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Work in Progress Report - Subject Centric IT in

Local Government

Gabriel Hopmans, Peter-Paul Kruijsen

Morpheus SoftwareTMRA 2005

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Introduction• Presentation of ongoing work in ON-TOP project

• Collaboration between BCT and Morpheus• BCT offers CORSA

– Document Management System– Deployed at local governments, hospitals, etc.

• Morpheus offers Topic Maps implementations– Implementation partner of Ontopia

• Collaboration to– Combine Corsa and Topic Maps– Allow a Dynamic Information Facility (DIF)

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Current vs improvement• Current situation

– CORSA is a well-built DMS, used extensively– Data storage is application centric

• Morpheus was asked to– Provide intuitive interfaces to data ...– For various target group users ...– Without knowing user requirements ...– And possibility to chain with other processes / organisations

• Morpheus’ approach– Make data storage subject centric– Allow sharing with applications (CORSA, ...)

– Provide a framework for user modeling• Rather than explicit programming efforts

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Step 1: Upconversion• From a database delivery

– Scripts were written to convert DB to TM– Based on Ontopia’s upconversion tools

• An application was built to enable– User friendly mapping from DB to TM– A mapping tool is presented to users– To map fields in tables to ontology concepts

• This all results in a Topic Maps representation of existing data sets enabling– Intuitive browsing via Omnigator– Removal of duplicates– Enrichment with extra domain information

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DB-ONTO-mapping screenshot

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Step 2: Visualisation• The Topic Maps representation of the original database is visualised– In an ‘Omnigator-like’ interface– Subject-centric-ness is key issue– Display all information per subject

• User’s searches are directed by– Search entries as starting points– Navigation paths towards actual information

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Visualisation screenshot

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Step 3: Restrictions (ACL)

• A generic model was developed that– Defines navigation steps from topic (type) to topic (type) through association (types)

– Restricts occurrences (types) for topics (types) for certain target groups

• This model is filled for specific target groups to – Present navigation paths through data for civilians who do not (have to) know the actual data structure

– Hide certain information from certain employees

– Aggregate information for managers

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Navigation model

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Restriction screenshot

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Step 4: Restriction manager

• A management interface is (being) set up to fill the navigation model– Based on the ontology– Allows users to fill the model– For one or more target groups

• Results in an interface in which end users– Define the behaviour of a full web application

– Allows building Topic Maps based web portals

– Without any need for programming

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Step 5: Chaining• The current work involves assignment of PSI’s– Data from CORSA provides good concepts– Broader scope towards local governments

• When applied, chaining can be achieved– First only between different CORSA applications

– Later on between various applications in the domain of (local) governments

– Touches upon other initiatives like ADNOM

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Future developments• More / better search entries

– Based on personal info / settings

• Aggregating data– Needed for proper reporting

• Integration with other applications– other than CORSA

• Towards a full framework– Specific page / topic layout

•Towards Neo for Topic Maps