Interoperability in Public Sector

- How Use of a Lightweight Approach Can

Reduce the Gap Between Plans and Reality

- Svein Ølnes, Western Norway Research Institute (Vestforsk), Norway

www.vestforsk.no

Interoperability?

Norwegian Swiss

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Content

Main question answered

What a difference a little semantics can do

The troublesome gap between plans and reality

Los – An example of a lightweight approach

Conclusions and further research

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Main question answered

There is a huge gap between plans and reality when it

comes to functional interoperability in public sector

Are the ambitions too high?

Part of the solution: A lightweight approach

“as simple as possible”

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What a difference a little semantics can do

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What a difference a little semantics can do

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Gap between plans and reality

European level (Codagnone and Wimmer, 2007):

Although a lot of attention is already been paid to interoperability, the gaps in this storyline were assessed as very high and relevant according to the eGovernance model.

Norway

Framework for service oriented architecture proposed 2007

Not much has happened since

The Government is struggling with how to deal with this issue

In the mean time a lot of trials and errors (for instance the Seres I and II example by the National Registry Centre (BrønnøysundRegister Centre)

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Interoperability - definitions

Definition 1 (EIF 1.0):

Interoperability means the ability of information and communication technology (ICT) systems and of the business processes they support to exchange data and to enable the sharing of information and knowledge.

Definition 2 (EIF 2.0):

Interoperability is the ability of disparate and diverse organisations to interact towards mutually beneficial and agreed common goals, involving the sharing of information and knowledge between the organizations via the business processes they support, by means of the exchange of data between their respective information and communication technology (ICT) systems.

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Increasing complexity in frameworks

EIF 1.0 (2004)

Organisational interoperability

Semantic i.o.

Technical i.o.

EIF 2.0 (draft, 2008)

Revision of EIF 1.0 startedin 2006 – still no final update

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Comparison to the development of HTML5

xhtml 1.0

HTML 4.01 expressed in xml syntacs

xhtml 1.1

Pure xml (no Mime text/html, but xml)

xhtml 2.0

a shiny new and bright standard “relieved from the HTML sufferings”

full support for the semantic web

no backwards compatibility

a disaster!

HTML5

the browser developers in charge

support for Microformats rather than the full semantic web

pragmatics rather than theoretical perfection

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Los – A lightweight approach to interoperability

Los – Norwegian for “Navigator at sea”

aided navigation in a sea of information

A thesauri for public services

controlled vocabulary arranged as a thesauri

ca. 400 keywords + ca. 1 500 synonyms, outdated terms ++

user orientation (the terms used by “the man in the street”)

expressed using the Dublin Core metadata standard, rss sharing

distinguish between description of services and the services themselves

Exchange of information between sectors and organisations

Cross sector: Between government agencies and municipalities

Between organisations in the same sector

Primarily used in the municipalities

ca. 100 (of 430) municipalities uses Los in their portals

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Los – structure

Tema = Theme

Emneord = Keyword

Nettressurs = Net resources

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Los – examples of use in municipality portals

Bergen

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Los – examples of use in municipality portals

Sørum

Førde

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Classification and Categorisation

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Conclusions and further research

We are waiting for guidelines (ref. EIF 2.0 and other

frameworks)

In the mean time: Shed light on the good examples

Look for simpler solutions (less risk, quicker gains)

Is there too little emphasis on “simple” solutions?

for instance: rss as a method of information exchange, microformatsand/or RDFa for semantic expressions

“small pieces loosely joined” (David Weinberger)

“Top down” or “bottom up”?

How does lightweight approaches go together with more

demanding interoperability initiatives and frameworks?

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End of presentation

Thanks for your attention!

Svein Ølnes – sol@vestforsk.no

This presentation: http://j.mp/d6WX2G