moderating variable, namely, IS infusion. Findings – Findings show that the moderating impact of IS infusion is positively significant with respect to the performance expectancy–behavioral intention relationship thereby bolstering the impact on users’ perception of OGD vis-a-vis work/academics performance and negatively significant for social influence–behavioral intention, information quality–behavioral intention, thereby clinching the fact that with the increased engagement and involvement of OGD in the everyday life of the user, the role of significant others and information quality gets least significant. Originality/value – Extant OGD-focused research has underscored the impact of different variables as far as OGD adoption and usage is concerned; the present study seeks to add on to the extant literature by understanding the implications of IS infusion on the adapted UTAUT model constructs and behavioral intention relationships.

Περίληψη:
It is widely recognized that legislation is of critical importance for the proper functioning of economies and societies. However, the increasing complexity of the problems and challenges faced by modern economies and societies have resulted in the development of extensive, highly complex, and continuously evolving legislations. This makes it difficult for firms and administrations, as well as individual lawyers and public servants, to know the current applicable legislation on a particular topic of interest, as well as its evolution over time. This difficulty increases further due to the internationalization–globalization of economic activity, as well as the development of supranational organizations (such as the European Union (EU)), which make it necessary to continuously monitor legislations of several countries on various topics of interest. Existing national legal information platforms cannot satisfy the above highly complex requirements. This paper contributes to filling this gap, initially by describing the architecture and the capabilities/functionalities of an advanced “international” legal information platform, which has been developed as part of the European research program “ManyLaws,” based on requirements collected through interviews with lawyers and public servants; it enables the advanced search and retrieval of relevant legal documents on a particular topic of interest from within the legislative corpuses of many different countries, as well as EU legislation, using existing sources of open legal information, and also the automated comparative analysis of them and identification of various types of relations among them. The evaluation of this advanced legal information platform, using an extension of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), provides evidence of the usefulness and the ease of use of its novel functionalities, as well as their positive contribution to the productivity of both national-level legal work and internationallevel legal work, especially within the EU. The proposed advanced legal information platform can be quite useful for firms and administrations, as well as individual lawyers and public servants, active in the modern globalized economic context.

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:
Purpose – This study aims to underline the possible influence of the moderator, information systems (IS) infusion, on Open Government Data (OGD) adoption and usage. Design/methodology/approach – Using the partial least squares-structural equation modeling methodological approach, the adapted unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model has been used for understanding the role of themoderating variable, namely, IS infusion. Findings – Findings show that the moderating impact of IS infusion is positively significant with respect to the performance expectancy–behavioral intention relationship thereby bolstering the impact on users’ perception of OGD vis-a-vis work/academics performance and negatively significant for social influence–behavioral intention, information quality–behavioral intention, thereby clinching the fact that with the increased engagement and involvement of OGD in the everyday life of the user, the role of significant others and information quality gets least significant. Originality/value – Extant OGD-focused research has underscored the impact of different variables as far as OGD adoption and usage is concerned; the present study seeks to add on to the extant literature by understanding the implications of IS infusion on the adapted UTAUT model constructs and behavioral intention relationships.

Περίληψη:
It is widely recognized that legislation is of critical importance for the proper functioning of economies and societies. However, the increasing complexity of the problems and challenges faced by modern economies and societies have resulted in the development of extensive, highly complex, and continuously evolving legislations. This makes it difficult for firms and administrations, as well as individual lawyers and public servants, to know the current applicable legislation on a particular topic of interest, as well as its evolution over time. This difficulty increases further due to the internationalization–globalization of economic activity, as well as the development of supranational organizations (such as the European Union (EU)), which make it necessary to continuously monitor legislations of several countries on various topics of interest. Existing national legal information platforms cannot satisfy the above highly complex requirements. This paper contributes to filling this gap, initially by describing the architecture and the capabilities/ functionalities of an advanced “international” legal information platform, which has been developed as part of the European research program “ManyLaws,” based on requirements collected through interviews with lawyers and public servants; it enables the advanced search and retrieval of relevant legal documents on a particular topic of interest from within the legislative corpuses of many different countries, as well as EU legislation, using existing sources of open legal information, and also the automated comparative analysis of them and identification of various types of relations among them. The evaluation of this advanced legal information platform, using an extension of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), provides evidence of the usefulness and the ease of use of its novel functionalities, as well as their positive contribution to the productivity of both national-level legal work and international level legal work, especially within the EU. The proposed advanced legal information platform can be quite useful for firms and administrations, as well as individual lawyers and public servants, active in the modern globalized economic context.

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:
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:
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.