a linked open data and semantic citizen vocabulary

International Conference Internet Technologies & Society 2017

A LINKED OPEN DATA AND SEMANTIC CITIZEN VOCABULARY FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: A FIRST EXPLORATION AND IMPLEMENTATION Martijn Hartog and Bert Mulder eSociety Institute of The Hague University of Applied Sciences Johanna Westerdijkplein 75, 2521 EN The Hague, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT Citizen participation and structural involvement in a participatory society and public administration becomes more extensive in The Netherlands as digital developments are vastly implemented. The difference in language and definitions from the system-world of professionals and the life-world of citizens feed a mutual incomprehensibility. Establishing more confidence and avoiding miscommunications in collaborations between public administrations and the participatory society a citizen vocabulary was realized at the Municipality of The Hague in a Linked Open Data format, defining relationships, qualities, mapping the structure of a knowledge domain, concepts that are machine readable using XML, RDF and SPARQL. This study concludes with the potential added value of a citizen vocabulary: improving citizens queries by standardizing terms, optimizing search results by improving their selection, organizing information, and adding statements. In practice the vocabulary could be integrated into websites and apps as part of the ontologies that governments use. KEYWORDS Linked Open Data, Semantic Web, citizen vocabulary, Public Administration, participatory society

1. INTRODUCTION Citizens' digital access to government information and decision-making are seen together as important elements for a vital society. The idea is that a transparent and open government can stimulate citizens' participation. Their usefulness and necessity have been described in the recent decades in a series of reports (Council for Public Management, 2010; Scientific Council of Government Policy, 2012). At the same time, this development has been critically investigated (Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations, 2009; Bandringa and Van Engelenburg, 2016). In the coming years, the digital participation of citizens and digital involvement of citizens in the government will increase further. This is the result of the increasing digitization of citizens and government, the increasing amount of information and the greater importance of the participatory society in which the citizen is more likely to take responsibility. In an information society digital communication plays a central role in these developments, and the quality of that communication strongly influences the quality of the open and transparent government. Simply put, miscommunication can lead to an unworkable situation. That communication is not always optimal. Not only is the style of language used in documents and forms differ from the language of citizens, also the content terms themselves may be unknown to citizens. Language style and terminology of the government differ from those of citizens. It is the linguistic difference between the system world of professionals and the life world of the informal environment of citizens. Facilitating the digital communication between citizens and government is therefore becoming increasingly important. One way to contribute to do this, is to have government and citizens participate together in the design of a citizen vocabulary. The aim of this explorative research and development study is to contribute bridging the gap between two ‘languages’ by introducing the concept of a citizen vocabulary in combination with semantic web technologies and Linked Open Data. It honors the terms that citizens use exactly for what they are: citizenship terms. Where the terminology of the professional domain is standardized in data vocabularies,

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that does not apply to those of citizens. A citizen vocabulary does that: it identifies the terms that citizens use, describes them in a computer-readable way and connects them to the equivalent terms of professionals. To be able to translate the words and terms used by citizens into words and terms used by the government, there is a need for standards, infrastructure and availability of data and services. It is therefore essential that a citizen vocabulary will be part of the coherent system of information provision within government and social institutions.

2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY This exploratory research consisted of two phases. One was an explorative and inventory research of current initiatives of consumer and citizen vocabularies and ontologies. The other was a development stage of an ontology and semantic citizen vocabulary. During the development stage the research was conducted with the help of the Municipality of The Hague, the Quality Institute Dutch Municipalities of the Local Government Association (VNG/KING) and Notubiz (National supplier of Council and State Information Systems). Explorations and developments were partly made by Bachelor students of the educational programs Information Management and Services as well as Software Engineering / Computer Science of The Hague University of Applied Sciences.

