| Abstract: | This paper concerns the development and use of ontologies for electronically supporting
and structuring the highest-level function of government: the design, implementation and evaluation
of public policies for the big and complex problems that modern societies face. This critical
government function usually necessitates extensive interaction and collaboration among many
heterogeneous government organizations (G2G collaboration) with different backgrounds, mentalities,
values, interests and expectations, so it can greatly benefit from the use of ontologies. In
this direction initially an ontology of public policy making, implementation and evaluation is
described, which has been developed as part of the project ICTE-PAN of the Information Society
Technologies (IST) Programme of the European Commission, based on sound theoretical foundations
mainly from the public policy analysis domain and contributions of experts from the public
administrations of four European Union countries (Denmark, Germany, Greece and Italy). It is a
horizontal ontology that can be used for electronically supporting and structuring the whole
lifecycle of a public policy in any vertical (thematic) area of government activity; it can also be
combined with vertical ontologies of the specific vertical (thematic) area of government activity we
are dealing with. In this paper is also described the use of this ontology for electronically
supporting and structuring the collaborative public policy making, implementation and evaluation
through structured electronic forums, extended workflows, public policy stages with specific
sub-ontologies, etc., and also for the semantic annotation, organization, indexing and integration
of the contributions of the participants of these forums, which enable the development of advanced
semantic web capabilities in this area. |
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Greek