Structuring from scratch a legal interoperability laboratory

Fotios Fitsilis; Anastasia Papastylianou

doi:10.26422/RPA.2022.0101.fit

Fotios Fitsilis Hellenic Parliament https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1531-4128
Anastasia Papastylianou National School of Public Administration and Local Government (Athens, Greece)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26422/RPA.2022.0101.fit

Keywords: legal interoperability, digital transformation, legal informatics, LEOS, e-Governance, public administration

Abstract

The article describes the creation of an innovative legal interoperability laboratory from scratch at the National School of Public Administration and Local Government in Athens. Its scope and objectives are critically analyzed and its modules described. The problem-based learning method has been applied to a synchronous and asynchronous distance learning educational environment. In particular, in the context of the laboratory, the use of LEOS (Legislation Editing Open Software), a legal informatics tool that has been developed as a European Union ISA2 solution, is highlighted. Moreover, the relation of the laboratory to existing open interoperability courses and the wider European Interoperability Framework are presented along with the tool being assessed for potential use as an authoring tool by the Hellenic public administration. Both the laboratory and the course have been thoroughly evaluated and the results of this evaluation are presented and discussed, in view of plans for the design of additional related interoperability courses and laboratories.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Fotios Fitsilis, Hellenic Parliament

Dr. Fotios Fitsilis has an academic background in Law, Economics and Engineering. He has been active in a broad range of fields, from telecommunications and logistics to management and governance. After a career as a research engineer in Germany, he worked as Special Advisor for Business and Industry in the Greek Ministry of Development. Since 2007, he has been working in the Hellenic Parliament; initially as Scientific Advisor to the Speaker of the Parliament and later as Head of the Department for Scientific Documentation and Supervision in the Scientific Service. Dr. Fitsilis has led -from the position of the Resident Twinning Advisor- a highly profiled EU project to improve legislation, administrative and openness procedures in the National Assembly of Serbia. The project was successfully concluded in 2015. Dr. Fotis Fitsilis has been Visiting Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, on parliamentary procedures and legislative drafting. He is a certified PRINCE2® practitioner and, in 2017, he founded the Hellenic OCR Team, a crowdsourcing initiative for the processing and analysis of parliamentary data.

Anastasia Papastylianou, National School of Public Administration and Local Government (Athens, Greece)

Anastasia Papastilianou studied Mathematics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with postgraduate studies in Statistics and Business Research. She is Research and Studies Officer at the National School for Public Administration and Local Government (ESSDA). Previously, she was Head of Documentation and Innovation of the National Center of Public Administration and Local Government (EKDDA) and coordinator of the opengov.gr portal. Also, she worked as ICT and studies officer at the Institute of Training (INEP) as well as a statistician at the Hellenic Statistical Authority. She has profound teaching experience in various fields such as e-Government, Statistics, ICT , Project Management and BPR. She was the project manager of EKDDA-Slidewiki-Horizon 2020 program, for OpenCousreWares and member of several ICT administrative projects.

References

Chen, C.-H., & Yang, Y.-C. (2019). Revisiting the effects of project-based learning on students’ academic achievement: A meta-analysis investigating moderators. Educational Research Review, 26, 71-81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.11.001.

Chinn, D., Hieronimus, S., Kirchherr, J., & Klier, J. (2020). The future is now: closing the skills gap in Europe’s public sector. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/the-future-is-now-closing-the-skills-gap-in-europes-public-sector.

De Graaff, E., & Kolmos, A. (2007). History of problem-based and project-based learning. In De Graaff, E., & Kolmos, A. (Eds.), Management of change (pp. 1-8). Brill Sense. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789087900922.

Dos Santos, A. I., Punie, Y., & Muñoz, J. C. (2016). Opening up Education: a Support Framework for Higher Education Institutions (No. JRC101436). Joint Research Centre. https://doi.org/10.2791/293408.

European Commission. (n.d.) Interoperability Europe Academy. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/digital-skills-public-sector/solution/interoperable-europe-academy.

European Commission. (2017a). Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment - the Tallinn Declaration. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/ministerial-declaration-egovernment-tallinn-declaration.

