MERIT (MEtrics ReportIng Tool) is a quality reporting tool, which enables a combined and multi-faced view of quality of e-government services. MERIT is based on a quality of e-government services (QeGS) model.

It presents graphical charts regarding the various quality aspects (which are defined in the model) of the e-government portal and the public e-services. The charts are organized according to the various quality perspectives taken into account, i.e. citizens’, experts’ and technical staff’s opinions, as well as objective quality measures of the front and the back office.

By combining all these subjective and objective perspectives, the public administration gains a comprehensive view of the quality of e-government services delivered to the citizen, a 360 perspective.

##Description:

The figures below depict the overview page and the citizens’ opinion regarding the service reliability quality factor.

MERIT
MERIT

MERIT is a web based tool which has been build using JSP (Java Server Pages), while for rendering and displaying the various graphical charts, the “Cewolf” – Chart Enabling Web Object Framework, as well as the FreeChart libraries have been used. MERIT connects to MySQL databases through JDBC for fetching the required information. It connects to “surveyres” schema for question details, and according to the View the question belongs to, to the appropriate database i.e. Citizens Questionnaire database, Technical Staff Questionnaire database, Experts Questionnaire database, Web Log Filtering Tool database and Process Log Filtering Tool Database.

The figure below depicts the technical architecture of the tool.
MERIT

##Publications:

For the underlying QeGS model see:

  • Papadomichelaki X., Magoutas B., Halaris C., Apostolou D., Mentzas G., (2006), A Review of Quality Dimensions in E-government Services. In M. Wimmer et. al. (Eds.): EGOV 2006, Krakow, Poland, September 4-8 2006, Proceedings. LNCS 4084 Springer 2006, pp. 128–138. download paper

  • Halaris C., Magoutas B., Papadomichelaki X., Mentzas G., (2007), Classification and Synthesis of Quality Approaches in E-government Services. Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, Volume 17, Number 4, 2007 , pp. 378-401(24) download paper

For the 360 perspective of quality of e-government services used in MERIT, see:

  • Magoutas, B., Halaris C., Mentzas G., (2007), An Ontology for the Multi-perspective Evaluation of Quality in E-Government Services. In M. Wimmer et. al. (Eds.): EGOV 2007, Regensburg, Germany, September 3-7, 2007, Proceedings. LNCS 4656 Springer 2007, pp. 318-329, download paper .

##Videos

MERIT Demo

##Downloads:

MERIT is a sourceforge open source project available here