The site is organized into sections dedicated to the organizational structure (The administration), the services made available by the authority (Services), news and events (News), documents and data of the administration, plus a personal area that collects the user’s messages, documents, and applications. Content navigation and indexing is facilitated by the use of first and second level menus structured according to the official guidelines and models for Italian municipal websites and the use of related controlled vocabularies. The different types of detailed content (content types) are in turn organized into functional areas, easily navigable through a contextual navigation menu. The structure promotes usability and content accessibility.
The services section is based on a catalog, which in turn is connected to the delivery flows of individual services and their related applications. The catalog allows classifying services and expresses a data model that defines the service in terms of characteristics, the office responsible for it, progress statuses and application outcome, types of output released in case of a positive activation outcome: all of which facilitates interoperability between services and the process of creating and configuring new services.
The points of contact between citizens and the authority are managed through contact pages and FAQs, with a series of answers to the most frequently asked questions from citizens. Users have the references to directly contact the offices responsible for a topic and therefore the information and services associated with it, report issues, and, when necessary, can book an online appointment with the relevant office.
Finally, a section dedicated to the back office allows officials and managers to interact with the system, classifying information and analyzing data. Although it is very flexible, OpenCity Italia offers authorities a predefined model for content organization and also a set of preset content and services to help them in the creation process. The entire information architecture is based on the models for Italian municipal websites created by the Department for Digitalization of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.
The information published through OpenCity is open by default, published under CC license (Creative Commons) according to transparency regulations and in compliance with privacy regulations (as per the privacy notice published on the site). It is easily exportable in open data format, to promote sharing and reuse of public information assets.
A structured approach to information also facilitates analysis activities related to the use of the site and the authority’s digital services through an analytics module that records, among other things, user feedback on content clarity and service ratings.
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Aspetti normativi
Aspetti tecnologici
OpenCity Italia was born pursuing the idea of managing content as structured data. We have designed an ontology that organizes information into classes (or content types) that contain different properties within them. The system of relationships between different entities allows us to effectively correlate different content types, for example showing the information about the structure that manages a service within the service page, or recalling the list of locations within the booking system, and so on.
This approach produces various benefits and in particular allows creating an effective navigation system where users can orient themselves and find the right information in the right place. For the same reason, we are able to correctly index content for the site’s search engine and make it easy to find on Google. OpenCity Italia uses the semantic web, machine learning techniques, and standard public administration ontologies to index content, make it easy to find and manage while respecting privacy and transparency.
Some characteristics of the publishing, management, and content indexing platform based on open source technologies such as eZ Publish and Apache Lucene are: