Project Context and objectives

Over recent years, the number of queries received at European citizens’ services (in this project, “SAC”) has increased steadily. The main causes for this are the increase of EU population, cultural and legislative requirements to make all governmental services accessible on-line, the current mobility of population both across Europe and from further afield, and the increase in demands for information from local administrations by business stakeholders, mainly SMEs.
iSAC6+ aims to promote and deploy and innovative ICT solution (iSAC) that will enhance considerably the capability of various public authorities to respond to citizens’ attention and information requirements at the European level. iSAC is an on-line tool which has been designed to fulfil existing SACs needs and expectations, currently met by walk-in offices and phone services.
At present, iSAC has been installed in several local administrations in the Spanish Autonomous region of Catalonia. Two semantic webs have been created, in Spanish and Catalan. Specifically, the service in Terrassa, a city of 200.000 inhabitants 35 km from Barcelona, has been working since December 2006 at http://isac.terrassa.org, and currently provides response to queries that number up to 1/3 of the queries processed by the SAC city council phone services. However, the existing great variety of local citizens’ services and languages mandates additional resources such as semantic webs and novel strategies and business models in order to deploy the service at the European level.
General project objectives are:

• To improve the efficiency and capacity of responses from local SACs
• To reduce the time, money, stress, administrative burdens and other resources invested by both citizens and companies, especially SMEs, in trying to find information about their local administration
• To work towards a Single European Information Society for all, by installing a common on-line citizens’ attention and information service in a range of different scenarios and SACs across the European Union

Specific project objectives are:

• To improve the comprehension of German, French, Italian and English by building up local semantic networks.
• To adapt the methodologies needed to build up local semantic networks
• To adapt the architecture and functionalities of iSAC to different SAC, so that the existing digital repositories and database structures and the final service provided can be locally customized
• To adapt and test iSAC at non-local Administrations SAC
• To define a business model that will be used to initiate further deployments of the service after project completion

The project consortium is composed of:

• The city council of Terrassa (Catalonia, ES), that will transfer its know-how and experience from iSAC implementation to the pilot scenarios
• 5 target organisations that will install and evaluate iSAC during the pilot phase: the commune de Prato (IT), the city council of Bremerhaven (DE), the Mairie de Saint Médard en Jalles (FR), the South Yorkshire Police (UK) and the European Institute of Women’s Health (IE).
• One technological spin-off (SAM) that will coordinate integration tasks and will act as certifying company
• The Consorci de l’Administració Oberta (AOC), that will lead exploitation of iSAC’s main features, based on its own experience in Catalonia
• One ICT company that will deal e-accessibility and e-inclusiveness issues (King-e-Client)
• One governmental association with EU reach that will carry out training and dissemination tasks (Formez)

Services

ISAC is a new Citizens Information Service

• An intelligent tool that learns from real experiences to improve its service day after day
• Able to extract information from existing data bases
• Easy to adapt to every cultural, linguistic and social reality
• Multilingual
• Able to process different linguistic registers, such as colloquialisms or administrative terms
• An intelligent tool that learns from real experiences to improve its service day after day
• Developed cooperatively, in open source
• Developed within a 3Helix group, by participation of universities, public administrations and companies
• A framework for the modernization of the public administration and a think tank about its services delivery

A service useful for Cities to...

• Expanding the public attention service to full 24 hours a day, every day
• Facilitating the access to information and local services
• Stimulating citizens to self-service in simple or repetitive applications
• Saving time in complex applications
• Improving the communication among citizenship and the public services in the web
• Encouraging the citizens, collaboration, sharing knowledge about the city or town.

A service useful for Cities to the citizenship!

• It understands the applications in natural language, in every citizens' own language, which is quite different from the administrative or technical languages.
• It finds concrete answers for rough or under explained questions.
• It sorts and selects the more relevant information in every context.
• It is available 24 hours a day, every day, delivered through web.
• Whenever it cannot deliver a valid or proper answer, it calls the human staff to answer, on behalf of a personalized attention, by phone, chat, SMS, etc.

Potential Market and Areas of deployment

iSAC has been specifically designed to be installed in local Administrations. Our target is small and medium size city councils across the European Union. However, the project also addresses other type of organisations that have a citizens’ attention and information service being the European Institute of Women’s Health and the South Yorkshire Police also pilot scenarios.

Future perspectives

A new business model will be developed for further deployments of the service after the completion of the project. A certification scheme will be created to ensure that installation and maintenance tasks are carried out while fulfilling pre-defined quality parameters.

Duration of the Project

Start: September 2009 – September 2012

Funding source

Competitiviness and Innovation Framework Programme ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) – Second Call of Proposals 2008 – Pilot B Type

Project size

2,699,555.00 Euros

Links

• Website
• Information Society portal
• ePractice portal

Themes

• ICT PSP Call Objective: Reduction of Administrative burdens across the EU

Contacts: