Workshop on Knowledge Management and Semantic Technologies for e-Participation

Welcome to the website of the workshop on Knowledge and Semantic Technologies for e-Participation

NEW: Program of workshop announced—see the program page.

Motivation for the Workshop

The research community is involved in efforts to understand political participation in the Internet age, and to broaden and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process using information and communication technologies.

Participation of citizens in the political decision-making process requires access to information: citizens must be able to acquire the knowledge and information about governance needed to make informed choices.

The quantity, quality and range of government and public administration information provided electronically varies greatly. However, the sheer availability of documents is not a synonym of accessibility, since the latter implies making information available to citizens in such a way that citizens can comprehend and easily retrieve it.

Knowledge and semantic technologies are considered as key enabling technologies for making explicit the information implicitly contained in documents. Transforming textual data into knowledge requires:

· the definition of ontologies as shareable structures for knowledge organization;

· the possibility of semi-automatically populating and updating these ontologies with data coming from textual documents;

· automated techniques for semantically marking-up documents with conceptual metadata.

Over the last years, research and development activities have been carried out in these interconnected areas, especially for what concerns ontology modelling, the linking between ontologies and general lexicons, automatic or semi-automatic ontology learning and population, and semantic interpretation of linguistic content. 

We invite researchers interested in the intersection of Knowledge Management and Semantic Technologies and eParticipation to actively participate in a workshop which will reflect upon the meaning and practice of these technologies and their relationship to policy-making.

Workshop Objectives

The goal of this workshop is to map the various knowledge management and semantic technologies available in the context of eParticipation.

The workshop has the following objectives:

· to facilitate close and sustained co-operation between eParticipation researchers from different academic disciplines in order to better understand the role of knowledge management and semantic technologies in eParticipation processes;

· to explore the specific opportunities and advantages that knowledge management and semantic technologies bring to eParticipation;

· to identify research challenges which participation processes and practices pose for knowledge management and semantic technologies;

· to think about the socio-economical issues related to the adoption of knowledge management and semantic technologies in an eParticipation context.

 

 

Knowledge and Semantic Technologies

for e-Participation, Athens, 5 Dec 2006

Co-chairs of the Symposium:

· Gregoris Mentzas

· Ann MacIntosh

Supported by:

DEMO_NET: Network of Excellence in eParticipation.