3. TRANSPARENCY AND PARTICIPATORY SOCIETY The Netherlands sees great importance in transparency and openness of government. In this context, The Netherlands has joined the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a global initiative to make governments function better through openness. Transparency and openness of government activities play a central role and all participants describe an action plan and a vision of the Open Government. The Netherlands focuses on three points: encourage Open Data, ask citizens their opinion more often through the internet and make government information easier to find. A transparent government, facilitating government and accessible government are the three core values of the action plan drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations with a number of other government agencies and civil society organizations. The government wants to encourage citizens to quickly and easily find their way in the public sector. An important point of departure is that citizens want to be more involved and to think about and decide on policies. In addition, an equivalent information position can help - the policy and legislative process should be as transparent as possible, involving all stages such as policy preparation, implementation, effectuation and evaluation (Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations: 2013a). In transparency, a distinction can be made between passive and active transparency. In passive transparency, the municipality ensures that the information is accessible, but the citizen is able to seek and find government information. The responsibility lies with the citizen. With active transparency, the government disseminates information among the citizens of which they should be informed (Brandsma et al, 2010). The role of the citizen in society changes from passive to active, he has to take care of himself more and more and for the care of his neighbor. In addition, the government wants to make citizens more involved in decision-making. In recent years, new forms of participation have been encouraged, both locally and nationally. Particularly at local level, participation of citizens is most available, regularly successful and provides added value. "The added value is that citizens have sufficient time and opportunity to be well informed and that they can work together to solve problems" (Levenaar, 2009). The change from passive to active citizenship leads to a do-democracy where "doing" is central, rather than talking, debating or lobbying (Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations, 2013b). The Dutch School of Public Administration and Planning Agency for the Environment (2014) called for creative and initiative-rich citizens and businesses to play a greater role in solving social issues. When policies are conducted by residents, the government can perform it more effectively according to a research into innovation of citizenship participation in the Province Overijssel (Wiebusch and Moulijn, 2013). Participation is defined in different ways. In the context of administrative law, participation is a form of policy in which citizens, individually or organized, have the opportunity, directly or indirectly, to influence the development, implementation and/or evaluation of policies (Peeters, 2012). According to Jager-Vreugdenhil (2011) it is important that concepts of self-control and participation are not intertwined.

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In self-governance, citizens own their own initiatives and the government is mostly asked to participate. Sonja van der Arend describes interactive policy as: "Interactive policy is the idea, method and practice to try to change the role of government and citizens by inviting citizens (and other third parties) to participate in making government policy or plan, to design the participation process, to organize and guide through a process-maker, and measure the quality of policies and plans to the support of the participants (government, citizens and other stakeholders" (2007). If citizens manage or introduce their own initiatives, they reduce the distance between citizens and the government, which also results in an improved relationship between the parties involved. By involving citizens in the decision-making process, democratic content is increased. One of the forms of more direct democracy is civic participation within existing structures of democracy (Klijn and Edelenbos, 2006). Citizens get a greater sense of responsibility, which makes the formation of coalitions with other parties, including the government, easier (Burby, 2013). This reduces the gap between citizens and the government. The gap between citizens and government is one of the reasons that the government realized they had to involve citizens in the government. The contribution of citizens' ideas, wishes and views can provide additional creativity, experience, knowledge and information so that local authorities can make a better analysis of the planning area (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004). By giving more and more citizens the opportunity to contribute to political governance, confidence in politics can increase again. Therefor it is key that citizens are invited to be involved as early as possible and to control as much as possible (Klijn and Edelenbos, 2006; Burby, 2013).

