Konstantinos Tarabanis

University of Macedonia | UOM · Department of Business Administration

The Greek government introduced in 2020 the National Registry of Administrative Procedures ("MITOS") to standardize public sector administrative processes, improve transparency, and provide accurate information to citizens and businesses. While various processes have been documented, the lack of standardized metadata and metaprocesses has led to am...

eGovernment's primary strategic priority is to offer electronic services to citizens. However, the complex structure of public organizations often makes it difficult for citizens to find the services they need. In response, governments have adopted web portals as a single point of contact. This research paper evaluates the usability of the Greek go...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant traction, primarily due to their potential disruptive influence across industries reliant on natural language processing . Governance stands out as one such sector. Notably, there has been a surge in research activity surrounding the implications of LLMs in deciphering complex legal corpora. Thi...

In the rapidly evolving field of real estate economics, the prediction of house prices continues to be a complex challenge, intricately tied to a multitude of socio-economic factors. Traditional predictive models often overlook spatial interdependencies that significantly influence housing prices. The objective of this study is to leverage Graph Ne...

The provision of public services is one of the main goals of public authorities worldwide. In this frame the availability of structured public service descriptions openly is very important since it can improve transparency and trust. The CPSV-AP specification has been proposed as a standard model to publish public service descriptions as Linked Ope...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant traction, primarily due to their potential disruptive influence across industries reliant on natural language processing. Governance stands out as one such sector. Notably, there has been a surge in research activity surrounding the implications of LLMs in deciphering complex legal corpora. This...

In the rapidly evolving field of real estate economics, the prediction of house prices continues to be a complex challenge, intricately tied to a multitude of socio-economic factors. However, traditional predictive models have often overlooked the spatial interdependencies that play a vital role in shaping housing prices. This study applies Graph N...

In a continuously evolving environment, organizations, including public administrations, need to quickly adapt to change and make decisions in real-time. This requires having a real-time understanding of their context that can be achieved by adopting an event-native mindset in data management which focuses on the dynamics of change compared to the...

Large language models possess tremendous natural language understanding and generation abilities. However, they often lack the ability to discern between fact and fiction, leading to factually incorrect responses. Open Government Data are repositories of, often times linked, information that is freely available to everyone. By combining these two t...

The public sector is an immensely valuable resource of data, which has the potential to be harnessed for a wide range of applications. However, there are several challenges that impede the collection and dissemination of this data, including high variability and rapid obsolescence. Despite these challenges, emerging technologies such as Artificial...

Open government data (OGD) are provided by the public sector and governments in an open, freely accessible format. Among various types of OGD, dynamic data generated by sensors, such as traffic data, can be utilized to develop innovative artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and applications. As AI algorithms, specifically Deep Neural Networks, n...

Collaborative activities require the formation of team(s), whose members may have weak or strong ties to each other, depending on the task to be completed. Team formation is a time consuming, complex, critical and essential process in the life cycle and development of the team, especially when the list of participants is disputed. To enhance learni...

At the domains of agriculture and livestock farming a large amount of data are produced through numerous heterogeneous sources including sensor data, weather/climate data, statistical and government data, drone/satellite imagery, video, and maps. This plethora of data can be used at precision agriculture and precision livestock farming in order to...

The provision of public services (PS) is at the heart of public authority operations as it directly affects citizens’ lives and the prosperity of society. Part of PS provision is publishing PS descriptions in online catalogues to inform citizens and promote transparency. The European Union has developed the Core Public Service Vocabulary Applicatio...

Traffic forecasting has been an important area of research for several decades, with significant implications for urban traffic planning, management, and control. In recent years, deep-learning models, such as graph neural networks (GNN), have shown great promise in traffic forecasting due to their ability to capture complex spatio–temporal depende...

The main purpose of this article is to provide an up-to-date understanding of the utilization and deployment of emerging technologies in the public sector, as this is reflected through nineteen recently funded Horizon 2020 research projects. For the needs of this study, we have adopted a well-known literature review method that enables a concept-ce...

Dynamic data (including environmental, traffic, and sensor data) were recently recognized as an important part of Open Government Data (OGD). Although these data are of vital importance in the development of data intelligence applications, such as business applications that exploit traffic data to predict traffic demand, they are prone to data qual...

