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Integrating OSLO semantics in word processors

Published: 18 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Documents issued by the government such as public tenders or policy documents often lack consistent semantics, which leads to ambiguities and misinterpretations. Take for example granting subsidies to companies. The conditions for entitlement to a subsidy are checked against the government’s authentic data sources. However, the various governments and administrations have different definitions of, for instance, a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), which can be derived from a European legal framework or a financial perspective. The absence of uniform definitions for these terms results in a lot of duplicate efforts for both the government and the entrepreneur. To tackle the problem of semantics, Flanders founded an interoperability program, Open Standards for Linked Organizations (OSLO) whose primary goal is to ensure that systems exchanging data can use a common vocabulary. However, despite the results made by OSLO, they do not reach policy-makers working mainly on the legal and organizational levels. We developed two tools to close this gap and make semantic agreements available at these levels. With OSLO Lookup, we provide a simple user interface that lets users query the semantics assets, while the OSLO365 plugin allows embedding the semantic assets in a Microsoft Word document. To assess the relevance and usability of these tools, servants of a local administration were interviewed. This paper outlines that semantic agreements that are mainly used on the data level can provide added value at an organizational and legal level as well.

References

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Raf Buyle, Laurens De Vocht, Mathias Van Compernolle, Dieter De Paepe, Ruben Verborgh, Ziggy Vanlishout, Bjórn De Vidts, Peter Mechant, and Erik Mannens. 2016. OSLO: Open standards for linked organizations. In Proceedings of the international conference on electronic governance and open society: Challenges in Eurasia. 126–134.
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Raf Buyle, Mathias Van Compernolle, Dieter De Paepe, Jens Scheerlinck, Peter Mechant, Erik Mannens, and Ziggy Vanlishout. 2018. Semantics in the wild: a digital assistant for Flemish citizens. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance. 1–6.
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European Commission and Directorate-General for Informatics. 2017. New European interoperability framework : promoting seamless services and data flows for European public administrations. Publications Office. https://doi.org/doi/10.2799/360327
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Riitta Jääskeläinen. 2010. Think-aloud protocol. Handbook of translation studies 1 (2010), 371–374.
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Hendrik Mildebrath. 2021. Data Governance Act. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2021/690674/EPRS_BRI(2021)690674_EN.pdf
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Klaus Schwab. 2017. The fourth industrial revolution. Currency.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEGOV '22: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
October 2022
623 pages
ISBN:9781450396356
DOI:10.1145/3560107
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 November 2022

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Author Tags

  1. Interoperability
  2. Linked Data
  3. Semantic Web
  4. Word processors
  5. e-Government

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ICEGOV 2022

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Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%

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