Knowledge Interoperability of Parliaments’ and Government Agencies’ Information Systems

Abstract

There is a growing awareness that the interoperability among Government Agencies’ information systems (IS) is of critical importance for the development of e-government and the improvement of government efficiency and effectiveness. However, most of the IS interoperability research and practice in government has been focused on the operational level, aiming mainly to enable the delivery of integrated electronic services involving several Government Agencies, or to support the co-operation among Government Agencies from the same or even different countries. This chapter is dealing with knowledge-level interoperability, aiming to support higher knowledge-intensive tasks of government, such as the formulation of legislation and public policy. In particular, it presents an ontology-based methodology for achieving knowledge interoperability of IS of Parliaments and Government Agencies, so that they can exchange public policy related knowledge produced in the various stages of the legislation process. It is based on the common use by Parliaments of the ontology of the ‘Issue-Based Information Systems’ (IBIS) framework for constructing representations of this knowledge. An application of the proposed methodology is presented, followed by an evaluation, which results in an enrichment of the above ontology that enables a better representation of the public policy related knowledge produced in the legislation process, providing a ‘higher quality’ of knowledge interoperability. Finally a generalization of this methodology is formulated, which can be used for achieving knowledge interoperability among IS of other types of Government Agencies.