Call for papers: "Personalisation in e-Government and Smart Cities"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Electronic Governance.

User modelling and personalisation have proved to play a strategic role in adapting the behaviour 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 personalisation pipeline (adaptation, recommendation, etc.). While personalisation is being extensively studied in domains characterised by digital-object consumption (e-commerce, news, music, video recommendations, etc.), there is little work on personalisation 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 and transport, and are crucial to improving 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 personalisation 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 personalisation models.

This special issue welcomes research articles, project reports and field-level case studies investigating personalisation methods for improving digital public service delivery in smart cities and territories.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Workshop on PErsonalization in eGOVernment and Smart Cities: Smart Services for Smart Territories (PEGOV2013-2015), but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in these events to submit articles for this call.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Motivations, benefits and issues of personalisation in e-government and smart cities
• Approaches for the personalisation of inclusive, personal, multilingual and interactive public services
• User and context awareness in personalisation of public services
• User (e.g. citizens or persons) modelling in e-government and smart cities
• Mining of user behaviour, opinion mining and sentiment analysis in e-government and smart cities
• Semantic techniques for user profiling and personalisation in e-government and smart cities
• Gamification and crowdsourcing for collecting data and for mining citizens' profiles and opinions
• Services for personalised 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 personalised services in e-government and smart cities
• Applications of personalisation 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 modelling

Important Dates
Submission of manuscripts: 6 November, 2015