E-Government: Towards Electronic Democracy

The TCGOV 2005 international conference on e-government was held at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano during March 2–4, 2005. The conference was initiated by the working group “Towards Electronic Democracy” (TED) of the European Science Foundation and was jointly organized by the Free University ofBozen-Bolzano,theMunicipalityofBozen-Bolzano,theTEDWorkingGroup, and the IFIP Working Group 8.5. The conference addressed a large spectrum of issues that are relevant and have to be investigated for a successful transition from the traditional form of government to a new form known as e-government. The main focus was on the following topics: – improving citizen participation and policy making (e-democracy) – government application integration – semantic Web technologies for e-government – security aspects for e-government services Two sessions were dedicated to e-democracy, an emerging area within- government that seeks to enhance democratic processes and provide increased opportunities for individuals and communities to be involved in governmental decisions.Thecontributionsofthesetwosessionscovermorefundamentalresults and insights as well as experiences from di?erent countries. Another focus was on government application integration and the use of - mantic Web technologies, which are important technical aspects on the agenda of e-government research. Di?erent architectures for the integration and orch- tration of distributed services and processes were presented along with two case studies. Three papers about Semantic Web technologies discussed the use of ontologies in e-government.