Be Informed is an internationally operating, independent software vendor. The Be Informed business process platform transforms administrative processes. Thanks to Be Informed’s unique semantic technology and solutions, business applications become completely model-driven, allowing organizations to instantly execute on new strategies and regulations. Organizations using Be Informed often report cost savings of tens of percents. Further benefits include a much higher straight-through processing rate leading to vastly improved productivity, and a reduction in time-to-change from months to days.
The role of Be Informed in MOLTO is to make sure that the solutions developed in the project can indeed be readily integrated into their solutions (the Be Informed Business Process Platform in particular). Be Informed will build on its strong expertise in its domain to guide the project and make sure that the results are exploitable from a commercial point of view in the mid-term. Dissemination to, and feedback from, its client base, as part of the use case development in WP12, will increase the degree of suitability for exploitation.
Be Informed's exploitation strategy is tightly linked to its goal of quickly commercializing MOLTO results, and calls for a rapid and continuous flow of information to its sales force, existing client base and potential future customers. In addition, as an innovative company, Be Informed plans academic talks and publications.
The outcome of MOLTO is relevant for Be Informed's Business Process Platform. For both client and server product components the translation services based on the GF based prototype can offer translation support at design time as well as runtime. This would enable several usage scenarios to deal with verbalization activities of customers business models and others artefacts.
For more detailed information about this product and its solutions see www.beinformed.com.
The main approach of Be Informed Research and Innovation is based on co-innovation with customers, partners, and other third parties. These activities usually result in a working prototype. Prototypes which seem promising to get enough traction with customers are handed over to Be Informed Product and Solution development.
The MOLTO deliverables will be promoted to our clients and partner in the public sector. The prototype of the MOLTO multilingual verbalization component for integration with Be Informed Business Process Platform will be made available as an optional product component.
In this section we present a concise overview of relevant public sector trends and views within and across European Union Member States on future public services. This background information is not only necessary to understand the societal and political context in which multilingual public sector services take place, but also to detect synergies (and potential divergences) between visions about ontology driven services, language aspects and current developments within the public sector. The presented overview is inter alia based upon recent studies by the OECD (Towards Smarter and more transparent Government, e-government status spring 2010; OECD e-Government project; 25 March 2010; GOV/PGC/EGOV(2010)) and research results from the CROSSROAD Project (A Participative Roadmap for ICT Research in Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling; a support action under the European Commission 7th Framework Programme. http://crossroad.epu.ntua.gr/the-project/objectives/FP7-ICT-4-248458).
Within the context of this project we are dealing with public sector services that provide information and advice and perform transactions between citizens or companies and administrations. By using ontologies which contain concepts, their relations and respective rules, public sector services become decision centric and goal driven. This enables the public sector to become more agile, customer centric, efficient, effective and accountable as well.
In this section we will use the concepts of Governments and Public Sector interchangeably. Political institutions and administrative structures of counties are diverse, but regardless of their shape, they are all part of the Public Sector ecosystem that provides public sector services to citizens and companies or institutions. Governments in Europe face an increasing number of challenges such as ageing populations, immigration, climate change and globalization, further reinforced by the financial crisis. The globalization trend has limited the freedom of governments to manage their national economies and new challenges such as immigration and an ageing population seem to fundamentally affect the scope of public sector activities. At the same time, society’s expectations of public service delivery have by no means diminished as citizens from the 1980s onwards have become more concerned with choice and service quality. The paradox faced is one of open-ended demand versus a capped or falling resource share for actual delivery. Consequently, public administrations are under constant pressure to modernize their practices to meet new societal demands with reduced budgets.
In the Visionary Scenarios Design of the CROSSROAD Project, the researchers present a summary of the main trends with respect to ICT for governance and policy making in the wider context of an evolving public sector. They define a set of core policy trends across the governance and policy modelling domain, which also resonate with the use case settings of the MOLTO project.
Within the context of this project we are dealing with public sector services which provide information and advice and perform transactions between citizens or companies and administrations. This type of services is decision centric by nature. They are dealing with rights, permissions and obligations, for instance in the domain of permits and grants. The activities that have to be supported by the services are knowledge intensive. Another characteristic is that they are event driven. This makes them perfect candidates for semantic enabled services. Ontologies are situated at the core of this kind of services.
We have to take into account that ontology support for public services is not only positioned at the end of the service chain, where government and citizen meet each other, but throughout the whole service chain. Treating a request for a permit and deciding upon this request is based upon the same rules as getting advice whether one is entitled to acquire the permit. So, the concepts and rules that are used in ontologies apply as well to the citizens interactions as to the administrative officials interactions. The need for localization can however differ between these two target groups. In a traditional view public sector services are positioned at the execution and enforcement layer of the public sector infrastructure. This layer deals with policy implementation. For reasons of scoping we will focus in this stage of the project also on this policy implementation layer.
We foresee however a trend in which the use of ontologies will go more upstream towards the policy making process, since this will leverage the best outcome.
Main beneficiaries of the Molto outcomes are domain experts using Be Informed in an international context in the public sector. These public sector services provide information and advice and perform transactions between citizens or companies and administrations. This type of services relies by nature highly on interaction and communication on the one hand and the execution of regulations on the other hand. The quality of both aspects must be guaranteed. We will describe in brief scenarios of public sector actors like domain experts that are confronted with localization aspects for the services they are providing or intend to provide. These scenarios are:
In all scenarios we can see that, although policy making and implementation seems to be mostly a local (national) issue, there are very often also international issues/aspects that have to be taken into account.
A very common pattern in the world is the provision of public sector services in the field of immigration. Immigration services have to be provided to immigrants who want to work and/or live in another country and to companies or organizations who want to hire labour resources from another country. A specific kind of stakeholder is the group that wants to bring family members to the country they live in. The main process is the issuing of permanent or temporary/provisional permits for admission and residence. A crucial characteristic of this process is that the rules for admission and residence are changing frequently and sometimes with short notice. Since immigrations offices are communicating with ‘the whole world’, one cannot expect them to translate their services into all languages. Normally they will use the language or languages of their own country and maybe one or a few other languages that can be understood by the majority of their customers. And, in specific cases, they will want to translate a part of their information to a specific target language. This can be the case for instance as due to a certain incident a new group of immigrants from an individual country ‘threatens’ to flood the country. So they need a process that supports the translation of services to the current languages on a regular and flexible basis and an approach to deal with incidents that require instant translations in the non-current languages. In all cases it is a challenge to translate the complicated immigration laws and procedures into comprehensive services for national and international users.
An example of a government agency that has to cooperate internationally is the Dutch Emission Authority (NEA). Emissions trading is a flexible policy instrument which governments use to improve the living environment. In the Netherlands there are two emissions trading systems, one for emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and one for emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx). Emission trading requires an infrastructure for issuing permits, monitoring and allocating emission allowances. Emissions trading is inevitably an international business that requires cross boundary cooperation, information and communication. The public services of the Dutch Emission Authority must therefore be available and accessible in more than one language. In this case NEA wants to make its service also available in the English language.
Trading requires international agreement on standards and preferably also on service patterns. By using one information concept it becomes easier to exchange information and to innovate. In such a case the ontology supported infrastructure of a frontrunner in the specific domain, such as NEA, could be used as a basis for internationalisation and standardisation.
The times of splendid isolation are over (if they ever existed); we are living in a dynamic international world and an increasingly more global market. One of the government parties that is affected daily by this trend is Customs. They have to deal not only with local laws, but also with common market regulations, international trade regulations etcetera. The regulations, they have to comply with, and have to enforce, change frequently, based upon incidents, new insights and political developments. And within a set of regulations, the priorities for enforcement can change too.
Customs have to deal with international treaties about traffic of goods between countries and the limitation thereof. For example for importing certain goods from China, one has to apply for an export license in China which is transformed to an import permit in the country of destination. This leads to multilingual public services that are delivered in different countries of the world. Depending on the types of goods there might be an additional import tax to protect a country’s internal market from being ‘flooded’ with low price goods from low cost countries.
In order to be able to levy additional tax on certain goods one must be able to classify these goods. The EU defined the Combined Nomenclature, which is in fact a taxonomy of goods and their codes that can be used to classify goods that enter a country. This taxonomy is available in all official countries of the European Union. The taxonomy is based on the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System7 which is run by the World Customs Organization. The harmonized system is used by 137 countries and the European Union
Many countries are bi-lingual or multilingual. This means that all official publications and services have to be provided in more than one language. Often the pilot language, the language in which a document is written first, depends on the preferred language of the author. By using an ontology, the meaning of the document in the pilot language can be expressed abstractly and unambiguously in concepts and rules. They can then be translated into a particular language to express the meaning using the vocabulary and syntax of that language.
Be Informed captures policy in ontologies. These ontologies are used throughout the policy lifecycle from choosing/deciding on policy, communicating the agreed upon policy to all stakeholders to running the supporting applications. As a consequence, verbalizations of these ontologies could be used in a number of scenarios throughout that policy lifecycle.
For the ontologies to be used as the basis of actual applications, it is crucial they contain a correct representation of the requirements and constraints. Review and validation before deploying and the ability to provide feedback on the model after deployment is very important. A natural language representation of the models can help stakeholders to exercise these tasks. Special verbalization choices might have to be made to create texts that are effective in this specific scenario.
The most effective way of business user involvement is of course allowing them to create models themselves or, often more realistic, to maintain and alter existing models. In [EKAW2010] we explored editors that do use a textual metaphor to present models to the users, but that do not use typing text as editing metaphor.
Typically, systems need to be well documented for IT organizations to be able to support production use and perform maintenance. The online, navigational access to the models is then often not acceptable, and conventional documentation sets need to be generated.
Classically, business applications have used tables of data to present detailed information that is available in a business process. When involving customers in business processes, they find it hard to interpret the data. Verbalization into natural language can be a great way to present, for instance, process progress data to laymen, as the data can be presented in a self explanatory way.
The ontologies capturing legislation and policy are used to drive decision services, applying the policy to actual cases. These decisions taken are communicated to the stakeholders and need to be documented and explained. Verbalization of the model could be extended to verbalization of the decisions based on the models.
The proposed exploitation path would increase revenues of existing products like the Be Informed Business Process Platform. Be Informed will offer the Molto verbalization engine as an optional product component. It is difficult to predict the size of the increase at this stage of development.
Ontology translation systems are usually created using general-purpose programming languages, such as LISP or Java, and the mappings between expressions in the source and target languages are neither well-documented nor explained. Integrated tooling as part of Be Informed’s Business Process Platform is at this stage unique.