Chapter 27

E-government refers to the use of information and communication technologies for improving government services and interactions with citizens. In today’s digital information era the successful delivery of public policy is of paramount importance and significantly dependent upon the effective technology deployment. In this respect, many researches and business organizations have studied the means via which public administrations and citizens can benefit from the availability of e-government applications and services. Despite the plethora of existing studies on how technological means can serve governmental decision-making policies, still there is ample of room for improvement before Information Technology services are fully exploited. In this chapter we propose the exploration of text and data mining techniques for empowering e-government applications and services for the citizen’s benefit. In particular, we start by providing a field overview with respect to the current trends in e-government services and we demonstrate via proofs of concept the limited adaptation existing e-government applications entail. Stimulated by the need to transform e-government services to e-inclusion applications, we suggest the utilization of data mining techniques for processing the governmental data so as to extract and associate information fragments with real citizen needs and thus enable the encapsulation of the latter in future governmental decisions. To demonstrate the usability and added value of our proposed approach we have designed an interactive e-government infrastructure, the architecture of which we will present and discuss in our chapter. Moreover, we will elaborate on the system details, its adaptation capacity and we will discuss its usage benefits for both citizens and public sector bodies. Sofia Stamou Patras University, Greece DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1740-7.ch027