# A Point of View on New Education for Smart Citizenship
## 3 Being a Citizen in a Smart and Complex Environment
### Natural Language, Conceptual Models, and Data Spaces: A Bridge between System Users and Providers  
In this paper, we advance the proposal that when a citizen, using the natural language, is able to recognize a service conceptual model, he/she is also capable of identifying databases, information repositories, informative potentialities as well as linking conditions with other sources: in this way, the _digital territory_ created by the services used begins to take shape. In this methodological proposal, conceptual models are adopted as an instrument per se, for their explanatory potentialities and their ability to orient unskilled citizens in digital territories. In this perspective, the adopted methodology relies on the use of conceptual mappings [35; 36] as a support for education [37; 38] to improve a meaningful understanding of the materials studied. In this approach, concept maps met the need to explicitly show how new concepts and propositions were integrated into the learner's cognitive structure, helping students learn how to learn, capture explicit and tacit knowledge held by experts, assist in the design of instruction, facilitate creative work in every discipline, and facilitate improvement of management and marketing methods. This proposal actualizes a pioneering use of conceptual mappings [39] and, in this perspective, it does not use conceptual models towards any form of operationalization, but only as an asset in support of comprehension and learning. An original methodological update to this consolidated educational perspective, is given by the fact that, in this case, conceptual modeling is specifically addressed to reconstruct and understand an IT service structure by its users' view, with the explicit objective of also learning about the potentialities and risks for privacy, freedom and full active citizenship expression. A potential drawback is given by the fact that, usually, IT service conceptual models are not available for their users, who only approach them through their interfaces. In approach of this paper, we advance the proposal that this informative gap is bridged using the users' experiences and views developed in natural language as a source for a reverse conceptual modeling. Citizens require services: their requests, expressed in natural language, are the basis for the new system structure and architecture. When constructed, citizens use the system and obtain the services requested without knowing how it has been built. They are, in any case, able to describe the delivered services and what the system does: anyone is able to describe the experience of paying with a credit card, using an app to get a service, passing in a video-surveilled street. On the bases of these narrations, it is possible to derive and re-model a system conceptual model draft, useful for the citizens, to gain a clearer view of the digital space created by the services they use. Moving from interfaces to system architecture and code is not an original approach and it is a classic example of reverse engineering. Citizenship empowerment does not need this technical specification level: it could be enough to broadly recognize the model on which the system architecture is based in its most abstract and general form. Neither is the idea of using natural language to understand complex organization new [40]; it has quite a long tradition starting from problems of strategic management in complex environments. With respect to these early applications, technology has made important advances, even if the basic approach is still very similar: natural language is a useful modeling tool as it is rich enough to cope with the complexity of organizations. To support these points, the following picture illustrates a very common situation: an institution wants to provide services to support a problematic area. In this perspective, information systems designers and producers build a problem/solution conceptual model, on the basis of which they create the system.