Practicing Semantic web Technologies in e‐Government
Jean Vincent Fonou Dombeu 1 and Magda Huisman 2 1 Department of Software Studies, Faculty of Applied and Computer Sciences, Vaal
University of Technology, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa 2 School of Computer, Statistical and Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Natural Sciences,
North‐West University, South Africa fonoudombeu @ yahoo. com Magda. Huisman @ nwu. ac. za
Abstract: Over the last few years, Semantic Web technologies have attracted software developers in several domains such as e‐commerce, e‐business, e‐learning, video and multimedia, e‐Government, etc.; where there is need to develop intelligent web‐based applications that can be easily integrated and interoperated to perform complex transactions / operations over the Internet. However, the recency of the field of Semantic Web, the scarcity of qualified Semantic Web specialists and the lack of a clear specification of the software development process of Semantic Web applications have hampered the adoption of Semantic Web technologies in the software development community in general and in e‐Government in particular. This paper investigates the current state of practice of Semantic Web in e‐ Government, discusses the underlying technologies and presents a case study of application of these technologies in the field of e‐Government. Firstly, a literature review is conducted to learn about the current practice of Semantic Web in e‐ Government. Secondly, the Semantic Web technologies needed for building semantic‐based e‐Government applications including ontology, ontology languages and edition platforms, semantic data storage mediums, semantic query languages and semantic web services are discussed. Finally, a case study application of these technologies is carried out. The main contribution of the study is the investigation, identification and discussion of Semantic Web technologies as well as the clarification of the software process for building Semantic Web applications; this may promote the adoption of Semantic Web technologies in e‐Government projects and enable e‐Government developers to take advantage of Semantic Web technologies to build e‐Government systems that can be easily integrated and interoperated. The study would be useful to e‐Government developers, particularly those of developing countries where there is little or no practice of Semantic Web technologies in e‐Government processes as well as where little progress has been made towards the development of onestop e‐Government portals for seamless service delivery to citizens.
Keywords: e‐government, semantic web, ontology, semantic query languages, semantic data storage
1. Introduction
In the past few years, e‐Government has been a subject of interest of governments around the world. Governments worldwide are expecting e‐Government to improve their internal processes and provide Internet and ICT‐based service delivery to citizens, businesses and organizations. This requires the design, implementation and deployment of web‐based systems that present government structures and services online, provide mechanisms for online interaction of governments with citizens, and facilitate online citizen participation to government processes and decision making. These mandates of e‐Government can only be achieved if a large range of government’ s services and processes are delivered seamlessly to citizens and stakeholders through a single web portal( Wimmer, 2002; Lee et al., 2009). This raises the issue of developing heterogeneous web‐based e‐Government systems of government departments and agencies that can interoperate and be easily integrated. Although the state‐of‐the‐art software engineering techniques including object‐oriented and agile methods provide appropriate solutions to the aforementioned engineering problems of services integration and interoperability in e‐Government( Sanati and Lu, 2007; Muthaiyah and Kerschberg, 2008; Lee et al., 2009), it has been demonstrated that they have certain limitations( Muthaiyah and Kerschberg, 2008). Therefore, during the past seven years, Semantic Web technologies based on ontology have emerged as promising solutions to these problems.
However, the recency of the field of Semantic Web, the scarcity of qualified Semantic Web specialists and the lack of a clear specification of the software development process of Semantic Web applications have hampered the adoption of Semantic Web technologies in the software development community in general and in e‐Government in particular. This paper investigates the current state of practice of Semantic Web in e‐ Government, discusses the underlying technologies and presents a case study of application of these technologies in the field of e‐Government. Firstly, a literature review is conducted to learn about the current practice of Semantic Web in e‐Government. Secondly, the Semantic Web technologies needed for building semantic‐based e‐Government applications including ontology, ontology languages and edition platforms,
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