https://www.ch.ch is a Swiss eGovernment information service for the public. It is run by the Federal Chancellery. It is part of a huge web of government information systems of local, cantonal and federal authorities. We want to develop this information system further to better answer questions which people have about their political rights and duties. And to reduce the costs for authorities to provide information for citizens.
The goals are:
- ch.ch does not only answer specific user questions (e.g.: How much does learning to drive cost? https://www.ch.ch/en/cost-learning-drive/) but presents this answer as part of a process (e.g.: How to obtain a learners driving licence)
- ch.ch is part of a linked government information system and makes use of data which already exists.
- realize a prototype to illustrate the model and to prove the feasibility.
Today each government institution has its own web editing team, website, content management system, databases, and digital asset management. We have over 5’000 government websites in Switzerland. This creates many problems for the users of the content, be this citizens, companies or government institutions:
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Information about the same government service is produced several times in different forms and qualities.
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Information, which is outdated, stays online instead of being removed or updated.
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Information is only in one language instead of the at least the official languages of Switzerland.
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People with handicaps do not have access to information because it is too expensive to produce accessible information or it is produced but the user cannot find it.
Redundancy and other shortcomings result in misunderstandings, frustration and in the end in higher cost for government agencies and users.
We propose to build a linked government information system. Whoever produces and publishes information in that system does so in a way that this information is accessible by humans and by machines (e.g.: chatbots, virtual assistants). It can be queried and it can be represented in different contexts and media. The only requirement is that the information (text, statistical data, images, video etc.) is accessible as open government data. Therefor information has to be semantically structured.
To get there we need new production systems, better statistical information about users, better internal communication (who does what when and how?) and standards for the structuring, contextualising and publishing of information.
A well-known application of linked open data is the Wikipedia ecosystem. Highly structured items in Wikidata are used in the Wikipedia, in Wikicommons, in Wikimedia and elsewhere. However, we do not want to build and maintain a huge database as Wikidata. We want each content provider to produce the information about government services which it is responsible for, but share this information as open data.
The Government Digital Service of the UK-Government has already taken steps towards where we also want to go. It aims to integrate all the information about a service hosted in different content silos into a coherent service journey. Therefore, it has defined end-to-end-services and patterns to describe these end-to-end-services for the users.
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2017/11/30/building-end-to-end-services-into-gov-uk/
The process of how to learn to drive is laid out systematically on one page. https://www.gov.uk/learn-to-drive-a-car For each step, there is additional information and a backlink to the process description.