Open Government Data (OGD), including statistical data, such as economic, environmental and social indicators, are data published by the public sector for free reuse. These data have a huge potential when exploited using Machine Learning methods. Linked Data technologies facilitate retrieving integrated statistical indicators by defining and execut...

The digital era includes the rapid generation of data, knowledge, and technologies. This demands changes in education and the way that people learn in general. Problem-Based Learning PBL enables active participation in the learning process and supports the development of transversal and lifelong learning skills. This paper presents a LA process to...

Accurately estimating the prices of houses is important for various stakeholders including house owners, real estate agencies, government agencies, and policy-makers. Towards this end, traditional statistics and, only recently, advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence models are used. Open Government Data (OGD) have a huge potential es...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain are two of the most prominent technologies having the potential to streamline public sector. The objective of this paper is to reveal the latest developments and trends regarding the utilization and deployment of these technologies in the public sector, as this is reflected through nineteen recently funde...

Public authorities worldwide provide a large number of Public Services (PS) to citizens, businesses and other authorities. In this context, they publish PS catalogues containing descriptions of these services, e.g. about cost, required documents, contact details, etc. Two main challenges in the design of PS catalogues are standardisation and intero...

With Open Data becoming more popular and more public bodies publishing their datasets, the need for educating prospective graduates on how they can use them has become prominent. This study examines the use of the Problem Based Learning (PBL) method and educational technologies to support the development of Open Data skills in university students....

A low-performing team can cause serious problems and have a substantial impact on the organization's performance. Unproductive teams frequently cause unnecessary interruptions and strategic failures. Despite extensive study on team building, the characteristics that play a role have received little attention. Our study's main purpose was to figure...

Emergency Departments (EDs) are the most overcrowded places in public hospitals. Machine learning can support decisions on effective ED resource management by accurately forecasting the number of ED visits. In addition, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques can help explain decisions from forecasting models and address challenges lik...

The provision of public services (PS) is at the heart of public authority operations as it directly affects citizens’ lives and the prosperity of society. Part of PS provision is publishing PS descriptions in an online catalogue to inform citizens and promote transparency. The European Commission has developed Core Public Service Vocabulary Applica...

Opening Government Data is a political priority in many countries. A large part of open data is numerical and concerns statistics thus can be easily processed and visualized. At the technical level, statistical data can be represented using linked open technologies. The resulting Linked Open Statistical Data (LOSD) enables developing data-driven se...

Machine learning and artificial intelligence models have the potential to streamline public services and policy making. Frequently, however, the patterns a model uncovers can be more important than the model’s performance. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) have been recently introduced as a set of techniques that enable explaining individua...

Collaborative operations involve the creation of a team(s), depending on the task that is needed to complete, these formations can have weak or strong links to each other. Team creation is a time-consuming, complicated, crucial and necessary process for the lifecycle of team growth, especially when the participant list is not known. If the atmosphe...

In recent years, game-based learning and gamification have increasingly been used within flipped classroom approaches. Many research showed that both approaches were efficient in conjunction in an active learning perspective. However, we observe that few games have been designed with use in the flipped classroom in mind, and there is therefore pote...

Problem based learning (PBL) supports the development of transversal skills and could underpin the training of a workforce competent to withstand the constant generation of new information. However, the application of PBL is still facing challenges, as educators are usually unsure how to structure student-centred courses, how to monitor students’ p...

Nowadays, education is called upon to fulfill its mission in complex and fast-changing environments. According to the OECD, globalization, democracy issues, security risks, ageing societies and modern cultures are the global mega-trends affecting the way education deploys its functions. Enterprise Architecture (EA), as a key enabler of strategy for...

The Once-Only Principle states that citizens and businesses provide data only once in contact with public administrations. So far, many European countries have started to implement the Once-Only Principle at national level, but its cross-border implementation is still fragmented and limited. This paper presents the development of a Reference Archit...

During the last decades, public authorities worldwide have invested heavily in electronic public services (PSs). This includes efforts for publishing information about PSs and for providing online PSs. Each of these efforts is based on an underlying PS Model, i.e. a data model developed for describing and/or developing PSs. Although many PS models...

