Jean Vincent Fonou Dombeu and Magda Huisman
sophisticated knowledge discovery and reasoning on the Semantic Web. Table 1 provides a summary of the Semantic Web Technologies discussed above. In the next section, some of these technologies are applied to develop a domain ontology for an e‐Government application.
Table 1: Summary of semantic web technologies
Semantic web technology Ontology Ontology languages XML, OWL, RDF( S), DAML Ontology editing platforms Protégé, OntoEdit, WebODE, KAON1 Application programming interfaces OWL API, Jena API, Sesame Relational database management systems Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL Ontology query languages RDQL, SWRL, XSLT, SPARQL Semantic web services WSMO, SWSL, OWL‐S
Description Domain concepts and relationships between them
To represent ontology
To generate ontology in OWL, RDF( S) or DAML
To implement, store and query ontology
To store ontology
To query ontology
To semantically specify Web services
5. Case study practice of semantic web technologies in e‐Government
Ontology is the backbone of any Semantic Web application; it serves various needs such as storage and exchange of data, ontology‐based reasoning or ontology‐based navigation. Semantic Web application comprises more than one software module( See Figure 2) to deliver all these functionalities( Oberle et al. 2005). These functionalities are realised with Semantic Web Services. The design and experiments are carried out in the next subsections to illustrate the ontology building, implementation, storage and query in Semantic Web application development.
5.1 Building e‐Government domain ontology
5.1.1 Motivation of the case study
The idea of building the domain ontology used in this study was motivated by the fact that, in developing countries, almost every government department is somehow involved in the implementation of a programme aiming at improving the welfare of its people. These programmes are commonly called development projects and include infrastructure development, water supply and sanitation, education, rural development, health care, ICT infrastructure development and so forth. Thus, an application that could interface all the activities related to development projects implementation in a developing country could bring tremendous advantages; particularly, such a web‐based e‐Government application would improve the monitoring and evaluation of projects and provide transparency, efficiency and better delivery to populations. In Fonou‐Dombeu and Huisman( 2010), an ontology support model for such a web‐based e‐Government application was proposed. The next subsection presents the ontology.
5.1.2 Build the e‐Government domain ontology
In Fonou‐Dombeu and Huisman( 2010) a five step framework adopted from the Uschold and King( 1995) ontology building methodology was used to build the e‐Government domain ontology( Figure 1). The domain ontology shows the key concepts of the domain( people, stakeholder, financier, monitoring indicator, reporting technique, etc.), the activities carried out in the domain( training, discussion, fieldwork, visit, meeting, etc.) and the relationships between the constituents of the domain. This study does not expand on the framework used to build the domain ontology. The interested reader may refer to Fonou‐Dombeu and Huisman( 2010) for further information. This study focuses on the process for implementing, storing and querying the domain ontology using some of the Semantic Web technologies discussed earlier.
The steps used to implement, store and query the domain ontology in Figure 1 are presented in Figure 2. Firstly, the domain ontology is semi‐formally represented in description logic( step 1 in Figure 2). Thereafter,
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