ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Projects :: Projects of the Month :: HANDS
January 2007 Project of the Month: HANDS
Issues being addressed
Citizens strongly demand for quick and easy ways to communicate and interact with Public Bodies (PB) and get relevant responses to their enquiries.
Public Bodies need to improve their capacity to respond to the needs of their communities and improve the quality of their communication services and the efficiency of their procedures and staff.
The nature of e-government services is such that many of the users (citizens) are not skilled users of information retrieval techniques and even if they were, they would be unlikely to know the exact terms that a particular PB uses to refer to the service they wish to know more about.
By providing understandable and clear information in their own everyday language, citizens will be better informed and "e-participation" will be enhanced.
The HANDS service is an on-line communication service designed to facilitate and ameliorate communication between citizens and Public Bodies, not only local, but also regional and national. It allows citizens’ dialogue with the Public Bodies, using their everyday language, thereby obtaining a direct pre-structured and, at the same time, richer interaction.
Main objectives of the project
The main goal of the project is to “market-validate” the HANDS online communication service by:
- Investigating administrative and economic viability of HANDS.
- Identifying the conditions for its future deployment on a European scale.
Additional objectives of the project are:
- To raise awareness in the EU about the availability of an effective and advanced online communication service, based on Natural Language Processing (NPL) technology, and perform the first initial deployment steps.
- To contribute to the knowledge and understanding of the factors affecting citizens and customers’ take-up and effective usage of online ‘self-service’ enquiry channels.
- To verify market acceptance; gather and analyze feedback from Public Bodies’ personnel having set up and used HANDS, and from end users having used the HANDS service applications.
Service description
HANDS service is based on advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The citizens access HANDS through the Public Body’s web site, and type their questions on the keyboard using everyday language, without the need to use key words or Boolean operators and they will obtain relevant answers in their language with all necessary documentation.
The starting point of the project was a set of operational prototypes developed by the IST 20230 Project EDEN (Electronic Democracy European Network).
EDEN developed and tested five applications designed to improve online communication between citizens and public administrations based on Natural Language Processing technologies.
The HANDS project:
- Takes up two of the five NLP components developed within EDEN, and integrates them into a fully marketable platform.
- Brings together the Address Guesser (an automatic email message dispatcher to the relevant offices) and the Answer Tree (a tool for the management of FAQ lists).
The end users access the HANDS services through the PB’s web site, by means of a ‘dedicated’ area supporting the possibility to query the system by activating both the Address Guesser and the Answer Tree modules. From a user perspective, the HANDS services will retrieve the relevant information in terms of:
- Questions/answers pair(s) matching the user’s query among those questions/answers pairs stored in the PB’s repository of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ);
- Documents available from a repository of publicly available documents;
- Automatic selection of the PB’s office(s) competent to answer the query, and of their email addresses.
Achievements
The service has successfully completed the first validation and evaluation phase in three Public Authorities and a Public Utility and the second pilot phase is currently underway in four different domains; the Municipalities of Bologna and Saarbruecken, the City of Edinburgh Council and the public utility Enìa.
The viability of the service has been evaluated, from the perspectives of the Public Administrations and Utilities, officers and citizens/customers in the target populations.
In Pilot 1, the project has identified the factors that will increase acceptability and gave the developers the opportunity to incorporate them in the application package.
HANDS has been presented and demonstrated to a wide EU audience at various events across Europe.
The market analysis has been completed and has shown the potential and innovation of the service.
Expected benefits
The main benefits expected are as follows:
- Improved quality of service. The service enables the Public Body’s enquiry-handling staff to progressively adapt online information to reflect the answers given to citizens/customers’ enquiries, so they become more oriented to questions that they actually ask.
- Improved staff efficiency: by increasing the proportion of enquiries citizens/customers can answer themselves, and reducing the training/skill needs of PB staff.
- For Citizens and Utility Customers, the benefit is the availability of easier online interaction with the Public Bodies. The HANDS service reduces the skills needed for citizens/users to find relevant answers to their questions online, thus potentially widening the take-up of Public Sector e-services.
Partners
Reference Data
Project's website:
http://www.hands-online.org
Contract Type: Market Validation
Start Date: November 2005
End Date: April 2007
Duration: 18 Months
Contact: patrizia.marani@comune.bologna.it