Argiris Tzikopoulos, Nikos Manouselis, Kostas Kastrantas and Constantina Costopoulou
Away from central public authorities, regional (also called rural) enterprises do not have direct, physical access to all the services that governmental or public agencies offer…
Abstract
Purpose
Away from central public authorities, regional (also called rural) enterprises do not have direct, physical access to all the services that governmental or public agencies offer. Very often, these services are essential for enterprises, mostly small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), in such areas, in order to perform their business operations. This paper aims to present an example of how such types of information management and use took place in the case of familiarizing rural SMEs with the use of e‐government.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is a case study of how a practical application is designed and developed for the blended training of rural SMEs. First of all, an identification of the main information resources that will be stored, annotated, shared and accessed through the system took place. Then, an outline of the general architecture and user roles involved was developed. System analysis and specification using Unified Modeling Language (UML) then took place. This was accompanied by design and specification of the database, based on appropriate metadata schemas for describing the information resources. The whole process was completed by the design and prototype development of the interface, which was put into public operation and testing with a sample set of real users.
Findings
Although there are several information management systems focusing on the education and training of rural stakeholders, their learning resources are not directly relevant to SMEs' needs. The main finding of this paper is that it shows a complete case study of designing, developing and evaluating an information technology application for rural businesses.
Originality/value
The value of the approach presented here is the combination of training resources in an information system with a blended training approach, so that it better matches the learning needs of SMEs. Through this web‐based environment, rural SMEs are able to find information on the e‐government services offered in their region, as well as gaining access to e‐learning content on how they can use such services.
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Nikos Manouselis and Constantina Costopoulou
An issue of increased interest in metadata research concerns finding ways to store, in the metadata of an information resource, data regarding the resource's quality. The purpose…
Abstract
Purpose
An issue of increased interest in metadata research concerns finding ways to store, in the metadata of an information resource, data regarding the resource's quality. The purpose of this paper is to present a metadata schema that facilitates representation and storage of data related to the quality of an e‐commerce resource, the e‐commerce evaluation metadata (ECEM) schema.
Design/methodology/approach
A study of quality approaches that can be applied for the evaluation of e‐commerce resources is provided. The ECEM schema structure and elements are described. To demonstrate how ECEM can be used, two indicative examples are given: describing an e‐commerce quality approach, and storing quality evaluation results. A discussion about the validation and implementation of ECEM is also provided.
Findings
It has been demonstrated that ECEM can be effectively used to describe e‐commerce quality approaches. ECEM also facilitates the structured representation and storage of quality evaluation results. It is recommended that ECEM metadata be encoded using the eXtensible markup language (XML); thus, a corresponding XML schema has been produced.
Originality/value
Metadata about resources' quality has been developed ad hoc, according to the needs of each particular application domain, and cannot be applied in other contexts. E‐commerce is one application domain where no such contributions currently exist. ECEM is a step towards the reusable and interoperable storage of quality information in metadata. It is expected to facilitate a large number of potential applications, such as quality‐oriented search of e‐commerce resources and reusable storage of evaluation results.
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Efthimios Tambouris, Nikos Manouselis and Constantina Costopoulou
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a process for developing a metadata element set that will describe e‐government resources in digital collections. The outcome of the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a process for developing a metadata element set that will describe e‐government resources in digital collections. The outcome of the process is a metadata schema that reuses as many elements as possible from existing specifications and standards (termed as an e‐government metadata application profile). The use of e‐government metadata is to facilitate the electronic categorization and storage of governmental resources, as well as to enhance users' electronic interactions with the public sector.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper extends an initial process presented in the context of the European Standardization Committee CEN/ISSS, proposing four steps for developing the application profile: determine the resources to be described by the metadata, identify the stakeholder groups who will use the metadata, determine the use of metadata for each stakeholder group, and specify the metadata elements corresponding to each use.
Findings
The steps of the proposed process are followed in order to develop an e‐government metadata application profile for a particular digital collection: a one‐stop governmental Web portal that enables discovery and access to e‐government services and documents residing at the Web sites of geographically dispersed public authorities.
Originality/value
The combination of existing metadata schemas, in order to create an e‐government application profile, requires a well‐defined process for identifying the context requirements. This paper presents such a process and reports its engagement in a real case study. It may serve as a roadmap for other interested researchers, managers or implementers of digital collections of e‐government resources.