An important part of Open Data is of statistical nature and describes economic and social indicators monitoring population size, inflation, trade, and employment. Combining and analysing Open Data from multiple datasets and sources enable the performance of advanced data analytics scenarios that could result in valuable services and data products....

An important part of Open Data is of a statistical nature and describes economic and social indicators monitoring population size, inflation, trade, and employment. Combining and analyzing Open Data from multiple datasets and sources enable the performance of advanced data analytics scenarios that could result in valuable services and data products...

A major part of Open Data concerns statistics such as economic and social indicators. Statistical data are structured in a multidimensional manner creating data cubes. Recently, National Statistical Institutes and public authorities adopted the Linked Data paradigm to publish their statistical data on the Web. Many vocabularies have been created to...

Machine learning represents a pragmatic breakthrough in making predictions by finding complex structures and patterns in large volumes of data. Open Statistical Data (OSD), which are highly structured and generally of high quality, can be used in advanced decision making scenarios that involve machine learning analysis. Linked data technologies fac...

This paper investigates the factors influencing user acceptance of eParticipation systems drawing experience not only from previous eParticipation research but also from the Information Systems domain. Subsequently, a model for eParticipation acceptance is constructed by integrating the concepts from TAM literature and eParticipation evaluation lit...

Open Data initiatives worldwide are boosting with an aim to increase transparency and contribute to economic growth. With a global annual economic potential value estimated to $3 trillion, this boost seems justified. Current progress however is not satisfactory. We believe a main reason is the lack of relevant skills and competencies. Current educa...

A large number of public authorities worldwide publish descriptions of their administrative procedures (public services) in public service catalogues. These public services descriptions are often based on a national or an ad hoc description template (also referred to as model). Moreover, usually they are not provided in a machine-readable format. A...

Producing new generation of digital public services from open data is of major interest to policymakers, practitioners and academia in the digital government community. Recent efforts in the area of Linked Statistical Data suggest that the associated multidimensional data cubes are excellent resources that could underpin data-driven digital public...

The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is influencing the way we learn. 3D multi-user virtual environments (3D MUVEs) are emerging technology that is increasingly used in computer assisted language learning (CALL). Virtual environments are immersive, virtual worlds that could enhance second language learning (SLL...

In many democratic countries, including the European Union Member States, it is increasingly important that policy makers are aware of young people’s opinion. In this respect, the European Union prioritizes the discovery of new forms of participation in democratic processes and access to political decision-making through online and offline tools. T...

Governments are creating and maintaining increasing amounts of data, and, recently, releasing data as open government data. As the amount of data available increases, so to should the exploitation of this data. However, this potential currently seems to be unexploited. Since exploiting open government data has the potential to create new public val...

Governments are creating and maintaining increasing amounts of data, and, recently, releasing data as open government data. As the amount of data available increases, so too should the exploitation of this data. However, this potential currently seems to be unexploited. Since exploiting open government data has the potential to create new public va...

Open data have tremendous potential which however remains unexploited. A large part of open data is numerical and highly structured. We concentrate on those data and capitalize on linked open data (LOD) as the underlying technology. In this paper, we present a number of tools to facilitate publishing and reusing of linked open statistical data. We...

The number of open data available for reuse is rapidly increasing. A large number of these data are numerical thus can be easily visualized. Linked open data technology enables easy reuse and linking of data residing in different locations. In this workshop, we will present a number of technologies and tools that are currently under development for...

The analysis of Social Media data enables eliciting public behaviour and opinion. In this context, a number of studies have recently explored Social Media’s capability to predict the outcome of real-world phenomena. The results of these studies are controversial with elections being the most disputable phenomenon. The objective of this paper is to...

A major part of Open Data concerns statistics such as financial and social indicators. Accurate and reliable statistics provide the solid ground for performing analyses that support businesses and governments in understanding the world and making better decisions. More importantly, the combination of statistical figures coming from disparate source...

A large part of open data concerns statistics, such as demographic, economic and social data (henceforth referred to as Open Statistical Data, OSD). In this paper we start by introducing open data fragmentation as a major obstacle for OSD reuse. We proceed by outlining data cube as a logical model for structuring OSD. We then introduce Open Statist...

