UBITECH participates at the virtual kick-off meeting (January 25-26, 2021), hosted by UniSystems, of the inGOV Research and Innovation Action, officially started on January 1st, 2021. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 962563) and spans on the period January 2021 – December 2023. The vision of inGOV project is to enable European public authorities to co-create user-friendly, integrated public services accessible via mobile devices to all, particularly the disadvantaged, resulting in increased adoption, efficiency, effectiveness, trust and satisfaction – supporting the Integrated Public Service (IPS) cocreation.
inGOV focuses on exploiting co-creation methods and the wide adoption of mobile devices to reap the benefits of eGovernment principles (once-only, digital-by-default, interoperable-by-default, user centricity, etc) for all particularly the disadvantaged. For this purpose, we will develop a comprehensive IPS Holistic Framework that will include (a) IPS governance (structure), (b) IPS agreements between stakeholders (e.g. interoperability agreements, service level agreements, outsourcing, bilateral agreements etc), (c) stakeholders involvement, (d) implementation and migration guidelines, and (e) an agile roadmap. This framework will enable identifying and addressing all legal, cultural and managerial challenges. The framework will particularly support mobile applications and a relevant mobile reference architecture. In addition, we will develop a sustainability plan to safeguard the long-term use of the IPS framework and we will provide policy recommendations for enhancing existing EU work with our findings. The project results will be piloted in Malta to modernise the digital family household public service (affecting 200,000 households), in Austria to deploy IPS for collecting tourism tax (affecting 3,200 accommodation providers), in Greece to digitise the disabled card renewal service (benefiting 11,500 disabled, low-income citizens) and in Croatia to create AI-driven virtual assistants and services (affecting 32,000 citizens).
Within inGOV, UBITECH will drive the design of the IPS Mobile Architectures and the development of the ICT Tools, incorporating the Internal Information Sources and Services pillar that exploits knowledge graphs, PS-related vocabularies, semantics and linked data technologies; the IPS Coordination pillar that exploits suitable technologies to accommodate the agreements needed between stakeholders in various organisational structures; and the IPS Novel mobile apps and chatbots that includes the platform for mobile apps developments and the chatbot engine. The platform will inherently support multiple channels emphasising mobile devices. Our tools will be also embedded in social media applications (e.g. chatbots within Facebook) in an attempt to position PS as close to citizens as possible.
