Analysis of an inventory of information systems in the public administration

Deals with the problem of building an inventory of information systems for public administration, with reference to an ongoing project in Italy. We describe the investigation techniques that have been defined for collecting information and the techniques that have been developed for a systematic analysis of the large set of conceptual schemas resulting from the investigation. These schemas describe the data used by the public administration work processes. In particular, we describe the conceptual schema of the inventory, which is the basis for discussing the investigation methodology, the choice of the investigation units, the data collection and merging, and the access to information. Then, we present the schema analysis techniques which have been developed to semi-automatically analyse the large set of conceptual schemas resulting from the investigation. In particular, we illustrate indexing techniques for identifying representative descriptors of schemas and similarity techniques to compare schemas for their classification into families. Finally, a tool that has been developed to support the storage, analysis and classification of schemas is described, and experimental results are discussed