Bridging the Gap between Citizens and Local Administrations with Knowledge-Based Service Bundle Recommendations

Abstract

The Italian Public Administration Services (IPAS) is a registry of services provided to Italian citizens likewise the Local Government Service List (UK), or the European Service List for local authorities from other nations. Unlike existing registries, IPAS presents the novelty of modelling public services from the view point of the value they have for the consumers and the providers. A value-added-service (VAS) is linked to a life event that requires its fruition, addresses consumer categories to identify market opportunities for private providers, and is described by non-functional-properties such as price and time of fruition. Where Italian local authorities leave the citizen-users in a daedalus of references to understand whether they can/have to apply for a service, the IPAS model captures the necessary back-ground knowledge about the connection between administrative legislation and service specifications, life events, and application contexts to support the citizen-users to fulfill their needs. As a proof of concept, we developed an operational Web environment named ASSO, designed to assist the citizen-user to intuitively create bundles of mandatory-by-legislation and recommended services, to accomplish his bureaucratic fulfillments. Although ASSO is an ongoing project, domain experts gave preliminary positive feedback on the innovativeness and effectiveness of the proposed approach.