[open-government] call for papers - IJEG Special Issue on Personalization in e-Government and Smart Cities

[Dimitris Gouscos]

/* apologies for cross-postings */

International Journal of Electronic Governance (IJEG)
http://www.inderscience.com/ijeg

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Special Issue on Personalization in e-Government and Smart Cities

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Guest Editors
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Nikolaos Loutas, Senior Manager, PwC, Belgium, email: 
nikolaos.loutas at be.pwc.com
Fedelucio Narducci, Research Fellow, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, 
Italy, email: fedelucio.narducci at uniba.it
Adegboyega Ojo, Senior Research Fellow, eGovernment Unit Leader, 
Insight at NUI, Ireland, email: adegboyega.ojo at deri.org
Matteo Palmonari, Assistant Professor, University of Milano-Bicocca, 
Italy, email: palmonari at disco.unimib.it
Cecile Paris, Science Leader, CSIRO Digital Productivity Flagship, 
Australia, email: Cecile.Paris at csiro.au
Giovanni Semeraro, Associate Professor, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, 
Italy, email: giovanni.semeraro at uniba.it

Description
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User modeling and personalization have proved to play a strategic role 
in adapting the behavior of intelligent systems to the specific 
characteristics of their users. In this context, it is important to 
define accurate techniques to extract the users’ characteristics, 
interests and preferences so that they can be used in the next steps of 
the personalization pipeline (adaptation, recommendation, etc.). While 
personalization is being extensively studied in domains characterized 
from the digital-object consumption (e-commerce, news, music, video 
recommendations, etc.), there is little work on personalization in the 
public domain, and, in particular in the context of initiatives for the 
provision of digital public services in Smart Cities and Territories. 
These initiatives cover several aspects of public life, such as 
e-Participation, Welfare, Environment, Health, Transport, and are 
crucial to improve the quality of both life and services in cities and 
territories.

In the context of initiatives to provide digital public services in 
Smart Cities and Territories, the user is the citizen, which introduces 
new challenges for personalization models. For example, there are 
potentially ethical (including privacy) issues related to the fact that 
citizens might be in a dependence relationship with governments, and 
automatic user profiling might be considered intrusive (i.e. “big 
brother”) and not desirable. On the other hand, detailed, often close to 
real-time, data about the citizens, e.g. using urban sensors, are 
collected in Smart Cities and Territories, which can support new 
personalization models.

The issue welcomes research articles, project reports and field-level 
case studies investigating personalization methods for improving digital 
public service delivery in Smart Cities and Territories. We encourage 
novel contributions as well as revised and substantially extended 
versions of papers accepted at PEGOV2013-2015, three workshops dedicated 
to personalization in e-Government and co-located with the UMAP 
conference. Extended versions of papers accepted at PEGOV2013-2015 
require at least 50% new content, e.g., a full literature review, a full 
evaluation, full use-case descriptions, additional results.

Subject coverage
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Topics of particular interest include, without being limited to, include 
the following:

•    motivations, benefits, and issues of personalization in 
e-Government and Smart Cities;
•    approaches for the personalization of inclusive, personal, 
multilingual and interactive public services;
•    user and context awareness in personalization of public services;
•    user (e.g. citizens or persons) modeling in e-Government and Smart 
Cities;
•    mining of user behavior, opinion mining, and sentiment analysis in 
e-Government and Smart Cities;
•    semantic techniques for user profiling and personalization in 
e-Government and Smart Cities;
•    gamification and crowdsourcing for collecting data and for mining 
citizens’ profiles and opinions;
•    services for personalized access to (Linked) Open Government Data;
•    ethical issues, including privacy, in e-Government and Smart Cities;
•    usability of digital public services for citizens;
•    evaluation of personalized services in e-Government and Smart Cities;
•    applications of personalization methods in e-Government, Smart 
Cities, e-Health and Smart Health;
•    communities and social networks in participatory e-Government and 
Smart Cities;
•    user-centered public service design and modeling.

Notes for prospective authors
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Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be 
currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. 
Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper has been completely 
re-written and if appropriate written permissions have been obtained 
from any copyright holders of the original paper).

All papers are refereed through a double-blind peer review process and 
must be submitted online. Please read our information on preparing and 
submitting articles 
(http://www.inderscience.com/info/inauthors/author_submit.php).

Please communicate your submission intentions and any inquiries for this 
special issue to the guest editors. For general inquiries regarding IJEG 
please contact Dr. Dimitris Gouscos, Assistant Professor, Faculty of 
Communication and Media Studies, University of Athens, email 
gouscos at media.uoa.gr, IJEG Editor-in-Chief.

Important dates
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submission of manuscripts:        15 October 2015
interim notification to authors:  15 December 2015
revised versions due:             15 March 2016
final notification to authors:    15 April 2016

The special issue is scheduled for publication during the second 
semester of 2016.