1. Tuesday, 5 December, 2006 Athens, Greece
Workshop on KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT and SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES for ePARTICIPATION
Tuesday, 5 December, 2006
Athens, Greece

2. KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06
The problem:
Civil society disengages from formal political processes (such as voting and joining parties)
crisis of public trust in governments
The above threaten the representative model of democracy
The emerging field:
eParticipation is an emerging research domain that attempts to re-engage people in the democratic process by investigating the development and use of Information and Communication Technologies.
eParticipation aims at making decision-making more transparent, inclusive and accessible.
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

3. KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06
DEMO-net Objectives
To strengthen scientific, technological & social research excellence in eParticipation:
To achieve a lasting integration of currently fragmented research in eParticipation
To stimulate joint research in the agreed research areas of DEMO-net
To disseminate DEMO-net research amongst eParticipation stakeholders
To provide a barometer of research effectiveness for eParticipation in Europe by establishing a corpus of lessons learnt resource
to show what kind of projects have delivered what kind of results and thereby considered effective for eParticipation.
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

4. KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

5. Workshop on KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT and SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES for ePARTICIPATION
Professor Gregoris Mentzas
Director, Information Management Unit
Institute of Communication and Computer Systems
National Technical University of Athens

6. KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06
Motivation (1 of 2)
Role of IT in political participation in the Internet age and in broadening and deepening citizen participation in the political decision-making process
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 sheer availability of documents is not synonym of accessibility
citizens can comprehend and easily retrieve it.
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

7. KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06
Motivation (2 of 2)
Knowledge and semantic technologies are 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
Role of R&D in
linking between ontologies and general lexicons
automatic or semi-automatic ontology learning and population
semantic interpretation of linguistic content, etc.
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

8. KM and Semantic Technologies Workshop
We have invited 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
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

9. KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06
Objectives (1 of 2)
to map the various knowledge management and semantic technologies
available in the context of eParticipation;
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;
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

10. KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06
Objectives (2 of 2)
to think about the socio-economical issues
related to the adoption of knowledge management and semantic technologies in an eParticipation context.
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.
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

11. KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06
Agenda
13.45— Knowledge management aspects in eParticipation contexts
Andreas Rosendahl and Maria Wimmer, University of Koblenz-Landau
14.00— The need for semantic technologies to Support Policy-Making
Ann Macintosh,Napier University
14.15— An eParticipation ontology as basis for the Demo-net virtual centre of excellence
Maria Wimmer, University of Koblenz-Landau
14.30— Strategies to organize and access knowledge in a civic online community: the need and some research directions
Cristian Peraboni and Fiorella de Cindio, Università degli Studi di Milano
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

12. KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06
Agenda
14.45— NLP for eParticipation
Claudia Soria and Nicoletta Calzolari, CNR
15.00—15.15 Visualization of knowledge in the eParticipation ontology
Andreas Rosendahl, University of Koblenz-Landau
15.15—15.30 Coffee break
15.30— Exploiting current research
Moderator: Maria Wimmer, University of Koblenz-Landau
17.00—18.30 Exploring future research
Moderator: Ann Macintosh,Napier University
18.30 Closing of workshop
KM and SemTech in eParticipation, 5/12/06

13. Workshop on KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT and SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES for ePARTICIPATION
Thank you !!