Abstract
Need satisfaction plays a fundamental role in human well-being. Hence understanding citizens’ needs is crucial for developing a successful social and economic policy. This notwithstanding, the concept of need has not yet found its place in information systems and online tools. Furthermore, assessing needs itself remains a labor-intensive, mostly offline activity, where only a limited support by computational tools is available. In this paper, we make the first step towards employing need management in the design of information systems supporting participation and participatory innovation by proposing OpeNeeD, a family of ontologies for representing human needs data. As a proof of concept, OpeNeeD has been used to represent, enrich and query the results of a needs assessment study in a local citizen community in one of the Vienna districts. The proposed ontology will facilitate such studies and enable the representation of citizens’ needs as Linked Data, fostering its co-creation and incentivizing the use of Open Data and services based on it.
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Notes
- 1.
Due to differences in researchers’ epistemological positions, some researches prefer to use other terms instead of need assessment, such as creating and inferring explicit knowledge of needs (see e.g. [21]). In this paper, we try to use the term need assessment and other similar terms from a neutral perspective, without following or supporting a particular epistemological position.
- 2.
- 3.
“Leitbild Andernach 2030” http://www.andernach.de/de/leben_in_andernach/leitbildstadt.html.
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Acknowledgments
This work is funded through the project 855407 by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) under the program “ICT of the Future” between Nov. 2016 and Apr. 2019. Soheil Human is supported by the Jubilee Fund of the City of Vienna.
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Human, S., Fahrenbach, F., Kragulj, F., Savenkov, V. (2017). Ontology for Representing Human Needs. In: Różewski, P., Lange, C. (eds) Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web. KESW 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 786. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69548-8_14
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