Pan-European E-Government Services on the Semantic Web Services

2008

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires to the sharing scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since a few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain.

2012

E-government is quite a late achievement of the information society, although in theory, it could have been the first application of the Internet, since Internet itself started as a governmental project. Many factors have been delaying the implementation of e-government, the most important ones being the digital divide, the privacy and security concerns and the availability of common data models on a national and international scale. Since its implementation comes much later than other on-line organizational models (e-business, social networks etc.), e-government also lags technologically. In Romania, but not only, e-government and public administration applications are data-driven rather than knowledge-driven, since databases are quite popular and robust as a standard model for storing the information behind traditional Web applications. On the other hand, the World Wide Web authorities invest a great deal of effort in raising the awareness of the so-called “knowledge society”, def...

The paper describes Access-eGov (Access to e-Government Services Employing Semantic Technologies), an IST project partially funded under the IST Programme of FP6 (e-Government research). A project consortium consists of eleven partners from five countries (

… of Ongoing Research, …, 2009

The paper presents an approach to the integration of governmental services of various types, i.e. on-line (electronic and web services), as well as offline (i.e. traditional, face-to-face) services by means of enhancing the service description with semantic information. A software platform, developed within the EU funded Access-eGov project, is described as a framework for creation and maintenance of semantically enriched services and for presenting the services to the citizens via customisable web interface. This paper presents results of testing and evaluation of the implemented Access-eGov platform in real settings within public administration in three EU countries (Slovakia, Poland, Germany) and subsequent technology enhancements.

Semantic Technologies for E-Government, 2009

Semantics, in the context of information systems, allows for a rich description of information or behavioural models that improve application processing, integration, and performance. Research and development into semantic technologies is today centred around Semantic Web, which covers various areas of computer science including knowledge engineering, software and service engineering, data interoperability, logical languages, user experience, social networks, and last but not least, business applications. While a vast number of different semantic technologies already exist, it is not fully clear how industry may profit from them and what they bring on top of other solutions already available in the market. For this reason, many research efforts focus on showcasing semantic technologies in various domains, such as e-business, e-health, e-learning, telecommunications, transport, and e-Government. E-Government, like other mentioned areas, is facing several problems in systems and information integration, information extraction, and information representation across heterogeneous organizations. In particular, e-Government faces big challenges to achieve interoperability and integration, taking into account differences in laws, regulations, services, administrative processes, and different languages across regions and countries. Such differences are related to a great variety of computerbased solutions used at various levels and create the requirement for technical, content, and process integration. On the other hand, semantic technologies have been of interest to the research community for the last 7-8 years, and as any other research domain, they require a large, dynamic, heterogeneous, and shared information space to be effectively tested and evaluated. Therefore, the combination of these two areas is very much natural. E-Government provides an ideal test-bed for semantic technologies research and, on the other hand, semantic technologies provide an ideal platform for the vision of a knowledge-based, citizen-centric, and citizen-empowering, distributed and integrated e-Government. In addition,

Innovative Issues and Approaches in Social Sciences, 2012

Together with the development of science and technology demands of society as well as people's needs are changing. These changes affect all areas of human activity in particular those related to electronic business. One aspect of interaction that has been affected by these changes is the interaction within the government. It is precisely these requirements which imply the development of an E-government. This Web based technology which is being used by the government as a communication channel is becoming more and more advanced. The complexity and the amount of information included in the communication channels requires the application of a new business concept used by the E

Journal of Information Systems Operations Management, 2011

The e-Government interoperability is the ability of ICT components/applications to work together, in other words it is the ability of two or more diverse government (ICT) systems or components to sharing and re-use of information-services, inter-linking of administrative tasks, within and between sectors are essential factors for the delivery of high quality, innovative, seamless and customer-centric e-services. The organizational interoperability refers to the cooperation way of the public administrations processes, by defining the communication interfaces between processes. This approach addresses the interoperability of e-government applications at organizational and semantic level, adopting Web services (WS) and Semantic Web Services (SWS) as technological solutions. The e-Government interoperability is becoming an increasingly crucial issue, especially for developing countries that have committed to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 3. Enhanced government efficiency and effectiveness coupled with the delivery of basic public services to all citizens are essential components required to achieve such goals. In this context, most governments have finalized the design of national e-government strategies and are busy implementing priority programmes. Today the data needed by policy makers to make better decisions is available but inaccessible. Policy makers are faced not only with overlapping and uncoordinated data sources, but also with the absence of common terms of reference and means of representing these data. This results in the time consuming and complex cost of comparing data that is represented differently. Interoperability will allow data compiled by different agencies to be used together to make faster and better decisions. An important goal of governance is to enable the citizenry to have easier and faster access to government information and services. The seamless flow of data from one government office to another provides the policy maker with the information needed to draft sound policy and deliver better services.

Semantic Web Services, Processes and …, 2006

In the last five years a number of significant developments have occurred that motivate the use of Semantic Technology in e-Govemment. In 2001, the US President announced 24 e-Government initiatives (US President's E-Govemment Initiatives, 2001). In 2004 the Federal Enterprise ...

2010

Knowledge sharing within a large entity such as government organizations, is critical to successful e-government implementations. Semantic technologies offer promise in this regard, however, many studies in the past have suggested that the semantic technologies for knowledge sharing suffer from potential weaknesses such as dynamicity, scalability, flexibility and offer limited options for specific business applications. In most cases the need for knowledge integration in business interactions in government systems are overlooked or loosely addressed due to rapidly changing situations and complex business networking. Significant challenges remain in developing e-government solution that can address the need for growing knowledge integration and sharing to enhance business interactions. This paper outlines a knowledge sharing framework to solve these issues with respect to citizen's participation in e-government system, by encouraging user driven activities through the use of emerging technology and ontology based design.

2005

Abstract: Issues of semantic interoperability and service integration for e-government portals are the domain of interest of the present paper. We propose a Conceptual Model for One-Stop e-Government Portals based on the Semantic Web Service technology. We describe our research into building the three basic ontologies and their integration with standard ontologies. The result is a project-independent reusable model.