Smallholder farmers in the Ashanti region of Ghana face challenges due to shifts in climate patterns that have a significant negative impact on their crop yields. We conducted a feasibility study into the transition toward an agroforestry system by integrating trees and shrubs within crop fields. In this research, we adopted a complex systems perspective to analyse the institutional, social, and technical aspects that play a role in such a transition. By conducting in-depth analyses through three rounds of interviews and a Q-sort method with smallholder farmers in the Ashanti region, we mapped the most important challenges in transitioning to an agroforestry system. These pertain to: uncertainties in land tenure agreements, the absence of effective conflict resolution mechanisms, having no knowledge of and tools for maintaining trees, and the lack of financial resources for upfront investments. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for the design of the transition process toward a comprehensive agroforestry system in Ghana. We recommend improving land tenure security and establishing conflict resolution mechanisms by polycentric coordination in which all stakeholders are involved for this essential institutional redesign process. To enable smallholder farmers to acquire the required skills and tools for tree crops, preferably a pilot plot for real-life demonstration is initiated. Financial resources for the smallholder farmers in the transition period need to be warranted, e.g., via the design of a carbon credit market. We recommend future research to explore the perspective and interests of chiefs/landowners in the Ashanti region who have crucial decision-making power through their land ownership.

In this paper, we present a domain-independent ontology extension workflow supported by LLMs. Ontology Engineering (OE) is a complex field that requires combining technical skills with domain expertise across multiple disciplines. Despite numerous attempts at automation, most of the processes are still manual. Different ontology engineering methodologies coexist, but none is a standard. These challenges, together with the lack of highly skilled workers in the sector, increase the entry barriers to the field. In parallel, Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming prominent in ontology development due to their natural language processing and coding capabilities and their reportedly emergent abilities. In this paper, we focus on human-LLM collaboration for ontology extension. Following a Design Science Research approach, we interviewed 11 experts and modeled the current process of ontology extension to disclose its main issues. We analyzed the concerns and opportunities perceived by ontology engineers for using LLMs. Based on our insights and previous work, we designed a process framework for ontology extension that combines human expertise with LLMs capabilities, providing customizable prompt templates, OE tools, and guidelines. We tested our methodology with an existing greenhouse ontology using GPT-4o. Finally, we qualitatively evaluated the results against a manually crafted extension we use as our gold standard. The results show that the proposed approach holds the potential to (1) get inspiration for adding new entities, (2) deal with complex syntax definitions and repetitive tasks, and (3) verify whether the extended ontology conforms to the requirements and competency questions.

Cross-border eCommerce flows from non-EU countries with direct product delivery to consumers in the European Union have been rapidly growing. Whereas monitoring eCommerce flows for aspects such as Value- Added Tax (VAT), and safety and security already is a high priority, the increasing volumes bring new concerns. Such concerns include how to ensure that the products are sustainably produced and how to ensure a level playing field with products that are produced in the EU or imported via other modes of transport that are subject to more thorough checks at the border. These challenges have become new priorities in EU policy documents. Currently, authorities receive limited information related to eCommerce goods (particularly the low-value consignments that are exempted from duties), which hampers their risk assessment. Recently, Digital Product Passports (DPPs) have been introduced in legislation as a tool to inform consumers, recyclers, and market surveillance authorities about the material and manufacturing aspects of products. These DPPs promise to contain rich data that can be used to enhance both the monitoring and the customs risk assessment of cross-border eCommerce flows. To assess the exact potential and added value of DPPs, we analyze international eCommerce flows in the context of the EU-funded project PARSEC. We identify potential areas where DPPs can be relevant for eCommerce monitoring and risk assessment and present follow-up research directions on this topic.

Pre-print paper to be presented at the EGOV2025 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART’25, August 31 – September 4, 2025, Krems, Austria and is to appear in the the CEUR-WS Proceedings of Ongoing Research, Practitioners, Posters, Workshops, and Projects of the International Conference EGOV-CeDEM-ePart 2025.

