AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT: THE ROLE OF SEMANTIC AND ADMINISTRATIVE COOPERATION Flavio Corradini, Alberto Polzonetti, Barbara Re Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Camerino Via Madonna delle Carceri 9, 62032 Camerino MC, Italy Lucio Forestieri, Andrea Sergiacomi Regione Marche Via Tiziano 44, 60100 Ancona AN, Italy ABSTRACT Nowadays, document management is one of the most important challenges facing Public Administration’s operators owing to the wide numbers of the PA information in form of documents such as agreements, forms, letters, contracts, deliberation, contracts, and so on. Moreover, most of the PA’s business processes are based on document flows. In this context, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can plan again inter-organizational relationships inter and intra PA to (a) improve digital flows, and (b) share digital information to make a good use of information systems. We present a general framework for intelligent document management – DODIBOX -. It allows good productivity and major performance increases by applying intelligent technology to documents and document processing. The framework is organized by two different subsystems considering the design time and the run time functionalities. We explain the use of the framework together with richer representation of PA documents. KEYWORDS Intelligent document, e-Government, applicative cooperation, semantic, digital services 1. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, documents are the base unit of the Public Administration business processes and document management is one of the main function of the e-Government framework. At the same time the introduction of document schema can promote relationships inter and intra PA for (a) improve digital flows, and (b) share digital information. In this way a good use of the information systems is proposed. Using a set of reference document schemas we defined the main aspects of the e-Government intelligent document and we propose an ontology-based approach [Klinschewski 2003]. In this way some administrations’ needs may be satisfied and they take advantage of flexible document management [Johannes 2003], where the document become an intelligent units of information flows and they guarantee knowledge’s persistence. At the same time, the applicative cooperation infrastructure allows a better document management taking into consideration cooperation and coordination aspects. In this context, the creation of federate communities represents a good solution to introduce interoperability among PAs saving time and costs. In a federate community the main notions are: (i) the attention to the syntactic and semantic structures of the information; (ii) the necessity to introduce a “common understand” among involved parts (physical entities and software agents); (iii) the possibility to reuse knowledge with the aim to introduce standards for the semantic interoperability promotion inside the same domain; and (iv) the need to make explicit domain assumptions with the aim to separate the domain and system knowledge. Moreover, the introduction of an intelligent document structure can promote the documental flow management to introduce back-office cooperation according to the national laws. ISBN: 972-8924-19-4 © 2006 IADIS 222