USING E-MAPS AND SEMANTIC ANNOTATION FOR IMPROVING CITIZENS' AND ADMINISTRATIONS' INTERACTION

The high potential of modern ICT for supporting citizens’ and administrations’ interaction for the formulation of public policies has been extensively recognized by academics and practitioners, resulting in a rapid development of the e-participation domain in the last decade. Extensive research is required for developing appropriate advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) platforms that exploit and realize this potential to the highest possible extent. In this direction this paper describes an advanced ICT e-participation platform that has been developed having as main objective to improve the quantity and quality of interaction among citizens, and also with public administrations, concerning the formulation of public policies and decisions on environmental and energy issues, as part of the FEED (Federated e-Participation Systems for Cross-Societal Deliberation on Environmental and Energy Issues) project of the European Commission. It enables citizens and administrations to upload geographically referenced multimedia content (e.g. pictures, videos, etc.) on an electronic map of the area which the public policy or decision under discussion concerns, so that other interested citizens or administrations can easily access and download them. The proposed e-participation platform provides: i) federated relevant content from various sources, ii) efficient mechanisms for accessing this content based on maps, semantic annotation and ontologies, iii) additional stakeholders’ interaction capabilities through forum and petition functionalities. Finally, a pilot application of this platform for supporting e-participation/e-deliberation concerning important environmental and zoning public policies and decisions in the Flevoland region, Netherlands, which has been designed by the project consortium and is going to be implemented in the near future, is described.

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