Jean Vincent Fonou Dombeu and Magda Huisman
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 one‐stop e‐Government portals for seamless service delivery to citizens.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The methodology of the study is presented in Section 2. Section 3 presents a literature review on the current state of semantic web practice in e‐Government. The technologies needed for building semantic web applications in general and e‐Government applications in particular are presented in Section 4. Section 5 describes a case study application of using semantic technologies in e‐Government process. A discussion is carried out in Section 6 and a conclusion terminates the paper.
2. Methodology
The methodology of this study is based on literature review and experiments. Firstly, a literature search is carried out in both e‐Government and Semantic Web domains to identify the technologies and processes required for building Semantic web applications. Secondly, a domain ontology describing a government service domain is presented. Finally, the domain ontology is used to carry out experiments that illustrate the application of Semantic Web technologies in e‐Government.
3. State of practice of semantic web technologies in e‐Government
Several e‐Government research and projects have adopted semantic web technologies during the past seven years. This is witnessed in the literature review below.
Salhofer et al.( 2009) presented an ontological approach for service integration in e‐Government. A semantic objective and service discovery technique was used to illustrate how e‐services could be derived from citizens’ needs expressed in the form of simple phrases. The derived e‐service ontologies were represented in Web Ontology Language( OWL) and the Web Service Modelling Language( WSML). Another ontological approach for semantic interoperability in e‐Government was proposed by Muthaiyah and Kershberg( 2008). They used a shared hierarchal ontology in which knowledge is organized at different levels with local ontologies. A semantic bridging process methodology was described for the mapping, merging and integration of local ontologies represented in an OWL syntax. In Sabucedo et al.( 2010), an intelligent platform to host e‐ Government services in the form of a customer‐oriented e‐Government Web portal was motivated. To facilitate services and related public administrations interoperability they introduced the concept of an intelligent document and a Life Event service both of which are semantically modelled with OWL ontology. These allow automatic services composition, advanced searching mechanisms and better usability from the user’ s perspective. A multilevel abstraction of life‐events for e‐Government services integration was presented in Sanati and Lu( 2009). In their work, a life‐event is defined as a collection of actions needed to deliver a public service satisfying the needs of citizens in a real‐life situation and is modelled using three kinds of ontologies: e‐Government ontology, regulatory ontology and service ontology. The ontologies are represented in OWL to enable dynamic services integration through semantic searching and matching of concepts. Xiao et al.( 2007) present yet another ontology‐based approach for semantic interoperability in e‐Government. They describe the business process of e‐Government services using an E‐Government Business Ontology( EG‐BOnt). Each business process is described in terms of its input, output, resource constraints and logical relations with other relevant businesses. Thereafter, each class of the EG‐BOnt is defined using the OWL language for its strong semantic and logic relation expressiveness. Finally, an architecture describing a semantic interoperability framework between different government systems based on the proposed EG‐BOnt was presented. Semantic interoperability solutions for local governments are proposed in the TerreGov( Barthes and Moulin 2005) project with a set of ontologies; these ontologies are used to describe services and documents, and enable the semantic Web services orchestration and discovery processes. Jarrar et al.( 2011) present the semantic component of the Interoperability Framework of the Palestinian government, namely government ontology. The government ontology is composed of 15 modules describing data concepts,
167