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.