eGovernment Activity Scope Summary

There are three main topics of interest for the eGovernment Activity to achieve its mission of improving access to government through better use of the Web.

Provide input for Best Practices and Guidelines on how to use existing Web Standards to produce better government Web sites

• Gather information about the areas where best practice guidelines are needed: best practices drawn from the successes (and failures) of efforts at opening, sharing, and re-using knowledge about the use of standards and specifications by government applications that could be collected into a set of best practices that identify productive technical paths toward better public services.
• Provide input on how to ease standards compliance: probably partly through additional effort to package, promote, and train on best practices and existing material and tools, identify ways on how standard bodies could try better to speak in terms of government needs and rely on previous successful experiences in terms of broad government use such as the Web Accessibility Initiative work.

Identify ways to achieve better government Openness and Transparency using Open Web Standards and Semantic Web

• Identify ways to improve government transparency and openness: identify any gaps to be filled in creating a complete suite of standards to enable open government information and ease the goal of linkable Public Sector Information.
• Identify ways to increase citizenship participation: recognize new channels, ways to get the information to the citizens where the citizens are looking for it, and make better use of tools as means to increase citizenry awareness and participation while supporting champions, i.e. acknowledge and help active citizens and public servants.
• Identify ways to increase citizens and businesses use of eGovernment services: get information on benefits of Web use for government services, identify main factors that are important for people and businesses to use eGovernment services such as time and money savings, simplicity, etc. and identify ways to improve them.

Provide paths to achieve better data integration using Semantic Web

• Identify how to advance the state-of-the-art in data integration strategies: identify ways for governments and computer science researchers to continue working together to advance the state-of-the-art in data integration and build useful, deployable proof-of-concept demos that use actual government information and demonstrate real benefit from linked data integration. These proof-of-concept tools ought to be targeted to applications that will show real improvement in areas that politicians, government officers and citizens actually need; they should also address the need to provide business cases for transitioning from XML/SOA systems to Semantic Web based ones.