icegov2012 proceedings

Exhaustiveness indicates that all categories should be included
within a typology. For U-services, exhaustiveness has an
important significance in that the U-services are not fixed or static
but highly likely to develop into convergence services according
to their necessity. If a U-service typology lacks exhaustiveness, it
may be meaningless as a typology because it will not cover all of
the U-services that can be created or terminated depending on
environment.
Mutual exclusiveness can be a good condition for typology in that
confusion may be caused if there is a logical overlap between
categories or if a single concept simultaneously falls into different
categories, but actually it is difficult to meet in social sciences
where each classification target does not have a rapid discontinuity
between categories. In particular, the condition of mutual
exclusiveness is difficult to satisfy in U-services that include many
convergence services, and thus if this is taken into account, it will
end up just in enumeration, not in classification.
Parsimony is the concept that when other conditions are the same,
the simpler classification model the better and the more
complicated the worse. However, the parsimony a typology has is
commonly against the practical value of the classification model.
Accordingly, if a category becomes too wide for parsimony, the
classification may be made simpler than necessary and thus not be
of help in empirical studies or practical applications. For U-service
classification models, it is difficult to ensure parsimony due to the
complexity of U-services themselves. However, if the principle of
parsimony is not met, the U-service classification models can end
up merely serving for enumeration, not as typology, due to the
complexity of services themselves.
Empirical workability indicates that operations for measurement
should be possible when verification is conducted with an
involved person’s arbitrary decisions limited to a minimum in
classification. However, the lack of such empirical workability is a
troublesome problem which is present in most classification
models available in social sciences and can be considered as an
inherent limitation of social science research that takes advantage
of abstract concepts.
Theoretical fruitfulness is that it will be good if eventually a
typology itself presents a generally acceptable theory. As
mentioned above, this theoretical fruitfulness commonly conflicts
with empirical workability. The reason is that due to the
abstractness of classification criteria it is very uncommon that the
classification models making theoretical fruitfulness actually
extend to empirical studies.
In this study, we selected Jeong’s typology and heuristically
classified 228 unit U-services being currently developed in Korea
after their application to the selected system. The results of
classification were empirically analyzed in terms of whether they
are compliant with the five conditions. Through the analysis this
study identified the shortcomings of the total U-service typology
and other things that need to be made up for in the system.
3. ANALYSIS
In evaluating the appropriateness of Jeong’s U-service typology,
this study examined the distribution patterns and characteristics of
current services by assigning 228 unit services to eight medium
classification categories (i.e., spatial units, spatial facilities,
service providers, beneficiaries, service objectives, urban activities,
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human behaviors, and function-implementing methods), exclusive
of laws/institutions.
3.1 Procedure
The medium category of “laws/institutions,” unlike other
classification criteria, represents which laws include U-servicerelated
provisions, rather than a set of actual services. This
category was excluded because it was not fit for the purpose of
this study, and eight other medium categories of actual services
were used in this study.
In the classification of U-services into eight medium categories,
the 228 unit services were verified through in-depth interviews
with three experts selected from those who participated in the U-
Eco City project for two or more years. As the first activity of
service classification, each expert reviewed a list of 228 Uservices
and classified the U-services appropriately into one of the
given categories. The second activity was to compare the Uservice
classifications with those by two other experts. In the
coherence of service classification, 195 (85.5%) of 228 unit
services were consistently classified by all the three experts as
“culture, tourism or sports” but the classification of 11 services
(4.8%) was completely inconsistent among the experts who
categorized them as “transportation, health care, facility
management or labor/employment.”
3.2 Heuristics Used
Table 2(Fig. 1-8) shows how the services were categorized. The
classification of 228 unit services by the given criteria revealed the
following limitations: (1) the definitions of some small categories
were unclear to use for classification purposes; (2) there was a
preponderance of certain categories in the classification of Uservices;
and (3) there were similar items overlapping between
medium-categories.
First, some classification criteria were unclearly defined. Two
examples are the definition of information media facility services
as types of “services provided from fixed facilities” and the
definition of unit-space control facility services as types of
“services limited to facilities and their attached facilities.” Both
of the definitions reflect the concept of “services provided from
facilities,” and accordingly this causes confusion when services
are actually classified. For instance, the “traffic signal violation
enforcement service” working on the road can be recognized as
being provided from fixed facilities and at the same time viewed
as that limited to attached facilities. Moreover, if it is unclear
whether service beneficiaries are the public or business entities,
the human behavior forms of moving and cybering can be
considered for service classification. Second, when the 228 unit
services were classified in terms of their names, some
classification criteria were found to play only a nominal role rather
than serve as typology. For example, in the service classification
by urban activities, the category of “security/safety” represented
95% of transportation services, 100% of crime/disaster prevention
services, and 93% of facility management services; and the
category of “leisure” included 94% of culture, tourism and sports
services. This typology does not seem to reflect service types in a
balanced way, and therefore further studies need to focus on
reducing the uneven distribution of classification items and
making classification criteria more practical. Third, there were
similar items overlapping between medium categories. Especially,