icegov2012 proceedings

judgments are made about the quality or sophistication of the
feature itself.
While the underlying survey questionnaire has been adjusted and
updated over time, the overall supply-side approach has remained
consistent.
3. THE TECHNOLOGY MARCHES ON
Over the next five to ten years there are important technology
trends which e-government is, or should be, well placed to address
or benefit from and which any evaluation framework must take
into account. These include the increased power of data, network
developments and the cloud, mobility and social media.
3.1 Big Data, Open Data
Public sector data, also enhanced by compatible data from
companies and communities, are set to become a prime resource
for e-government development. Such data include trade, business
development, health, education, environment, care, transport,
crime and public order, as well as user and behavioral data when
aggregated so that individuals cannot be identified.
The ‘big data’ resources now available in some countries are
being used for policy modeling, visualization and simulation, as
well as data mining and pattern recognition using ICT and
semantic web applications. Combining these tools with analytical
methods (statistical, contextual, quantitative, predictive, cognitive,
etc.) leads to the new discipline of ‘analytics’ which some
governments are already starting to employ to dramatically
increase their operational efficiency and effectiveness. For
example, Singapore’s government addresses policy issues through
joined-up government to support broader desired outcomes, such
as economic vitality and foreign investment. [10] Its Land
Transport Authority (LTA) deployed the world’s first congestion
charging system and has since innovated elements of its business
model. LTA has seen an 80% reduction in revenue leakage from
“lost transactions”, while tripling its performance capacity to 20
million fare transactions per day. At the same time, its ability to
look holistically across the network to help manage current
demand allows it to predict future needs and sustainable solutions
to accommodate a growing population.
Many public sector data in aggregated form are now also being
made publicly available in machine-readable and linked formats
for use by companies, social entrepreneurs, communities, hackers,
etc. 2 This is not solely about encouraging a better informed and
more transparent society. It can also lead to economic gains, as a
result of re-use or recombination of these data in creative ways.
Government, with minimal cost to itself, can make large amounts
of data available so others can build innovative apps and eservices.
This makes sense since governments are often not best positioned
to extract commercial value from their own data. According to the
European Commission [11] open government data policies will
increase direct business activity in Europe by up to €40 billion per
year, which translates into adding 0.3% of GDP. The same study
showed overall benefits, including direct and indirect effects,
could be up to €200 billion per year, or 1.7% of GDP. An
Australian study in September 2011 [12] found that open data
2 For example: the US (data.gov), UK (data.gov.uk), France
(data.gouv.fr) and Australia (data.gov.au).
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unlocked value equal to 5 times the cost of opening the data.
Specifically, the estimated value of new economic activity plus
cost savings was AU$25 million/year after bearing a cost of $4.6
million/year.
An important premise in many, though not all, of these initiatives
is that tech communities are better able to make government data
useful than the governments themselves. For example, in 2009 the
‘Apps for Democracy’ competition in Washington DC awarded
$20,000 in prizes for developers and yielded 47 web, iPhone and
Facebook apps in 30 days with a value to the city of $2,300,000. 3
Peter Corbett, CEO for iStrategyLabs and organiser of the
competition said "I think the government realises that they don't
have all of the money to do things people want them to
do……government forgot that the biggest asset that they have are
actual citizens… [and] many developers work free.."
To encourage government data owners to publish their data, Tim
Berners-Lee, also called the father of the world wide web, has
proposed a five star scheme to rate Linked Open Data (LOD).
LOD are data designed for linking with other data which are
released under an open license and do not impede free reuse. Stars
are awarded for the online availability, properties of the data
format to facilitate re-use and linking to non-government data.
3.2 Network Developments and the Cloud
ICT is being increasingly seen as a utility in the same way other
basic infrastructures like electricity and transport systems already
are. Thus, who provides it and how will not be important for many
users, although its quality, resilience, reliability and price will be.
ICT will soon become an ambient technology, i.e. systems and
services which are everywhere, fully interoperable and truly
convergent (in both technical and non-technical terms).
An evolution has already started towards wide-scale ubiquitous
seamless networks, networked and distributed computing, open
semantic web, large scale distributed databases and artificial
intelligence. According to Tim Berners-Lee, we are indeed on the
verge of the age of the semantic web which exploits the Internet
of data rather than the Internet of documents we now have. This is
built on a new RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard
for metadata in the same way as document standards currently use
HTML or XML. This will enable intelligent uses of the Internet
like asking questions rather than simply searching for key words,
as well as more automatic data exchanges between databases and
the Internet of things and places. It is noteworthy, however, that
the implementation of RDF still remains largely unrealized. [28]
The dramatic growth of cloud computing is part of these
developments, i.e. whereby shared resources, software, and data
are provided to computers and other devices on demand. The
fundamental concept of cloud computing is that the processing
and the related data are not in a specified or known location.
Generally, cloud computing users do not own the physical
infrastructure, thereby avoiding capital expenditure by renting
usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a
service and pay only for resources that they actually use.
In the UK sharing data across new internal cloud computing
systems is part of a radical plan that it claims could save up to
£3.2bn a year from an annual bill of at least £16bn. The key part
3
http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/ (accessed 28 November
2009)