Be Informed: Multilingual verbalization of Business Models

Value Proposition

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:

1. National Government with International clients
2. National Government cooperating Internationally
3. National Government dealing with International Law/Policies
4. National Government in Multilingual Countries
5. International Government (European Union)

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.

National Government with International clients

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.

National Government cooperating International

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.

National Government dealing with International Law/Policies

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

National Government in Multilingual Countries

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.

Value Creation

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.

Review, Validation and Feedback of Models

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.

Text based Editing of Models

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.

Self Documenting Models

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.

Textual UI’s for Model Driven Applications

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.

Communicating Model Based Decisions

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.

Revenue Model

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.

Market Overview

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.