A Framework to Evaluate Information Quality in Public Administration Website

This paper presents a framework aimed at assessing the capacity of Public Administration bodies (PA) to offer a good quality of information and service on their web portals. Our framework is based on the extraction of “.it” domain names registered by Italian public institutions and the subsequent analysis of their relative websites. The analysis foresees an automatic gathering of the web pages of PA portals by means of web crawling and an assessment of the quality of their online information services. This assessment is carried out by verifying their compliance with current legislation on the basis of the criteria established in government guidelines1. This approach provides an ongoing monitoring process of the PA websites that can contribute to the improvement of their overall quality. Moreover, our approach can also hopefully be of benefit to local governments in other countries.

[1]  Jenny Edwards,et al.  An adaptive model for optimizing performance of an incremental web crawler , 2001, WWW '01.

[2]  Lili Wang,et al.  Evaluating Web-Based E-Government Services with a Citizen-Centric Approach , 2005, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[3]  Mauricio Marín,et al.  High-performance priority queues for parallel crawlers , 2008, WIDM '08.

[4]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Web crawling ethics revisited: Cost, privacy, and denial of service , 2006, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[5]  Steve Drew,et al.  The Effects of Website Quality on Adoption of E-Government Service: AnEmpirical Study Applying UTAUT Model Using SEM , 2012, ArXiv.

[6]  Sebastiano Vigna,et al.  Do Your Worst to Make the Best: Paradoxical Effects in PageRank Incremental Computations , 2004, WAW.

[7]  Maurizio Martinelli,et al.  Analysis of the Internet diffusion in the non-profit sector: the social digital divide in Italy , 2006, Scientometrics.

[8]  Vicente Pina,et al.  E-government and the transformation of public administrations in EU countries: Beyond NPM or just a second wave of reforms? , 2005, Online Inf. Rev..

[9]  Marc Najork,et al.  Web Crawling , 2010, Found. Trends Inf. Retr..

[10]  Carlos Castillo,et al.  Effective web crawling , 2005, SIGF.

[11]  Carmine Scavo,et al.  World wide web site design and use in public management , 1999 .

[12]  Marco Pellegrini,et al.  Medium sized crawling made fast and easy through Lumbricus webis , 2011, 2011 International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics.

[13]  M. J. Moon.  The Evolution of E-Government among Municipalities: Rhetoric or Reality? , 2002 .

[14]  Simon Fong,et al.  A web-based performance monitoring system for e-government services , 2009, ICEGOV '09.

[15]  Marco Maggini,et al.  A Multi-sequence Alignment Algorithm for Web Template Detection , 2011, KDIR.