As a primary means of communication, the role of mobile telecommunications networks is important for a developing country's economic and social development. However, especially rural areas in low-income countries still lack mobile coverage. In the academic literature, only segmented solution strategies for this mobile coverage problem in rural areas are proposed. These are either technological, regulatory, or organizational solutions, whereas solving the mobile coverage gap requires an integrated approach to develop arrangements for mobile network rollout in rural areas. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the causes of the lack of mobile coverage, the available solutions, and how they can be combined. Based on this overview, the paper proposes a decision support scheme for selecting a suitable arrangement for solving the mobile coverage gap. In this decision support scheme, the technical, organizational, and regulatory solutions are combined to develop a set of arrangements that match the local key causes of the lack of mobile coverage and that fit with the local context. In the last phase of the decision support scheme, the relevant stakeholders are involved in selecting the most suitable arrangement. We demonstrate the decision support scheme by applying it to the case of an unserved rural village in Indonesia, Unipa on the island of Papua, to show how it can guide a developing country to initiate the process of developing a solution for mobile coverage problems in rural areas.

Monitoring the circular economy (CE) transition requires data sharing and collaboration between public and private actors. However, businesses are reluctant to share data with authorities for monitoring purposes due to fear of losing control over sensitive data. The emerging technology Multi-Party Computation (MPC), which enables collaborative data analysis while maintaining data control, could address barriers in business-to-government (B2G) data sharing and collaboration. This ongoing research aims to explore the potential of MPC in facilitating B2G data sharing and collaboration for CE monitoring under the conditions of inter-organizational trust and data control. Drawing on a B2G data sharing framework, our initial findings suggest that MPC can benefit authorities in accessing sensitive business data, while businesses can benefit from controlling shared data for compliance reporting. As MPC can be deployed in various architectures, the next research steps are to examine links between variants of MPC architectures and different data-sharing solutions.

Circular economy (CE) and sustainability are high on the political agenda of governments nationally and internationally. We see different regulatory developments where governments aim to put stricter rules and requirements towards businesses to ensure the transition toward a more circular and sustainable future. The use of digital infrastructures, including transparency systems and digital product passports is starting to play a vital role in supporting governments in their CE monitoring efforts. Yet there are challenges to be overcome. Many government procedures are set up in laying out very detailed requirements about what one government agency can do in a singular phase of the circular process (e.g., customs performing specific checks at the border) or a single Member State (e.g., organizing Extended Producer Responsibility in a specific country). While these efforts are valuable building stones towards CE monitoring, they are fragmented, and blank spots in CE monitoring occur when borders are crossed, and another country needs to take over the CE monitoring tasks. As for circularity, even if many efforts are spent by a single government agency or a single country, all these efforts may be in vain if the proper CE monitoring of the next step is not secured. While earlier research identified this problem, there is still limited understanding of the problem itself and directions to address it systematically. In this paper, following up on earlier research and with insights gained from an EU project on CE monitoring, we shed further light on the problem. More specifically we conceptualize CE monitoring by putting the CE flows at the center and exploring deficiencies for governments and businesses to safeguard the monitoring of CE flows. We examine two routes that can be followed to ensure continued CE monitoring when borders are crossed, namely the government route, as well as the business route (enabled by traceability systems and in-control mechanisms of businesses). We discuss the need for a global governance layer that can facilitate both routes and propose further directions to advance CE monitoring by taking a global perspective.

The AI Act represents a significant legislative effort by the European Union to govern the use of AI systems according to different risk-related classes, imposing different degrees of compliance obligations to users and providers of AI systems. However, it is often critiqued due to the lack of general public comprehension and effectiveness regarding the classification of AI systems to the corresponding risk classes. To mitigate these shortcomings, we propose a Decision-Tree-based framework aimed at increasing legal compliance and classification clarity. By performing a quantitative evaluation, we show that our framework is especially beneficial to individuals without a legal background, allowing them to enhance the accuracy and speed of AI system classification according to the AI Act. The qualitative study results show that the framework is helpful to all participants, allowing them to justify intuitively made decisions and making the classification process clearer.

To access business data for compliance monitoring of the circular economy (CE), governments would need to deal with issues of both legislative complexities arising from many new regulations in the area of CE and sustainability, as well as the digital complexity for accessing business data that resides in different business systems and data spaces. While earlier research has touched upon (1) the legal complexity through the identification of common high-level concepts of what to monitor, and (2) the digital complexities through the use of upper ontologies, so far these aspects have been treated to a large extent in isolation and not been linked systematically. In this research in progress paper, we propose an approach on how to link the two, discuss advances in the area and limitations, and identify areas that need to be addressed to allow governments to tap into the rich business data sources for compliance monitoring in the future.

