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Institute
In the last years the e-government concentrated on the administrative aspects of administrative modernisation. In the next step the e-discourses will gain in importance as an instrument of the public-friendliness and means of the e-democracy/e-participation. With growing acceptance of such e-discourses, these will fastly reach a complexity, which could not be mastered no more by the participants. Many impressions, which could be won from presence discussions, will be lacking now. Therefore the exposed thesis has the objective of the conception and the prototypical implementation of an instrument (discourse meter), by which the participants, in particular the moderators of the e-discourse, are capable to overlook the e-discourse at any time and by means of it, attain their discourse awareness. Discourse awareness of the present informs about the current action in the e-discourse and discourse awareness of the past about the past action, by which any trends become visible. The focus of the discourse awareness is located in the quantitative view of the action in the e-discourse. From the model of e-discourse, which is developed in this thesis, the questions of discourse awareness are resulting, whose concretion is the basis for the implementation of the discourse meter. The discourse sensors attached to the model of the e-discourse are recording the actions of the e-discourse, showing events of discourse, which are represented by the discourse meter in various forms of visualizations. The concept of discourse meter offers the possibility of discourse awareness relating to the present as monitoring and the discourse awareness relating to the past as query (quantitative analysis) to the moderators of the e-discourse.
The publication of freely available and machine-readable information has increased significantly in the last years. Especially the Linked Data initiative has been receiving a lot of attention. Linked Data is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and anybody can simply publish their data in RDF and link it to other datasets. The structure is similar to the World Wide Web where individual HTML documents are connected with links. Linked Data entities are identified by URIs which are dereferenceable to retrieve information describing the entity. Additionally, so called SPARQL endpoints can be used to access the data with an algebraic query language (SPARQL) similar to SQL. By integrating multiple SPARQL endpoints it is possible to create a federation of distributed RDF data sources which acts like one big data store.
In contrast to the federation of classical relational database systems there are some differences for federated RDF data. RDF stores are accessed either via SPARQL endpoints or by resolving URIs. There is no coordination between RDF data sources and machine-readable meta data about a source- data is commonly limited or not available at all. Moreover, there is no common directory which can be used to discover RDF data sources or ask for sources which offer specific data. The federation of distributed and linked RDF data sources has to deal with various challenges. In order to distribute queries automatically, suitable data sources have to be selected based on query details and information that is available about the data sources. Furthermore, the minimization of query execution time requires optimization techniques that take into account the execution cost for query operators and the network communication overhead for contacting individual data sources. In this thesis, solutions for these problems are discussed. Moreover, SPLENDID is presented, a new federation infrastructure for distributed RDF data sources which uses optimization techniques based on statistical information.
The provision of electronic participation services (e-participation) is a complex socio-technical undertaking that needs comprehensive design and implementation strategies. E-participation service providers, in the most cases administrations and governments, struggle with changing requirements that demand more transparency, better connectivity and increased collaboration among different actors. At the same time, less staff are available. As a result, recent research assesses only a minority of e-participation services as successful. The challenge is that the e-participation domain lacks comprehensive approaches to design and implement (e-)participation services. Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks have evolved in information systems research as an approach to guide the development of complex socio-technical systems. This approach can guide the design and implementation services, if the collection of organisations with the commonly held goal to provide participation services is understood as an E Participation Enterprise (EE). However, research & practice in the e participation domain has not yet exploited EA frameworks. Consequently, the problem scope that motivates this dissertation is the existing gap in research to deploy EA frameworks in e participation design and implementation. The research question that drives this research is: What methodical and technical guides do architecture frameworks provide that can be used to design and implement better and successful e participation?
This dissertation presents a literature study showing that existing approaches have not covered yet the challenges of comprehensive e participation design and implementation. Accordingly, the research moves on to investigate established EA frameworks such as the Zachman Framework, TOGAF, the DoDAF, the FEA, the ARIS, and the ArchiMate for their use. While the application of these frameworks in e participation design and implementation is possible, an integrated approach is lacking so far. The synthesis of literature review and practical insights in design and implementation of e participation services from four projects show the challenges of adapting architecture frameworks for this domain. However, the research shows also the potential of a combination of the different approaches. Consequently, the research moves on to develop the E-Participation Architecture Framework (EPART-Framework). Therefore, the dissertation applies design science research including literature review and action research. Two independent settings test an initial EPART-Framework version. The results yield into the EPART-Framework presented in this dissertation.
The EPART-Framework comprises of the EPART-Metamodel with six EPART-Viewpoints, which frame the stakeholder concerns: the Participation Scope, the Participant Viewpoint, the Participation Viewpoint, the Data & Information Viewpoint, the E-participation Viewpoint, and Implementation & Governance Viewpoint. The EPART-Method supports the stakeholders to design the EE and implement e participation and stores its output in an architecture description and a solution repository. It consists of five consecutive phases accompanied by requirements management: Initiation, Design, Implementation and Preparation, Participation, and Evaluation. The EPART-Framework fills the gap between the e participation domain and the enterprise architecture framework domain. The evaluation gives reasonable evidence that the framework is a valuable addition in academia and in practice to improve e-participation design and implementation. The same time, it shows opportunities for future research to extend and advance the framework.