Call for Papers

Call for Papers 
    International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age (IJPADA)

Indexed in Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)

  

Special Issue On

FOUNDATIONAL APPROACHES, METHODS AND CASES IN LEGAL INFORMATICS

  

Submissions Due Date

10/15/2020

Guest Editors

Charalampos Alexopoulos, University of the Aegean, Greece
Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna, Italy
Yannis Charalabidis, University of the Aegean, Greece

Introduction
Legal informatics domain is dealing with the application of informatics within the context of the legal environment, relating law-related organisations, such as parliaments or national printing offices, lawyers and law firms, courts, deliberative institutions and public administration, as well as citizens and businesses. The big data available –the amount of data produced is growing exponentially – permits to the machines to turn data into information, and to use personal behaviors for extracting knowledge. Artificial intelligence, legal analytics, machine learning, natural language processing, text mining and blockchain in the last five years permits to apply the theoretical findings elaborated for decades to concrete domains, including the legal environment and the legal informatics discipline paves the way of a new services.

On the one hand, the law-making and courts-decision processes, in an informed society, is facing the requirement to be “evidence-based”, factual evidence being deemed the prerequisite to guarantee the quality of decision and legislation. On the other hand, transparency, explicability, efficiency and effectiveness are the basic prerequisites in the public sector including the legal domain. Thus, new approaches utilizing the above-mentioned technologies are emerging in order for the designed services to provide information about the potential and actual impact of decisions and policies, enhance trust and accountability among governments, citizens and businesses, prevent bias on proceedings with cross jurisdictional boundaries, facilitate the rules depend on a particular jurisdiction and assist dispute resolution process.

The combination of the basic characteristics of these technological trends would eventually lead to the total reform of the legal sector either in law-making or in the legal industry. But first we need to describe, annotate and semantically enrich the legal information. A second great challenge of the domain is the so called, “Responsible AI” and explicable AI, which has been raising awareness of the potential threats of AI to a “healthy development” of society, and there is an ongoing discussion to what extent normative regulations are required to control the use of AI. This new approach includes also a new ethics dimension creating a digital ethics analytic method by-design to introduce with the other disciplines.

Objective
This special issue aims at presenting foundational, approaches, tools, case studies and theoretical frameworks for the creation, processing and publishing of legal documents as open data towards citizens, practitioners and administrations. Specific emphasis may be given to legal text mining, legal XML standards and models, legal ontologies, as well as further legal argumentation and reasoning models and approaches towards more automated legal services and information systems. We solicit for papers covering both organizational and technical aspects and combining theory and practice. Papers taking interdisciplinary approaches and covering a multitude of aspects are strongly encouraged. Furthermore, we promote a diversity of research methods to study the challenges of this multifaceted discipline including best practices, case studies, design approaches, literature reviews and interviews.

Recommended Topics
• AI and NLP concepts, methods and applications in legal informatics
• Blockchain and smart contracts concepts, methods and applications in legal informatics
• Responsible and Explainable AI in the legal sector
• Creating Big Legal Open Data
• Legal Knowledge Graphs and ontological alignment
• Metadata and semantic approaches in the legal sector
• Automated decision-making using Data Mining, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms in legal domain
• Extracting value from big legal open data through text mining
• Legal data analytics
• Knowledge extraction from legal documents
• Policy analytics, processing and intelligence for legal domain
• Data-driven strategies and policies using legal big data
• AI for eGovernment using legal rules
• Data quality, authenticity and provenance of legal big data
• Data protection, security and trust of the legal big data
• Ownership and legal big data and documents
• Ethical considerations in the application of Artificial Intelligence in Government
• Methods and technologies leading to enhanced digital public services
• Data-driven public sector innovations and applications
• Architectural Legal standards, principles and frameworks
• Semantic ontologies, web services and modeling for legal governmental infrastructures
• Legal Data platforms, interoperability and information sharing

Submission Procedure
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers for this special theme issue on Foundational Approaches, Methods and Cases in Legal Informatics on or before 15 October 2020. All submissions must be original and may not be under review by another publication. INTERESTED AUTHORS SHOULD CONSULT THE JOURNAL’S GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS at http://www.igi-global.com/publish/contributor-resources/before-you-write/. All submitted papers will be reviewed on a double-blind, peer review basis. Papers must follow APA style for reference citations.

