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Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: an ontological approach

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Abstract

Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their constructive feedback, as well as Bahareh R. Heravi for her important suggestions which enhanced our ontological analysis. Parts of the work presented are related to the project “LEX-IS: Enabling Participation of the Youth in the Public Debate of Legislation among Parliaments, Citizens and Businesses in the European Union” which was funded by the European Commission under the 2006/1 eParticipation call.

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  1. Decision Support Systems and Management Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens, 9 Iroon Polytechniou Str. Zografou, Athens, Greece

    Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos, George Gionis, John Psarras & Dimitris Askounis

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  1. Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos
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  2. George Gionis
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  3. John Psarras
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  4. Dimitris Askounis
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Correspondence to Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos.

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Panagiotopoulos, P., Gionis, G., Psarras, J. et al. Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: an ontological approach. Oper Res Int J 11, 281–298 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12351-010-0081-3

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