Alexopoulos Charalampos et al.
which data can be linked, in order to meet users’ expectations for using the platform. This means that this first version of the ENGAGE PSI e‐infrastructure did not achieve to attract sustainable interest.
In general, the first application of the proposed evaluation framework showed that meaningful insights can be obtained by applying the proposed evaluation framework and infrastructure to such an advanced open public data e‐infrastructure 2.0. The insights concern both managerial( categorizing priorities, decision making) and technical aspects of the e‐infrastructure. The evaluation results appeared to be useful for defining priorities for improvements and enrichments required for developing the future versions of the ENGAGE e‐infrastructure. They provide very detailed information about the features of the e‐infrastructure and information about possibilities for improvement. One advantage of the evaluation framework was that the evaluation results are based on users experience with the actual ENGAGE e‐infrastructure, instead of feedback on mock‐ups of the e‐ infrastructure and / or presentations about the e‐infrastructure. In addition, the evaluation results clearly show that user experience is a critical success factor for the community uptake of the e‐infrastructure( navigation, search, user interface, services and features for non‐Information Technology savvy users). Furthermore, some ideas were mentioned to improve the e‐infrastructure that the consortium had not thought of. For instance, the idea of a‘ shopping cart’, where the user can add different datasets to make the linking process easier, could be considered for future versions of the ENGAGE e‐infrastructure. Finally, several other inventive recommendations and solutions were provided by the potential users of the infrastructure.
1. Conclusions
This paper presented an evaluation framework for both traditional PSI e‐infrastructures and advanced ones following the web 2.0 paradigm, which consists of an evaluation model and a procedure for applying it. A first application of the evaluation framework to an open public sector data e‐infrastructure developed in the ENGAGE project has provided some first evidence for the applicability and usefulness of the proposed framework, as well as useful directions and ideas for the improvement of the above‐mentioned e‐ infrastructure. Further research on this is in progress by the authors, mainly in three directions: i) application of the proposed evaluation framework in the following stages of the ENGAGE project and the next versions of the PSI e‐infrastructure it develops, ii) application of this evaluation framework for evaluating other PSI e‐ infrastructures, both traditional and advanced ones, and iii) estimation of value models of such infrastructures, by elaborating and extending the approach proposed by Alexopoulos et al.( 2012) and Loukis et al.( 2012). This further research is expected to lead to improvements and extensions of the proposed evaluation framework.
Acknowledgements
This paper is related to the ENGAGE FP7 Infrastructure Project( An Infrastructure for Open, Linked Governmental Data Provision Towards Research Communities and Citizens), that started in June 2011. The main goal of the ENGAGE project is the deployment and use of an advanced service infrastructure, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information resources as well as data curation, semantic annotation and visualisation tools, capable of supporting scientific collaboration and governance‐related research from multi‐disciplinary scientific communities, while also empowering the deployment of open government data towards citizens. More information can be found at www. engage‐project. eu and www. engagedata. eu.
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