Energy production and consumption are major contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, exacerbating one of the greatest challenges faced by modern societies: climate change. Thus, societies must switch to more sustainable energy sources. Green hydrogen has emerged as a promising alternative energy carrier, facilitating storage and utilization across various industries. However, amidst different production processes, solely sustainable electrolysis stands out as an environmentally benign production method. Hydrogen producers must prove provenance and sustainable production to regulatory bodies and hydrogen buyers to comply with the regulations for sustainable development. Blockchain provides a viable solution encompassing trustworthy and secure information sharing between untrusted partners. In this article, we employ a design science research approach to develop a blockchain-based certification system (BLC-CS) for green hydrogen. Through collaboration with experts to gather requirements and conduct evaluations, we design an artifact that streamlines the certification process for producers, regulators, and consumers. Our proposed solution facilitates information gathering, verification, and reporting, contributing to the advancement of sustainable energy practices. We provide a comprehensive discussion of the BLC-CS’s feasibility for green hydrogen certification, including technical extensions, recommendations for practitioners, and directions for future research.

To facilitate the transition toward a circular economy (CE), EU policymakers are drafting new policies and legislations at a high speed. This affects a wide set of sectors and leads to legislative complexity. At the same time, the legislative developments requiring Digital Product Passports (DPPs) offer opportunities for governments to tap into a rich set of business supply chain data for CE and sustainability monitoring. Nevertheless, the diversity of these legislative initiatives leads to complexity for governments on what needs to be monitored. There is a need to reduce legislative complexity, to have a more clear view on what governments need to monitor, which in turn would provide more clarity on the types of business data from the Digital Product Passports and digital infrastructures governments may need to access for CE and sustainability monitoring purposes. One approach to reduce the legislative complexity is to have a framework of high-level concepts for CE and sustainability monitoring. The question, however, is how to arrive at such a framework of high-level concepts. In this paper, we explore the potential of the concepts found in the UN Recommendation 46 (initially developed for the traceability of textiles), to serve as a basis for a generic framework of high-level concepts for CE and sustainability monitoring. We examine the suitability by applying the concepts from UN Recommendation 46 to a variety of legislations beyond textiles. Our analysis suggests that the framework has the potential to serve as a high-level framework of CE and sustainability monitoring concepts across sectors, and we identify several areas for further research.

The transition towards a circular economy (CE) will require data sharing across different platforms and data spaces of parties operating in a variety of supply chains. From a circular economy compliance monitoring perspective, beyond the access to mandatory data that governments will receive, authorities may benefit from accessing additional business data from the source on a voluntary basis, which is challenging. While platforms and data spaces solve a great deal of complexity and interoperability within their realm, platform, and data space interoperability is still challenging. In the logistics domain, efforts have been made to overcome these issues of data sharing across logistics platforms with a Semantic data sharing architecture developed by the CEF FEDeRATED Action, at the heart of which is a semantic model aligning other semantic models for logistics. In this paper, we take the Semantic data sharing architecture as a point of departure and examine the opportunities and limitations that it has for CE monitoring, and how it relates to other developments in the EU and beyond. Many of these developments acknowledge the need for data access across heterogeneous systems and – processes of actors; others add security and trust to data sharing that goes all the way to the level to cover legal obligations. The goal of this paper is to gain further insights into how data sharing across multiple platforms and data spaces enables circular economy monitoring, where government organizations would need to address the issue of how they would interface with, and access data that resides in multiple platforms and data spaces. We found that the various models can be aligned on some architecture principles that promote interoperability across dimensions (e.g. federation, keeping data at the source), yet they still differ on other dimensions (e.g. data model and semantics, as well as how they address issues of identification, authentication and authorization). We suggest further efforts towards developing meta-level agreements and standardization for data space interoperability and we propose further research directions on that topic.