4. DIGITAL CONTEXT Another reason for exploring a citizen vocabulary lies in digital developments: not only because citizens themselves become more and more digital, but also because linked data is available to make digital citizenship as a generic service possible. Digital developments over the past few decades led to registrable and administrative applications, intensive communication through the Internet, personal ICT through smaller and cheaper, permanent online through mobile applications. But over the coming decades, these will be complemented by (at least) three new ICT developments: Smart web: The Semantic Web and Linked Open Data; Smart data: Big Data and analytics; Smart world: Internet of Things. The development of the Internet led in the first decade to the linking of information (web 1.0: website development) and in the second to connecting people (web 2.0: the social web). Without the importance of these themes, the third decade of the Internet will be characterized by connecting knowledge (web 3.0: the semantic web). This is done by computer-readable metadata capture, the descriptive information of information. This commitment applies not only to the terms themselves, but also to their qualities, so that they become "entities" or "concepts" that can form the base for actual substantive editing by computers. For the usefulness of a digital citizen vocabulary, the development of the technology of the semantic web (linked open data) is essential. In the annex, the technical basis is described in more detail. The large increase in the amount of data creates advanced ways of storing, analyzing and presenting data. The current large amounts of high diversity data (such as social media data) are also referred to as Big Data. Big Data is unstructured data that has no set data model and is not ordered in a predetermined manner. About 80% of business data are unstructured (Wieringa, 2016). In the formal description according to Gartner research firm, it is at least about three factors: 1. The amount of data (volume); 2. The speed at which data is received and requested (velocity); 3. The diversity of data (variety). We speak of Big Data if this data is digitally available. The data can be anything like video, audio, text and numbers. It is increasingly suggested that Big Data does not describe scope, but development. It contains two components. First, the increasingly advanced hardware and software makes it possible to collect, edit and store more data. Secondly, the statistics make it possible to find meaning in a set of separate dates. By collecting the data, new insights can be created. In the longer term, Big Data will contribute to a data driven government and data driven democracy. A citizen vocabulary makes information from such data for citizens easier accessible in their own language.

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In the context of this research on a citizen vocabulary, 'Internet of Things' is less important, but for the government it becomes an important source of information. The Internet of Things is a network of physical objects such as vehicles, roads, devices and buildings that are equipped with sensors and can communicate with each other. It leads to an intelligence world (or smart city) by collecting and exchanging data about physical reality and refers to the situation in which people-operated computers (desktops, tablets and smartphones) will be in the minority on the Internet. In the long time, it means that our policies get a more 'real time' character and become less dependent on research, questionnaires and mathematical models. Table 1. Differences in world of professionals and citizens Citizens life-world Emotional closeness Informal action Incidental interest Informal social network Mixed levels of understanding Flexible work Integrated tasks Day-to-day language Practical skills Informal appointments

Professionals systems-world Professional distance Formal protocol Structural attention Formal professional network Professional understanding Fixed or planned work Specialized tasks Professional jargon Professional knowledge Formal appointments

The large scale adoption of digital solutions by citizens creates new challenges for designers and governments in three domains: quality, complexity and scale. Quality – people speak their own language. In our own lives we speak our own language. We talk about money and not ‘liquidity’. People use their own language, where professionals need more precise terminology to do their work (see table 1). For digital solutions to work for citizens, they need to speak the language of citizens. Complexity – diversity requires integration. The growing diversity of digital solutions in the household creates technical challenges, data inconsistencies and information overload. Products and services may be designed to work effectively for a single user, but often not to interoperate with the products and services of other providers. Government services provide individual services, often not integrated or providing a comprehensive overview of all interactions with government. Scale – networks require effective solutions. People live and grow in groups and networks. That is why citizens need to be supported and empowered at a different scale than the individual. Digital solutions need to be effective at the level of groups, neighborhoods, towns, cities, regions and society. Their data need to be interchangeable and consistent and their services scalable and understandable at every level.

5. A CITIZEN VOCABULARY FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONS A citizen vocabulary is a verified “dictionary” of terms used by citizens. The terms in the vocabulary can be linked to each other or with other terms such as those of professionals. Both the terms and the connections are defined in a computer-accessible format. The collection of citizen terms itself is defined with a brief description and other collection(s) of descriptive metadata identify relationships between the terms. With this, a citizen vocabulary facilitates the digital connection between two worlds: the living world of the citizen with the system world of government. Citizen vocabularies aims to provide clear (digital) communication for all, both for citizens and businesses and the government. The need and necessity for citizens to communicate digitally with the government has increased in recent years, driven by the increase of digital government information. When government information is understandable, it improves communication between citizens and the government and can thereby stimulate citizens' participation. But often government information appears unclear, too complex or difficult to understand. This may be due to the style of formal language use, the complexity of the argumentation, or the clarity of forms or navigation on screens. One of the aspects that can improve the quality of communication is to connect with the language of citizens. The language used by citizens themselves may differ significantly from that of the government (Koopman and Pinxten, 2016).

