No (e-)Democracy without (e-)Knowledge

Citizens have never had complete and up-to-date information on all the laws, regulations and opportunities that concern them. Although the law does not excuse ignorance, information-publishing techniques, usually Official Gazettes on paper, make effective knowledge and awareness virtually impossible. One of the greatest opportunities of e-government is to overcome this information gap and to supply timely and complete information to everybody. The electronic availability of information is but a minor aspect of this problem. Rather, effective, timely and accurate ways of disseminating information must be found. We discuss several solutions, ranging from text retrieval to ontologies and agents, and focus on dynamic taxonomies, a model recently proposed for the intelligent exploration of heterogeneous information bases, that can provide guided browsing and personalized exploration for complex laws and regulations.