Decision Support for E-Governance: A Text Mining Approach

Information and communication technology has the capability to improve the process by whichgovernments involve citizens in formulating public policy and public projects. Even though much ofgovernment regulations may now be in digital form (and often available online), due to their complexityand diversity, identifying the ones relevant to a particular context is a non-trivial task. Similarly, with theadvent of a number of electronic online forums, social networking sites and blogs, the opportunity ofgathering citizens’ petitions and stakeholders’ views on government policy and proposals has increasedgreatly, but the volume and the complexity of analyzing unstructured data makes this difficult. On the otherhand, text mining has come a long way from simple keyword search, and matured into a discipline capableof dealing with much more complex tasks. In this paper we discuss how text-mining techniques can help inretrieval of information and relationships from textual data sources, thereby assisting policy makers indiscovering associations between policies and citizens’ opinions expressed in electronic public forums andblogs etc. We also present here, an integrated text mining based architecture for e-governance decisionsupport along with a discussion on the Indian scenario.