Page 226 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese Edition of Journal of Library Science in China 2015 Vol.41 225

and new appraising view for application.

Research on the framework of e-government body of knowledge
Yafen YANG 1 ∗

It has been more than 20 years since the concept of“e-government”was first proposed. However,
due to the sophisticated research object and external theoretical reference, it is difficult to establish
a scientific, systematic and logical theory system of e-government which can be accepted by most
scholars. So far, it has been hard to get a comprehensive, unified and rational grasp of e-government
from the perspective of discipline theory system. Nevertheless, there already exists a certain
accumulation of knowledge related to e-government. But what belongs to the scope of e-government
has no unified clear answer. In order to get a better understanding of e-government, it is necessary
to analyze and integrate the existing academic accumulation of e-government, to extract a body
of knowledge of e-government which owns internal logic structure, and finally to establish an
appropriate framework of e-government body of knowledge.
Focusing on the problems to be solved in e-government, the paper makes a research of the
composition and logical architecture of e-government body of knowledge with the methodology of
general discipline theory system. It involves three major issues in the study: 1) the orientation: what
oriented when building the framework of e-government body of knowledge; 2) the structure: how
to identify and describe the basic structural relationship between each module in the framework; 3)
the composition: how to determine the components of each module in the framework.
During the research, two kinds of methodology are mainly adopted, namely “logical starting
point” and “problem system”. First of all, according to “logical starting point” methodology, the
paper takes the most abstract concepts in e-government area as the logic start in the framework
of e-government body of knowledge, regards the application of fundamental principles and laws
of e-government in practice as the logical end, and focuses on “theory” and “application” when
logically organizing and partitioning the body of knowledge. Moreover, modularization designing
ideas are utilized when the overall logical architecture of e-government body of knowledge
partitioned into three modules which contain ontology, essentialism and practice theory. Secondly,
based on the methodology of “problem system”, the paper makes a deep decomposition of the
basic problems in e-government, integrates the latest development of current research questions
in the area, extracts a problem system which connects the main factors on various aspects of
e-government, and further defines the specific composition of each module in the framework,
finally puts forward a framework of e-government body of knowledge. The framework is
composed of five big modules including elementary concepts, essential theory, fundamental

* Correspondence should be addressed to Yafen YANG, Email: yyf@hdu.edu.cn