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When citizens are looking for certain information, without knowing exactly what the usual term is for it, a citizen vocabulary can help. When a citizen's vocabulary identifies both the terms used by citizens and professionals, they can be replaced by professional terms during a search. When a citizen searches for 'traffic light', the citizen vocabulary can add the terms 'traffic light control system'. Extending the citizens’ query with related professional terms will improve the quality of the search result. Connecting the life world vocabulary with that of the system world reinforces the possibility that citizens can get involved with the public administrations and simplifies the access to information. A digital vocabulary containing citizen’s terms may provide other benefits. "When citizens become self-employed, they must not only be well-informed but also be supported in the performance of tasks that they shape themselves" (Mulder and Hartog, 2015). Because a citizen vocabulary can not only include current but possibly also historical links, a citizen vocabulary also facilitates access to longer term information. The functionality of a citizen vocabulary can be built into search engines, or in the search function on web pages. Therefore, the search query is automatically translated or enriched in order to improve the search query and consequently the result. Integrating a citizen vocabulary into a search engine causes the search query to become independent of the language (or "term independent"), which in theory shows the citizen what she should see. Of course, that replacement or enrichment of terms can be shown to the citizen by listing the search result. With the use of popular general search engines like Google, one is likely to see the risk of very many relevant websites. These are not always related to the search because they can also show websites in which only part of the search query occurs. The citizen must then make more effort to refine or specify the search.

5.1 How does a Citizen Vocabulary Work A citizen vocabulary realizes several forms of added value based on a number of features: capturing citizens’ terms, connecting citizens’ terms to professional terms, connecting terms to additional information such as qualities and additional explanation, providing higher quality and easier communication, and allow automated processing by computers. In different domains, the terminology of citizens and professionals differs. A citizen vocabulary’s first function is to capture citizen terms. In addition, a structured list is drawn up listing the citizens' terms of citizenship. In order to establish a clear understanding of the language of citizens, terms can be extracted from different sources: An identification of terms from online and offline text containing citizen terms, an identification of citizen terms by professionals who work with citizens and a broad inventory among citizens. The collected terms must be ordered and 'cleaned': stripped of doubles, wrong spellings and conjugations. A second function of a citizen vocabulary is the linking of terms. A distinction is made between internal and external connections. With internal connection the terms in a list are not just loose terms, those terms may also be connected amongst each other by semantic relationships. Through the explicit creation of these connections, a thesaurus is created. A thesaurus is a post-coordinating information arrangement, in which an ordered set of chosen terms whose form and the mutual semantic relationships are recorded (Becker, 2010). There are different types of relationships, distinguished into equivalence relationships, hierarchical relationships and associative relationships. With external connection terms in a collection can also be linked to other, such as professional terms. By associating citizen terms with professional terms, a citizen vocabulary creates a connection between terminology of professionals and the "slang" of citizens. That way a search query of a citizen becomes more ‘language-independent’, which will in theory lead to the better search results. The challenge here is the question of which professional terms refer to the citizens' terms. That challenge varies greatly per domain: in terms of health care, the professional terminology is more highly standardized and is used worldwide. The Dutch Land Registry (Kadaster) has not only defined its own terms but also described linked open data. In the public administration policy process, that standardization has not yet been implemented, and also linked open data is not described.

