Jeroen Meij and Jeroen Pastoor
Figure 6: Example of concepts and relationships within an ontology for an insurance domain
4. Infrastructure
To complete the description of the framework, some technical information is provided in this chapter.
4.1 Technical components
The form generator is a custom development based on the Symfony framework. The form generator creates the forms for data collection that may be integrated into various PHP based CMS platforms. The forms will store submitted data in separate databases outside the CMS system. This ensures portability and facilitates the link to the Knowledge infrastructure ontology. The Open Source systems Drupal and Joomla have been used for CMS functionality so far.
The map is derived from GEOZET viewer, which in turn is based on the Open Source Openlayers project. The ontology is based on the Virtuoso Open Source edition and uses SPARQL as a query language.
4.2 Private and public data
During the course of the project, it was found that from a motivational perspective, the balance between local feedback and public scrutiny is a very delicate matter. For this reason, most of the detailed local feedback data is considered private data, only accessible to the municipality and the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom relations. More generic local data is presented in the overview maps. Thus, the local entities have secure access to their own private dashboards. To accommodate for public as well as private data from municipalities, the ontology has also been equipped with a security layer. This layer provides authorisation services to protect the private data.
5. General applicability
Started from a specific e‐Government need, gradually a platform has evolved that will be applicable to many decentralised change processes. The Framework for Decentralised Change Support or FDCS is a scalable platform which offers project progress tracking and information delivery for local actors in the change process. At the same time the centralised views offer insight in the nationwide progress per project or for the complete programme. Reference data is fed into the system and disclosed to the project sites through the unifying knowledge infrastructure. The knowledge infrastructure also provides a view on all project progress data through the SPARQL query interface. Any website or app may use this interface to collect the desired data.
Furthermore, by providing a file upload facility for local actors, detailed analyses can be made of the data quality of local data, with or without a direct link to the central reference data sources. The data quality is made visible to the local actors in a private dashboard. In some cases a downloadable error file is supplied to support the improvement of data quality. An important feature is the calculation of potential benefits based on errors found. These potential benefits( or avoidable costs) prove to be a significant motivator for change by the local actors.
Although initially targeted at municipalities, the system proves to be equally applicable to government agencies and other public service organisations. Project progress tracking and data quality analysis for this type of organisations can easily be integrated in the framework. Examples include Public housing organisations and
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