All inquiries should be directed to the attention of:
Charalampos ALEXOPOULOS
Guest Editor
International Journal Of Public Administration In The Digital Age
E-mail: alexop@aegean.gr

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Submission Deadline: 1st July 2020

Scientific Foundations of Digital Governance and Transformation

Concepts, Approaches and Challenges

A book to be published by Springer Publications, edited by:

Yannis Charalabidis, University of the Aegean, Greece,

yannisx (at) aegean.gr

Leif Skiftenes Flak, University of Agder, Norway,

leif.flak (at) uia.no

Gabriela Viale Pereira, Danube University Krems, Austria

Gabriela.viale-pereira (at) donau-uni.ac.at

Editorial Advisory Board Members

Elsa Estevez, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina

Marijn Janssen, TU Delft, The Netherlands

Atreyi Kankanhalli, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Robert Krimmer, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Rony Medaglia, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Gianluca Misuraca, European Commission, Spain

Francesco Molinari, University of Rijeka, Croatia

Theresa Pardo, State University New York, US

Demetrios Sarantis, United Nations University, Portugal

Maria Wimmer, Koblenz University, Germany

Introduction

Digital Governance refers to the phenomenon where administrations, enterprises and citizens utilize information and communication technologies (ICT) to a great extent, aiming at advanced levels of service provision quality, openness and transparency, collaboration and evidence-based decision making for enhancing the quality of living and promoting sustainable development.

During the last decades, Digital Governance has been recognized as a well-established application domain studying the problems related to the needs of public sector operation and proposing novel methods and frameworks for enhancing service quality through the use of ICT. Substantial progress has been made through EU and national funded research in a number of areas, yet the lack of scientific foundations in the Digital Governance domain seems to hinder unlocking its real transformative value and full potential to all stakeholders, from researchers to industry and SMEs. Providing such a scientific background would document the existing knowledge and open the pathway for systematic and reproducible solutions to identified problems, without the danger of repeating research or missing opportunities for application.

Objective of the Book

This title aims at providing the latest research advancements and findings for the scientific systematization of the Digital Governance and Transformation knowledge, such as core concepts, foundational principles, theories, methodologies, architectures, assessment frameworks, educational programs and future directions. It will bring forward the ingredients of this new domain, proposing its needed formal and systematic tools, exploring its relation with neighboring scientific domains and finally prescribing the next steps for eventually achieving the thrilling goal of laying the foundations of a new science.

This book is an activity stemming from Government 3.0 Erasmus+ project (www.gov30.eu)

 Target Audience

The audience of the book includes:

●     Researchers and Practitioners in the Digital Governance Domain, Digital Transformation, Information Systems and in the broader ICT domain

●     University Students and Professors from different disciplines

●     ICT industry experts, engaged in public sector information systems, software design and deployment projects

●     Policy makers and decision drivers at local, national or international level

The title will contribute to the analysis of the scientific perspectives of Digital Governance and Transformation, thus becoming an indispensable support tool for scientists and practitioners, either from the administrative or the technical side.

Recommended topics

The topics of the present call include, but are not limited to, the following:

Area A. Scientific Foundations of Digital Governance

●     Basic research questions, key concepts, generic laws and foundational principles of Digital Governance

●     Ontologies, taxonomies, lexicons and other semantic elements for Digital Governance

●     Combined taxonomies and ontologies of Digital Governance structure and neighbouring scientific domains

●     Definition of related scientific foundations and epistemological issues in science

●     Methodologies for Digital Governance neighbourhood recognition and identification of reusable elements

●     Neighbouring scientific domains analysis

Area B. Digital Governance Problem and Solution Space

●     Formal methods to describe Digital Governance problems and solutions

●     Digital Governance knowledge bases definition and design

●     Impact assessment frameworks, simulation methods and tools for Digital Governance 

●     Models and tools for cutting across problem-solution paths in Digital Transformation

●     Populations of formal descriptions, generalization of Digital Transformation approaches

●     Metrics and algorithmic models for Digital Governance

●     Other scientific methods for Digital Governance and Transformation in the Public Sector 

●     Scientific methods for Digital Governance found in other research domains    

●     Shared formal and other descriptive methods identification

Area C. Perspectives and Future Research Directions for Digital Governance

●     Forward - looking roadmaps for research in the area of Digital Governance and Transformation

●     Action plans for sustainability and evolution of scientific disciplines in general, and Digital Governance in particular, towards their scientific recognition

●     Open research challenges and hypotheses for Digital Governance

●     Visionary Scenarios for public sector organizations and digital public services

●     Proposals on the value proposition, assessment and marketing of the scientific offerings for Digital Governance

●     Guidelines and recommendations to key stakeholders

Submission Procedure

Chapters must be between 8,000 and 10,000 words and should be submitted on or before 1st July 2020, accompanied by:

●     The area of submission (A, B or C, as above)

●     Brief Author(s) CV(s) - up to 150 words per author

Chapter formatting guidelines for edited books can be found at:

●     Key Style Points on springer.com (for an easy reference).

●     Book Manuscript Guidelines on springer.com (for more detailed information)

All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.

Important Dates

●     1st July 2020               Full Chapter Submission Deadline

●     15th September 2020   Author Notification on Review Results

●     1st November 2020      Camera–Ready Chapters Submission Deadline

●     Spring 2021                 Planned Book Publication

Inquiries may be addressed to all co-editors.

Submissions should be forwarded electronically (Word/PDF document) to:

Gabriela Viale Pereira, Danube University Krems

Email: gabriela.viale-pereira (at) donau-uni.ac.at

cc : Zoi Lachana, University of the Aegean / zoi (at) aegean.gr