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5.2 Assigning Qualities and Automatic Processing Qualities can be assigned to terms. These qualities, also called properties, are added to terms by describing them by so-called triplets formed by subject predicate object. The different qualities of a city are, for example, city-has-location, city-has-population, city-has-coat of arms, city-is-part of town. Adding qualities to concepts lays the foundation for computers to "understand" concepts - by connecting the qualities of semantic networks that can be used to 'reason' and create 'meaning'. When it is clear that a "council meeting" belongs to a decision-making process of a "local government" or "municipality" that municipalities use a "council information system (CIS)" and that a "municipality" has a geographical location, we can ask 'when is the next council meeting' - on which the system will use the current geo location to see in which municipality the questioner is located to determine that council meetings in a CIS and then search for the next council meeting on the current location in the particular CIS and present the date. Terms in a citizen vocabulary may also refer to additional relevant information such as an explanation of the topic, process information or official documents such as procedures, laws and regulations. The general term 'motion' can contain general explanation and information on its role in the decision-making process. The requirements for digital information are getting higher. People expect quick and adequate information. Websites should deliver results in a few seconds to retain visitors and not frustrate them. When searching and finding take too long users loose interest. A citizen vocabulary can help users quickly provide the desired information. This imposes requirements on the construction of a citizen vocabulary. The terms must be well-chosen and lead to fast, reliable, sufficient and complete information. Being able to seek information when the government term is completely different can support citizens in contact with the municipality. When the desired information is reached quickly, it is easier to retrieve information more often. Today's computer systems are excellently capable of retrieving promptly retrieved information. Smart search engines and search algorithms make it quick and easy to deliver information on the World Wide Web quickly and easily. By using a citizen vocabulary in search engines for the communication between citizens and government, the access to information becomes more manageable. New web technology, which will be applied in this period of the semantic web, is that of linked open data, described in more detail in the following chapters. The Netherlands adopted the SKOS standard to describe the internal references between terms in a dictionary (making the terms a thesaurus). SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) uses RDF (Rich Description Framework) standard to describe the relationships between terms. By describing the basic relationships between terms in a machine-readable way, networks of terms that together describe a knowledge- domain arise. The RDF format allows the publication of structured vocabularies on the Semantic Web. Examples of SKOS relationships are terms like preflabel, altlabel, broader, narrower, topconceptof, hastop concept. Those familiar with it recognize the basic relationships between terms in a thesaurus. To be able to automatically deduce the meaning of information and metadata, draw conclusions and create argumentations, the concepts and their qualities must be formally described. To describe qualities in ontology or a vocabulary (structured collections of concepts with qualities), Web Ontology Language (OWL) is used as one of the most widely used standards. As a vocabulary ontology structurally classifies categories, classes, subclasses, instances, individuals, properties creating ‘concepts’ it becomes possible to define the relations, characteristics and meaning of concepts/terminology from a citizens’ point of view (Noy and McGuinness, 2008).

6. PROCESS REALIZING AND DEVELOPING A CITIZEN VOCABULARY There are significant differences in the size of the different International examples of citizen vocabularies, e.g. The American Open Access Collaborative Consumer/Citizen Health Vocabulary (Zeng and Tse, 2006; Zeng et al, 2007) and the Italian Consumer Medical Vocabulary (Cardillo, 2011; Cardillo, 2015), as mentioned in Hartog and Mulder (2017), and the eGovernment Core Vocabulary by ISA2. But regardless of the differences, citizen vocabularies are realized in a number of identical development steps. A distinction is made in ten specific steps, which can be summarized as four phases as displayed in table 2.

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Table 2. Development Steps Citizen Vocabulary Four-step phases Identification of (citizen) terms Control and selection of terms Linking selected terms

Evaluating feasibility of citizen vocabulary

Ten-step process Preparation Gathering of terms First validation Describe Linked Open Data Linking terms Second validation Testing of citizen vocabulary Usage of citizen vocabulary Management of citizen vocabulary