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have paved the way toward a more sustainable future. The 2019 EU Green Deal and the 2020 EU Circular Economy Action Plan [1] introduce laws and regulations to facilitate and encourage the transition towards sustainability and a circular economy (CE). For the implementation of these regulatory measures, public authorities face the challenge to gain access to relevant business data for compliance monitoring. Digital infrastructures and access to business data (sources) such as the material composition of products are useful for compliance monitoring, however CE-relevant data is spread across multiple platforms of the supply chain partners and across multiple supply chains. Therefore, digital infrastructures and information-sharing arrangements need to be developed to create visibility and traceability for monitoring the circular economy flows. In this paper, we use a conceptual framework with four dimensions (context, actors, public value, and digital infrastructures) to analyze key actors and potential data of value they hold in their digital infrastructures to explore options for data-sharing solutions.
By focusing predominantly on the actor dimension, we analyze a case study in the automotive industry, taking the perspective of two focal Dutch governmental actors: Customs and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. In our analysis, we also show how this actor dimension is linked to the other dimensions: context, public value, and digital infrastructures. These dimensions
play an instrumental role in navigating through the complex actornetwork in a systematic way toward identifying pathways for the development of digital infrastructures and data-sharing solutions for circular economy monitoring.

The European Commission initiated a series of Directives and Regulations that aim to turn the linear economy into a climate-neutral and circular economy. Business-to-government information- sharing arrangements play an essential role in monitoring compliance with these regulatory measures. To this end data from the supply chain of products needs to be combined to create a full picture of the product life cycle. This requires the design of data-sharing arrangements in which businesses and governments share data. The EU proposal to introduce the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) obliges EU importers and non-EU exporters to buy carbon certificates for goods imported into the EU Customs Union. Upon implementation, the CBAM will require monitoring activities by the EU Custom Authorities. We use the case of the import of steel for the EU automotive industry to explore the required data, scenarios for (voluntary) data sharing, and the role of (future) digital infrastructures for e-government. Our analysis shows that data sharing for compliance with the CBAM Regulation is relatively simple. However, if Customs Authorities need to go beyond the monitoring of single regulations, the situation becomes more complex. In addition, the diversity of data sources owned by a network of actors in different (future) digital infrastructures will increase. Future research needs to go beyond data-sharing solutions for monitoring single regulations for circular economy towards combined data sharing for multiple regulations. This requires alignment between public and private interests to limit the administrative burden for businesses and government and an assessment of which digital infrastructures developed can be used to support data sharing.

In this paper, we propose a framework for circular economy monitoring by looking at the issue of border crossing and levels of control.

The AI Act represents a significant legislative effort by the European Union to govern the use of AI systems according to different risk-related classes, linking varying degrees of compliance obligations to the system's classification. However, it is often critiqued due to the lack of general public comprehension and effectiveness regarding the classification of AI systems to the corresponding risk classes. To mitigate those shortcomings, we propose a Decision-Tree-based framework aimed at increasing robustness, legal compliance and classification clarity with the Regulation. Quantitative evaluation shows that our framework is especially useful to individuals without a legal background, allowing them to improve considerably the accuracy and significantly reduce the time of case classification.

Public value creation is traditionally considered as the citizens' collective expectations with respect to government and public services. Recent e-government literature indicates that what exactly constitutes public value in digital government is still debated. Whereas previous research acknowledges aspects such as co-production and the orchestration role of government in the context of public value creation, there is only a limited understanding of how public value is created by the interactions between government and business actors, and the role digital technologies play in that process. Furthermore, so far, research into public value creation processes is limited to specific services that aim to meet a specific goal; for a more complete view, an integrative perspective is required to address the multiplicity of goals. Societal challenges including climate change, sustainability, and the transition towards circularity will require governments to play a crucial role. Businesses are also transforming their vision by adding societal goals to their economic objectives and contributing to these societal challenges. This necessitates even more the need to explicitly consider the role of business in public value creation processes. In this paper we argue that there is a need to understand public value creation as an interactive process, involving both government and business actors. In this process, voluntary information sharing enabled by digital infrastructures has the potential to contribute to the value creation processes, but the increased complexity of digital technologies obscures the effects they can have on value creation. Therefore, we develop a framework that allows to reason about public value creation as an interactive process, involving government and businesses, facilitated by voluntary information sharing. The framework also allows to reason about how the technological design choices of the underlying digital infrastructure influence this value creation process. For the framework development, we use an in-depth case study from the domain of international trade. We analyze the interactions between customs authorities and supply chain actors for jointly creating public value related to revenue collection, as well as safety and security of goods entering the European Union, using business data made available via a global blockchain-enabled infrastructure. In future research, the framework that we developed can be used to analyze more complex cases with additional public value aspects, such as sustainability and circularity.