European Commission. (2017b). New European Interoperability Framework – Promoting seamless services and data flows for European public administrations. http://ec.europa.eu/isa2/sites/isa/files/eif_brochure_final.pdf.

Grover, V., Jeong, S. R., Kettinger, W. J., & Teng, J. T. (1995). The implementation of business process reengineering. Journal of Management Information Systems, 12(1), 109-144. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.1995.11518072.

InCiSE. (2019). Results report 2019. https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2019-04/InCiSE%202019%20Results%20Report.pdf.

Kalogirou, V., Stasis, A., & Charalabidis, Y. (2020). Adapting national interoperability frameworks beyond EIF 3.0: the case of Greece. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (pp. 234-243). https://doi.org/10.1145/3428502.3428536.

Koryzis, D., Dalas, A., Spiliotopoulos, D., & Fitsilis, F. (2021). ParlTech: Transformation Framework for the Digital Parliament. Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 5(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc5010015.

Kouroubali, A., & Katehakis, D. G. (2019). The new European interoperability framework as a facilitator of digital transformation for citizen empowerment. Journal of biomedical informatics, 94, 103166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2019.103166.

Loutsaris, M.A., & Charalabidis, Y. (2020). Legal informatics from the aspect of interoperability: a review of systems, tools and ontologies. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (pp. 731-737). https://doi.org/10.1145/3428502.3428611.

Mateescu G., Stanciu, A., & Blei, A. (2021). Digital transformation of training programs for public administration. Proceedings of the International Conference on Business Excellence, 15(1), 1171-1182. https://doi.org/10.2478/picbe-2021-0109.

Matt, C., Hess, T., & Benlian, A. (2015). Digital transformation strategies. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 57(5), 339-343. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-015-0401-5.

Mikroyannidis, A., & Papastilianou, A. (2021). Open educational resources in public administration: a case study in Greece. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2021.1950526.

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2021). The OECD Framework for digital talent and skills in the public sector. OECD Working Papers on Public Governance (No. 45). OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/4e7c3f58-en.

Pagallo, U., Palmirani, M., Casanovas, P., Sartor, G., & Villata, S. (2018). AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems: AICOL International Workshops 2015-2017: AICOL-VI@ JURIX 2015, AICOL-VII@ EKAW 2016, AICOL-VIII@ JURIX 2016, AICOL-IX@ ICAIL 2017, and AICOL-X@ JURIX 2017, Revised Selected Papers (Vol. 10791). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00178-0.

Papastylianou, A., Stasis, A., Rantos, K., & Kalogirou, V. (2019). Blended learning and Open Courseware for promoting interoperability in public services. In International Conference on e-Democracy (pp. 79-93). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37545-4_6.

Pezziardi, P., & Verdier, H. (2016). Des “start-up d’État” pour transformer en souplesse l’Administration. Le journal de l’école de Paris du management, 120(4), 22-29. https://doi.org/10.3917/jepam.120.0022.

Sovrano, F., Palmirani, M., & Vitali, F. (2020). Deep learning based multi-label text classification of UNGA resolutions. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (pp. 686-695). https://doi.org/10.1145/3428502.3428604.

Valverde-Berrocoso, J., Garrido-Arroyo, M. d. C., Burgos-Videla, C., & Morales-Cevallos, M.B. (2020). Trends in Educational Research about e-Learning: A Systematic Literature Review (2009-2018). Sustainability, 12(12), 5153, https://doi.org/10.3390/su12125153.

Van Laar, E., Van Deursen, A. J., Van Dijk, J. A., & De Haan, J. (2017). The relation between 21st-century skills and digital skills: A systematic literature review. Computers in Human Behavior, 72, 577-588. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.03.010.

Wirtz, B. W., Weyerer, J. C., & Geyer, C. (2019). Artificial intelligence and the public sector—Applications and challenges. International Journal of Public Administration, 42(7), 596-615. https://doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2018.1498103.

Zalavra, E., & Papanikolaou, K. (2022). A wiki-based framework for collaborative learning design in teacher education. Education and Information Technologies, 27, 6407-6435. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10874-9.