XI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

“INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND IMPLEMENTATION” (IT&I-2024)

Towards the Information Technology for Online Citizen Services Detection and Assessment on E-Government National Portals

Andrii Kopp ¹ and Oleksandr Chornenkyi ²

¹ National Technical University “KhPI”�² V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University

Agenda and the main purpose

1. Motivation
2. Related Work
3. National Web Portals Data Preparation
4. National Web Portals Data Processing
5. National Web Portals Data Analysis
6. Results and Discussion
7. Conclusion and Future Work

• The main purpose of the study is to improve the assessment of the structure and content of these portals in terms of availability and variety of services provided to citizens.

• The analysis is aimed at identifying the key characteristics of the web portals, such as the number of available electronic services, their thematic distribution by e-government service catalog, as well as the level of richness of services in various citizen service branches.

1. Motivation

• Humanity lives in the period of the information age, the determinant of the evolution of which is the rapid development of new information and communication technologies.

• Digital technology and the new opportunities that it brings were swiftly adopted by the world society.

• New technologies significantly influenced the course of foreign and domestic policy of different countries.

• Digital technologies are one of the most important drivers of the transition from industrial to post-industrial society (or information society).

• Creating an information society requires the development of online services for better communication with citizens.

2. Related Work

• Social sciences and political science in particular are in a state of constant movement, transformation and improvement of methodology.

• In terms of significant transformations, there has recently been a growing interest among humanities researchers in computational research methods using digital technology.

• Today, any user activity on the Internet can be recorded, and at the same time web pages, social networks, online media, blogs, file exchanges, etc. can be a source of valuable information for researchers.

• The creation of government web portals is part of the e-government model and the web scraping approach is valuable for political science because it allows us to examine how dedicated portals are used.

3. National Web Portals Data Preparation

The process starts with the converting data from Excel-based spreadsheet format to JSON format for further processing and storage using Python programming language. The “pandas” library is used, which allowed to load data from an Excel file. The required dataset is contained in the file “egov_data_2024.xlsx”.

The data preparation process could be formally described as the set of operations that ensure the transformation of the Excel spreadsheet into the JSON format file:

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where

D_xlsx – the spreadsheet represented as the set of records;

D_df – the data frame;

T_json – the function used to transform the data frame into JSON

set of objects D_json;

D_dict – the Python dictionary to which D_json is deserialized;

W_json – the writing operation to the JSON file F_json.

4. National Web Portals Data Processing

Using the obtained data stored as the JSON document “egov_data_2024.json”, each country’s national web portal is accessed by making Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests.

All hyperlinks are extracted from the resulting (Hypertext Markup Language) HTML content, which is then analyzed for thematic keywords relevant to major government service areas and citizen services according to Integrated Architecture Framework for E-Government (IAFEG).

Example of UK national portal data scraping

5. National Web Portals Data Analysis

The general process of e-government national portals data processing could be formally represented as following:

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where:

L_i – the set of hyperlinks extracted from the web portal page;

P_i – the set of thematic categories and hyperlinks

that, as we assume, provide the access

to corresponding citizen services;

S_i – the set of detected citizen services based

on the introduced thematic categories

and keywords;

SR_i – the service richness of the national portal

with e-government services.

The Microsoft Power BI is used for the further analysis of the obtained web scraping results.

Developed Python component for national portal scraping and analysis

6. Results and Discussion (1)

The stages of EGDI dataset discovery, preliminary check (to manually remove countries with not accessible or non-English language interface), and processing using the proposed technology:

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Almost 55% of country records were removed from the initial dataset because of the inaccessible national portals or absence of English versions.

The remaining 87 records were processed using the proposed solution. However, only 79% of the available national portals were successfully scraped.

Failed processing: Bulgaria, Spain, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Jordan, Lithuania, Eritrea, Ghana, Ireland, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Malta, Namibia, Philippines, New Zealand, Morocco, Palau, Thailand, and Zimbabwe.

6. Results and Discussion (2)

The Power BI dashboard consolidates information about countries, Online Service Index (OSI) measures of these countries, as well as introduced measures.

• Processing of Ukraine, Australia, and Netherlands national portals has resulted into 0 citizen services detected and, therefore, 0.00 values for the service richness measures. However, according to the OSI measurement on the EGDI website, Ukraine has 0.99 score, while Australia and Netherlands have 0.92.
• The analysis of Ukrainian indicators resulted into the fact, that EGDI rating contains the URL of the Cabinet of Ministers (CM) homepage instead of the Diia portal. As for the Australian and Dutch national portals, the reasons for undetectable online services are similar.

7. Conclusions

• This research proposed the information technology for online citizen services detection and assessment on e-government national portals.

• The main purpose of this study was to improve the assessment of the structure and content of national portals in terms of availability and variety of online services provided to citizens.

• Such a solution can be used by political scientists to perform experiments, find best practices of online citizen services provision, compare different national portals, and get valuable insights.

• Obtained results have shown the difference between EGDI-based OSI measurements and the availability of detected citizen services.

Future work

• In the future, the proposed approach will be improved to traverse all national portal pages.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!