e-Democracy project, 24-9-2008
Expert System, leading provider of semantic software that discovers, classifies and interprets text information, announced that the project “The semantic web to listen to citizens” was recognized by the Ministry of Public Administration and Innovation (Prime Minister’s Office) as an example of professional competence, innovation, and initiative in experimenting with new solutions to reduce costs, improve services, and answer to the needs of individual citizens and businesses.
The project, with the goal of favouring an active participation among both citizens and organizations, is based both on the Cogito semantic software that analyzes and interprets the opinions of the citizens, and on the Oracle RDF platform for the Semantic web that processes the collected information.
The integration of the two technologies provides the mayors of the municipalities of the region (specifically Bari, a major city in southern Italy) with a tool able to process documents of public meetings in addition to comments by citizens posted in specific forums, to automatically identify the meaning of the collected information.
For example, semantics can interpret the opinions of the citizens in regard to specific initiatives and obtain a useful overview to answer questions such as, what are the opinions on this initiative? How many people have appreciated it? How many haven’t?
“The project developed in partnership with Oracle”, says Luca Scagliarini, VP Strategy & Business Development of Expert System “is further confirmation of the fundamental role of semantic technology in the realization of the Semantic Web. We tend to think of the semantic web as something still remote and unreachable, but actually we are already testing it. We at Expert System are proud to be on the front line, helping to shape a new web.”
