Wiki-based conceptual modeling: an experience with the Public Administration

The dematerialization of documents produced within the Public Administration (PA) represents a key contribution that Information and Communication Technology can provide towards the modernization of services within the PA. The availability of proper and precise models of the administrative procedures, and of the specific “entities” related to these procedures, such as the documents involved in the procedures or the organizational roles performing the activities, is an important step towards both (1) the replacement of paper-based procedures with electronic-based ones, and (2) the definition of guidelines and functions needed to safely store, catalogue, manage and retrieve in an appropriate archival system the electronic documents produced within the PA. In this paper we report the experience of customizing a semantic wiki based tool (MoKi) for the modeling of administrative procedures (processes) and their related “entities” (ontologies). The tool has been used and evaluated by several domain experts from different Italian regions in the context of a national project. This experience, and the reported evaluation, highlight the potential and criticality of using semantic wiki-based tools for the modeling of complex domains composed of processes and ontologies in a real setting.