Linked Open Cube Analytics (LOCA) systems enable the performance of analytics on top of multiple open statistical data (OSD) that reside in disparate portals. We present OSD's potential and highlight the problems hampering its integration and reuse. To overcome these problems, we introduce an approach for OSD integration. The proposed approach capi...

During the last years a growing body of literature studied Linked Data Cubes. The objective of this paper is to accumulate this body of knowledge and provide a preliminary analysis of the research results in the area so far. Towards this end, we systematically reviewed the scientific literature to identify relevant studies. These studies were analy...

Electronic Government (eGovernment) is currently facing significant challenges particularly due to the economic crisis which suggests governments should provide more with fewer resources. During the last few years, cloud computing emerged as a new computing paradigm with significant potential. The use of cloud computing in eGovernment has inevitabl...

Billions of people everyday use Social Media (SM), such as Facebook and Twitter, to express their opinions and experiences with brands. Companies are highly interested in understanding such SM brand-related content. Consequently, many studies have been conducted and many applications have been developed to analyse this content. For analysis purpose...

A major part of open data provided by international and governmental organizations include facts and figures that are described in a multi-dimensional manner (aka data cubes). The real value, however, of these open data cubes will unveil from combining and exploiting them in analytics across the Web. Linked data paradigm promises to facilitate the...

Over the past years electronic participation (eParticipation) became a political priority worldwide. Consequently, research on the field has dramatically grown. However, eParticipation is still an unconsolidated research area that lacks generally agreed upon definitions, research disciplines, methods and boundaries. The aim of this paper is to cont...

A number of governments worldwide employ web-based e-consultation platforms to enable stakeholders commenting on draft legislation. Stakeholders’ input includes arguing in favour or against the proposed legislation as well as proposing alternative ideas. In this paper, we empirically investigate the relationship between the volume of contributions...

A significant part of open data provided by governments and international organizations concerns statistics such as demographics and economic indicators. The real value, however, of open statistical data will unveil from performing analytics on top of combined datasets from disparate sources. Linked data provide the most promising technological par...

Latest advancements in information and communication technologies offer great opportunities for modernising policy making, i.e. increasing its efficiency, bringing it closer to all relevant actors, and enhancing its transparency and acceptance levels. In this context, this chapter aims to present, analyse, and discuss emerging information and commu...

During the past few years, information and communication technologies and especially the internet are increasingly used in a vast range of human activities, including citizens' interaction with government. In this context, advanced technologies are also being used to more actively engage citizens in democratic processes, which are termed as electro...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2015, held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in August/September 2015. The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical section...

Electronic government (e-government) is high in the agenda of a large number of countries worldwide for more than a decade now. Recently, the concept of transformational government (t-Gov) was introduced to determine the stage of e-government evolution characterised by the radical restructuring of the public sector towards efficiency. The aim of th...

The increase in the volume and heterogeneity of biomedical data sources has motivated researchers to embrace Linked Data (LD) technologies to solve the ensuing integration challenges and enhance in-formation discovery. As an integral part of the EU GRANATUM project, a Linked Biomedical Dataspace (LBDS) was developed to semantically interlink data f...

The increase in the volume and heterogeneity of biomedical data sources has motivated researchers to embrace Linked Data (LD) technologies to solve the ensuing integration challenges and enhance information discovery. As an integral part of the EU GRANATUM project, a Linked Biomedical Dataspace (LBDS) was developed to semantically interlink data fr...

The adoption of the Linked Data principles and technologies has promised to enhance the analysis of statistics at a Web scale. Statistical data, however, is typically organized in data cubes where a numeric fact (aka measure) is categorized by dimensions. Both data cubes and linked data introduce complexity that raises the barrier for reusing the d...

A major part of Open Data concerns statistics such as population figures, economic and social indicators. The adoption of the Linked Data principles and technologies has promised to enhance the analysis of statistical data at a Web scale. Statistical data, however, is typically organized in data cubes where a numeric fact is categorized by dimensio...

The rising importance of service for the global economy has resulted in a significant number of efforts to define and interpret its meaning. In this vein, this article identifies and organizes related literature following a holistic approach. The authors study service from different perspectives, both business-related and technical ones, e.g., mark...