Refining public sector services by applying innovative technologies

Bojan Cestnik 1, 2 Alenka Kern 3

1 Temida d.o.o., Ljubljana, Slovenia 2 Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

3 The Housing Fund of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Talk outline �  Motivation and introduction �  Case studies ◦  CeDEM 2011 papers topic ontology ◦  Temporal focus shift of topics ◦  Outlier documents detection – search for innovative leap of

ideas �  Conclusions and further work

Motivation I �  Hypothesis: tools like

�  text exploration, �  document clustering, and �  literature mining ◦  have a potential to support the process of innovative problem

solving �  in e-government domain ◦  by bridging information from different disciplines

�  Source: E-Government Reference Library (EGRL) ◦  4.674 peer-reviewed articles published in the last decade

Motivation II �  Creativity is a universal virtue �  Two kinds of creativity (G.A. Wiggins, 2012) ◦  Spontaneous creativity (ideas appear spontaneous in

consciousness) �  e.g. Mozart: „When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely

alone, and of good cheer – say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.“ (Holmes, 2009, p. 315)

◦  Creative reasoning �  The composer working to build a new version of a TV theme, on

schedule and with constraints on „acceptable style“

�  The computer software is the tool, the user is the creator �  Computational Creativity as an emerging field

Motivation III �  Increasing number of documents within all areas of human

expertize �  Difficult to follow the progress even in a single specific area �  Innovative behavior is related to the comprehension of a particular

field

Literature mining �  Technologies: ◦  Associative retrieval based on simple keywords ◦  Inductive pattern search ◦  Novelty: cross-context search incorporating scientific theories

and models �  Knowledge discovery process involves: ◦  Mining dynamic data streams ◦  Incrementally updating existing models and theories

�  Observation: vast majority of the mappings between scientific models and theories has been carried out exclusively by the human scientists

Case studies �  First study: CeDEM 2011 topic ontology �  Source: E-Government library (Scholl, 2012) �  Second study: explore temporal focus shift, compare focus shifts of

titles and abstracts �  Third study: outlier documents detection – rare and worthwhile

for additional exploration since they might contribute to creative leap of ideas

CeDEM 2011 papers

E-Government library (Scholl, 2012)

Titles Abstracts Publication year Number % Number % 2002 and before 515 11,0 281 10,3 2003-2004 706 15,1 479 17,5 2005-2006 813 17,4 331 12,1 2007-2008 938 20,1 500 18,3 2009 679 14,5 427 15,6 2010 637 13,6 420 15,3 2011 386 8,3 301 11,0 Total 4.674 100,0 2.739 100,0

Focus shift through time – titles

Motivation IV �  Help experts in cross-domain discovery of new previously unknown

relations by supporting bisociative discovery �  Bisociation: ◦  Term coined by Arthur Koestler, The act of creation, 1964 ◦  Bisociation is "any mental occurrence simultaneously associated

with two habitually incomparable contexts“ - Koestler considered it the essential mechanism of the creative process ◦  The goal of FP7 EU Project BISON (Bisociation Networks for

Creative Information Discovery): explore the concept of bisociative discovery using graph-based data mining

�  When we all think alike, no one thinks very much (A. Einstein)

Outlier documents detection innovative, technology, service, adopted, creativity, local, citizens, applications, diffusion, challenges

management, studies, discuss, relationship, effectiveness, presented, proposes, security, offer, framework

E-Goverment library

documents

sim

ilarit

y

Document clustering �  Outliers: good candidates to search for relations between concepts

An example of bisociation

Dr. Lawrence J. Fogel

Conclusions �  Presented case studies explore technological possibilities for

supporting creative processes in public sector �  Ontologies can be used for studying temporal focus shift within a

given domain �  Experts can use document clustering and similarity measures to

support cross-domain discovery of new previously unknown relations (bisociative discovery)