Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 17th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview II. Working Group on E-government Author(s) Mitja Decman University of Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia Title Wiki as a knowledge database in public administration: The service of public administration legislation advice as developed in the context of Slovenia File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Public administration has to keep the strict legislation rules while doing its business to perform its services reliably and trustworthy. The flood of legal acts and their changes that can occur quite often because of different reasons makes the interpretation and understanding quite a hard job to do. Public employees and their managers are confronted with questions regarding the implementations and no answers to them. In such cases they seek for legal advice, exchange opinions and knowledge with their colleagues, read different literature, articles etc. Often they can make good use of the information technology, which can achieve good results especially in the field of search for information and knowledge. One can find many web pages and web sites with legislation of different individual countries all over the world, in many cases available for free. Case-law, reports of different inspections and other legal practice is also documented on the web. Many other electronic sources contribute to faster and easier solving of the problems mentioned above. Technologies can be different. From simple documents like web pages, to computer databases with search capabilities and artificial intelligence, trying to solve the problems and help the user. In the last few years newer technologies rise in the modern web environment that are widely accessible, easy to use and cheap as well. They might be even the right solution for the above mentioned problems. We talk about semantic web, wikipedias, wiktionaries, blogs and similar technologies that are grouped under Web 2.0 phrase. Using one of them or their combinations might be the right option in many cases. The following paper shows the idea and a case of using a Wikipedia as a knowledge base for solving practical cases of unknown or incorrect interpretation of legal acts. As stated, it’s a common problem in public administration when public employee in specific activity of the concrete administration process or concrete event does not know what to do because of the unknown interpretation of the legal act. The solution, i.e. the Wikipedia will be used in reality as a Public administration advisory service portal. The intention is to set up a free advisory service and a knowledge portal that would help to share knowledge, exchange information, delivering solutions to concrete problems and situations, widening the knowledge of public employees and consequently improve operations in the public administration of Slovenia.