Step 1 Identification of (citizen) terms. The first step is to collect terms used by citizens. This can be done in several ways: Automatically by analysis of digital documents, using search queries from citizens or by asking professionals who work with citizens Step 2 Control, validation and description. The collected terms are cleaned: eliminated from duplications, misspellings, related terms or professional terms. In addition, a suggestion for citizen terminology is described in XML using a linked data format. Step 3 Linking selected terms. The described citizen terms are associated with professional terms from other collections. Also, the links between the citizen terms and professional terms must be checked. Because those who create links should be able to understand both terms, this validation should be performed by a specific team of domain professionals. Consultation of informatics is also important to check linked data descriptions. In addition, the citizen vocabulary is tested for effectiveness by, among other things, integrating it into a search engine and calculate the changing revenue, capture and precision, and the occurrence of possible errors. Step 4 Evaluation and feasibility. The use of the citizen vocabulary in applications is being tested: is it possible that the vocabulary well integrates with other applications? Are the ontologies used accurate and available? In the research project the acquisition of citizen terminology in Dutch public administration was done using an existing thesaurus. The thesaurus contains the important terms as they appear in civil council meeting minutes of 160 municipalities (nearly half the number of municipalities) in The Netherlands. The thesaurus is based on the relation between the terms in the minutes of the council meetings. Originally developed as access method to a yet to be realised municipal council meeting archive here the thesaurus is used as a starting point for a comprehensive citizen vocabulary, since it covers all the themes occurring in the decision making process. This approach is only a starting point because the language in civil council meetings, although geared to citizen representatives, is closely aligned to that of the administrative procedures. Therefore, the identified terms should be seen as a starting point and complemented with terms that are more related to the language of citizens. Luckily, in political decision making process, there is relatively little discrepancy between citizen terms and professional terms; e.g. ‘motion’. The choice for only policy process terms in this research was made because it is a very small set of terms, they can be completely and explicitly described and their actual use has great added value. For the realisation of a first concept – taken as an interface for a Council Information System (CIS) for the Municipality of The Hague – the used dataset of terms is narrowed down to terms used in the process of policy development and decision making. Due to the narrow focus, a comprehensive dataset is easily established and despite a small scale the dataset has still high added-value. For instance, when used to improve the accessibility to a CIS.

7. PROCESS ONTOLOGY PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AT A NATIONAL LEVEL For the realized vocabulary it was decided to focus on the terms used in the process of public administration decision-making: stakeholders/third parties, process activities, related documents and results (as described in table 3).

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Table 3. Entities and examples Entities Parties Activities Related documents Results

Examples Persons and organisations, mayor, alderman, registrar, council member, citizen, official Council meetings, commission meetings Minutes, motion, reports, policy statement Votes, decision

In order to describe the ontology, it is necessary to clarify the structure between the different terms. The first implementation used a small ontology of 54 words, classified in main classes and subclasses. Next, possible synonyms were identified.

7.1 Construction of the Linked Open Data Ontology The ontology was described using defined standards which enables the description of metadata in a structured manner: i.e. RDF, RDFS, SKOS and OWL. RDF states that the description of a concept is shaped as triples, which comprises three elements: 1. Subject The to be described concept 2. Attributes One of the characters 3. Object Content or value of the character The subjects and objects can be described as classes, and the attributes as properties (see figure 1).

Figure 1. First description in ontology

In the second part of the ontology, the concepts are identified; the ‘classes’. The relationship between the different concepts is described with use of RDFS (RDF-Schema) and SKOS – in triples which are comprised of subjects, attributes and objects. The 54 terms of the ontology are 54 classes and the relations are indicated by the following terms: 1. Label The name of the class 2. Comment The description of the class 3. isDefinedBy The URI of the ontology, entailing class 4. subClassOF Some classes are subject to a main class, a URI is used for linkage. 5. skos:note A reference to a source for more information on the class 6. skos:prefLabel The term used by professionals 7. skos:altLabel Synonym for the class, this are also citizen terms Based on the description above, the class ‘Council Meeting’ in the citizen vocabulary is described as figure 2:

Figure 2. Description of the class ‘Council Meeting’

The terms can be labelled with properties, via RDFS and if appropriate OWL. In this first concept of the Citizen Vocabulary for Public Administration, 11 properties for concepts are defined. Each object, in turn, can also be the subject of subsequent triples, in which are also assigned properties. The definition of the property ‘Council Member – ParticipatesIn – Meeting’ can be illustrated as figure 3:

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Figure 3. Definition of a property ‘Council Member’

As mentioned earlier we integrated the citizen vocabulary as a function in a web environment and used to assess the user friendliness of the CIS of the Municipality of The Hague. The architecture in steps: 1. The user accesses the website; 2. The search request enters a SPARQL endpoint server; 3. The SPARQL endpoint server consults the Citizen Vocabulary Public Administration; 4. The results of the query from step 3 are send back to the website; 5. The website formulates a SQL-search request, based on the result in step 4; 6. The improved search request is carried out on the CIS; 7. The results of this search request are forwarded to the website; 8. The website shows the results to the user. In order to simulate the technical construction for this study we used a Zend Framework (see figure 4), which as a software solution is able to simulate different elements in one (website, SPARQL, endpoint, formulation of search requests, receiving and displaying).

Figure 4. Citizen vocabulary integrated in website to CIS

7.2 A Coherent Network of Vocabularies This research project is a first exploration. Due to constraints of time and means we could not attend to some challenges we encountered during our conversations with the experts involved. We will cite them here, because they point forward to a possible architecture of national network of vocabularies. One of the criteria for the creation of vocabularies is reuse: it optimizes the words most used by users in a certain context and tries to avoid to include ‘all terms used by all, all of the time’. Following this rule, we distinguished different vocabularies – one distinguishing between terms for the process of policy making (the in The Netherlands are the same nationwide) and the professional terms used in different domains such as mobility, economy, culture, social and welfare and education (see figure 5). The second distinction was between the terms at the national level, and terms at the local level. That would result is a network of vocabularies where an individual dossier might be described by a generic process term from the national level, one or more professional terms from a professional vocabulary and some terms specific to the locality. The challenge is how these would form an inherent part of the network of professional ontologies. In The Netherlands that is an early question, because at the level of government there is no coherent architecture for a network of vocabularies.

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Figure 5. Possible network of citizens’ vocabularies

8. CONCLUSION The project concludes that the practical realization of a citizen vocabulary for public governance is possible. There are initiatives in the health care domain that have been published or investigated. They illustrate a step-by-step development. While the implementation has been described in detail about the application of these citizen vocabularies, little information is available. A linked open data (LOD) description for a citizen vocabulary is recommended: that makes the vocabulary more easily deployable in a variety of digital systems such as websites, desktops and mobile apps increasing its usefulness. A citizen vocabulary has a number of possible applications that can already be provided: Improving the quality of a search query first by replacing term(s) used by a preferred professional term and second be expanding the terms with other appropriate terms. A citizen’s vocabulary may also improve the results of search queries. This may be realized by replacing of professional terms by citizen terms, by adding additional explanatory information to professional terms or by improving the communication of government by serving as a reference to the most desirable citizen terms for that context. When citizen terms and professional terms are developed into well-structured ontology, citizen terms and professional terms together can form the base for argumentation in the forthcoming development of artificial intelligence in the government domain. Good use of the citizen vocabulary illustrates that the life-world is connected to the system-world while the citizen asks questions in his own words, he receives high-quality information from sources of information that mainly use professional terms. The realization of a citizen vocabulary requires a strategic vision that can be developed by first explorations like this one. That vision must form the base for a thoughtful development of not only the vocabulary itself but also its integration with the existing or in development data vocabularies and the data landscape. Only then an optimal solution can arise. In future research we intend to further develop this concept described in this exploration and its first realization. In addition, an exploration can be initiated for broader applications of a citizen vocabulary and the ability to build functionality into suppliers' products. A company such as Notubiz could serve as an inspiration. A Public Administration vocabulary should be designed to give citizens more control and possibilities for active participation with ensuring they are equipped and empowered for their quality of life. The design and development process of a digital environment for the collection, validation, linking of terms and relations can start directly. At the same time a further exploration of the practical future possibilities of semantic web technologies in the communication between government and citizens is needed but also in the longer term consequences when these terms will be instrumental in facilitating the application of artificial intelligence in advisory practices, in procedural decisions and in the support of political decision making. Even though this exploratory research is early, or maybe because of it, we clearly identified the strategic importance of the subject and the need for further research.

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International Conference Internet Technologies & Society 2017

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This paper is related to the ‘Government of the Future’ research programmes with the Municipality of The Hague (2012-2018) and the Province of South-Holland (2013-2018) in The Netherlands. The opinions of the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the governmental bodies. The authors would like to thank the interviewees for their constructive input.

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