The paper “Towards Website X-Ray for Europe’s Municipalities: Unveiling Digital Transformation with Multimodal Embeddings” by ZHAW researchers Jonathan Gerber, Bruno Kreiner, Jasmin Saxer and Andreas Weiler has been accepted at the iiWAS 2024 (International Conference on Information Integration and Web Intelligence). Jasmin Saxer had the opportunity to present our work at the conference, receiving great feedback and engaging questions from the audience. This strong interest highlights the importance of understanding and monitoring the digital transformation of municipalities across Europe through innovative approaches like multimodal embeddings.

The project is a collaboration between the ZHAW Institute of Computer Science, the ZHAW School of Management and Law, the Potsdam University, and the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU). DIGILOG (Digital Transformation at the Local Tier of Government) is an international, interdisciplinary research project on the state of digital transformation at the local tier of government in Europe.

DIGILOG aims to monitor and evaluate the digital transformation of local governments across 47 European countries through an innovative combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The project employs a web crawler and machine learning techniques to automate data collection from municipal websites, providing a systematic comparison of digital service offerings and internal digital infrastructures. This is complemented by in-depth case studies in selected municipalities to capture local administrative realities and variances.

The project will generate an openly accessible monitoring platform, offering real-time insights into the digital transformation of European local governments. This platform will be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners, contributing to a deeper understanding of long-term digitalization trends and informing future public sector modernization policies.