Προσαρμοστικό Σύστημα Αξιολόγησης Ηλεκτρονικών Υπηρεσιών: Εφαρμογή Στην Ηλεκτρονική Διακυβέρνηση (adaptive Evaluation Of Electronic Services: An E-government Case)

Abstract

This doctoral thesis focuses on the domain of quality of e-services and portals and proposes a framework which allows adaptive quality evaluation. Considering the problems of the existing methods for measuring the quality of e-services and portals, there is a need for measuring quality in a manner that each user is treated differently, based on her/his characteristics and particularities and furthermore in a way that allows e-service providers to collect more effective and efficient user feedback with regard to the provided services. The contribution of the present doctoral thesis can be summarized in three main axes:The first axis concerns the review of e-service quality and adaptivity methods. Basically, we substantiated an extensive and systematic review of research efforts in the domain of e-service quality models. The review, which originated from the need to answer the question about what should be measured as far as the quality of portal and e-services is concerned, concluded in a suggested categorization and synthesis of the various quality models. In the context of this axis, a review of adaptivity targets and techniques was also conducted.The second axis focuses on the development of a framework aiming to improve the existing e-service quality evaluation methods, by enabling the evaluation to be done in an easier, more efficient and adaptive manner. The proposed framework includes the development of various models, ontologies, methods and tools. In addition, we developed an innovative software system (SALT) that can take advantage of the specific framework and apply three types of adaptation: based on previously gathered data from the user through questionnaires, based on problems encountered by the user and based on metadata of the pages visited by the user.The third axis includes the actual application of the doctoral thesis results. The implementation and evaluation of the overall system took place in the e-government portal of an Austrian municipality. The evaluation showed that the system addresses the challenges of the existing e-service quality evaluation methods.