Wiki-Based Conceptual Modeling: An Experience with the Public Administration

Abstract

Abstract. The dematerialization of documents produced within the Public Administration (PA) represents a key contribution that Information and Communication Technology can provide towards the modernization of services within the PA. The availability of proper and precise models of the administrative procedures, and of the specific "entities" related to these procedures, such as the documents involved in the procedures or the organizational roles performing the activities, is an important step towards both (1) the replacement of paper-based procedures with electronic-based ones, and (2) the definition of guidelines and functions needed to safely store, catalogue, manage and retrieve in an appropriate archival system the electronic documents produced within the PA. In this paper we report the experience of customizing a semantic wiki based tool (MoKi) for the modeling of administrative procedures (processes) and their related "entities" (ontologies). The tool has been used and evaluated by several domain experts from different Italian regions in the context of a national project. This experience, and the reported evaluation, highlight the potential and criticality of using semantic wiki-based tools for the modeling of complex domains composed of processes and ontologies in a real setting.

People-Centred Production Design

“…The Metasonic Suite (https://www.metasonic.de/en) is used for modelling, validating and executing work processes applying the subject-oriented methodology (Fleischmann et al 2012) • MoKi-a wiki-based collaborative tool for the enterprise modelling. MoKi Christl et al 2008;Rospocher et al 2009;Ghidini et al 2012) has already been applied to a number of collaborative settings (Casagni et al 2011;Dragoni et al 2013), also in multilingual scenarios (Bosca et al 2014;Dragoni et al 2014a), and for the analysis of business processes (Dragoni et al 2014b;Di Francescomarino et al 2014). MoKi is used for analysing the propagation of workplace changes (including changes related to processes and non-procedural aspects), as well as for supporting discussions, notifications and approvals related to potential workplace improvements Specifically, these technologies should empower workers in Company B's goods-receiving and quality-checking department by allowing them to:…”

Achieving Interoperability through Semantic Technologies in the Public Administration

“…In order to face the interoperability issues described in the previous section, and to create a common reference model shared by all the regions belonging to the project, a common conceptual schema was proposed to the experts of the different task-teams to guide the modeling of their administrative procedures, the related documents, and the services to be provided by the document management system. This conceptual schema, whose simplified version is graphically depicted in Figure 1 using an Entity-Relationship notation, was developed by the experts in archival, computer, and organizational sciences working in the central tasks of the ProDe project, and it represents an extension of the one presented in [3] 3 . In detail, the new entity Service is used to describe the functionalities required to the document management system by a given task in order to handle the documents managed within the task.…”

“…Overall, 2255 wiki pages have been created, 6809 revisions realized, 710 pages deleted and 71 pages renamed by both peripheral and central task users. Moreover, as comprehensively presented in [3], ProDeMoKi Platform users have been interviewed, by means of an on-line questionnaire, about the ease of use and the usefulness of the ProDeMoKi tool, in order to collect their subjective impressions.…”

“…Lessons Learned. In the evaluation of ProDeMoKi described in [3], we observed that about 45% of the users considered the collaboration support provided by ProDeMoKi one of the major strength of the tool and that users positively perceive its overall usefulness for the collaborative modeling of documents and processes. Such a usefulness is perceived more strongly by employees working in teams constituted by more than two persons (on average the usefulness of ProDeMoKi has been judged 3.8 out of a 5-point Likert scale for teams with more than two persons versus 2.8 for those with less than three).…”

“…Second, it provides an attempt to report lessons learned and future steps especially related to how semantic-wiki based systems can support distributed modeling, the confluence of terminologies into shared lexicons, the adoption of (standard) pre-existing terminologies and metadata when available, and the integration of different entities for the construction of complex models. This contribution extends the work presented in [3] where the experience of the ProDe project was analyzed by looking at the usefulness of MoKi to support the collaboration process between knowledge engineers and domain experts in their modeling activities, and where aspects related to interoperability and construction or usage of shared knowledge were not considered.…”