The use of TRAO to manage evolution risks in e-government

The need to develop and provide more efficient ways of providing Electronic Government Services to key stakeholders in government has brought about varying degrees of evolution in government. This evolution is seen in different ways like the merging of government departments, the merging of assets or its components with legacy assets etc. This has involved the incorporation of several practices that are geared towards the elimination of processes that are repetitive and manual while attempting to progressively encourage the interaction that exists between the different stakeholders. However, some of these practices have further complicated processes in government thus creating avenues for vulnerabilities which if exploited expose government and government assets to risks and threats. Focusing on ways to manage the issues accompanied with evolution can better prepare governments for manging the associated vulnerabilities, risks and threats. The basis of a conceptual framework is provided to establish the relationships that exist between the E-Government, asset and security domains. Thus, this thesis presents a design research project used in the management of evolution-related risks. The first part of the project focusses on the development of a generic ontology known as TRAO and a scenario ontology TRAOSc made up of different hypothetical scenarios. The resulting efficiency of the development of these ontologies have facilitated the development of an intelligent tool TRAOSearch that supports high-level semantically enriched queries. Results from the use of a case study prove that there are existing evolution-related issues which governments may not be fully prepared for. Furthermore, an ontological approach in the management of evolution-related risks showed that government stakeholders were interested in the use of intelligent processes that could improve government effectiveness while analysing the risks associated with doing this. Of more importance to this research was the ability to make inferences from the ontology on existing complex relationships that exist in the form of dependencies and interdependencies between Stakeholders and Assets. Thus, this thesis presents contributions in the aspect of advancing stakeholders understanding on the types of relationships that exist in government and the effect these relationships may have on service provisioning. Another novel contribution can be seen in the correction of the ambiguity associated with the terms Service, IT Service and E-Government. Furthermore, the feedback obtained from the use of an ontology-based tool during the evaluation phase of the project provides insights on whether governments must always be at par with technological evolution

Knowledge-based life event model for e-government service integration with illustrative examples

The advancement of information and communications technology and web services offers an opportunity for e-government service integration, which can help improve the availability and quality of services offered. However, few of the potential service integration applications have been adopted by governments to increase the accessibility of and satisfaction with government services and information for citizens. Recently, the 'life event' concept was introduced as the core element of integrating complexity of service delivery to improve the efficiency and reusability of e-government services, web-based information management systems. In addition, a semantic web-based ontology is considered to be the most powerful conceptual approach for dealing with challenges associated with developing seamless systems in distributed environments. Among these challenges are interoperability, which can be loosely defined as the technical capability for interoperation. Despite the conceptual emergence of semantic web-based ontology for life events, the question remains of what methodology to use when designing a semantic web-based ontology for life events. This paper proposes a semantic web-based ontology model for life events for e-government service integration created using a methodology that implements the model using the ontology modelling tool Protégé and evaluates the model using Pellet Reasoner and the SPARQL query language. In addition, this model is illustrated by two examples, the Saudi Arabia King Abdullah Scholarship and Hafiz, to show the advantages of integrated systems compared with standalone systems. These examples show that the new model can effectively support the integration of standalone e-government services automatically so that citizens do not need to manually execute individual services. This can significantly improve the accessibility of e-government services and citizen's satisfaction. © 2014-IOS Press

A VALUE NETWORK ANALYSIS OF AUTOMATED ACCESS TO E-GOVERNMENT SERVICES

This research maps out the value network of collaboration enabling automated access to egovernment services, motivated by the dissemination efforts of the EU-funded Access-eGov project. The main contribution of this article is the stepwise development of a value map which highlights the exchange of tangible and intangible deliverables and an initial value network analysis based on two different scenarios of technology choice. Results are expected to help decision makers in the participating institutions to direct their investments, and to help policy makers considering options for introducing new (public or private) actors to the collaboration network. However, value network analysis in e-government is only at the beginning, and further research should collect more empirical data, focus on reusing existing e-government assets, quantify the value exchanges, and bring value network analysis closer to decision making in governmental practice

Modelling legal knowledge for GDPR compliance checking

In the last fifteen years, Semantic Web technologies have been successfully applied to the legal domain. By composing all those techniques and theoretical methods, we propose an integrated framework for modelling legal documents and legal knowledge to support legal reasoning, in particular checking compliance. This paper presents a proof-of-concept applied to the GDPR domain, with the aim to detect infringements of privacy compulsory norms or to prevent possible violations using BPMN and Regorous engine

Investigating the use of semantic technologies in spatial mapping applications

Semantic Web Technologies are ideally suited to build context-aware information retrieval applications. However, the geospatial aspect of context awareness presents unique challenges such as the semantic modelling of geographical references for efficient handling of spatial queries, the reconciliation of the heterogeneity at the semantic and geo-representation levels, maintaining the quality of service and scalability of communicating, and the efficient rendering of the spatial queries' results. In this paper, we describe the modelling decisions taken to solve these challenges by analysing our implementation of an intelligent planning and recommendation tool that provides location-aware advice for a specific application domain. This paper contributes to the methodology of integrating heterogeneous geo-referenced data into semantic knowledgebases, and also proposes mechanisms for efficient spatial interrogation of the semantic knowledgebase and optimising the rendering of the dynamically retrieved context-relevant information on a web frontend

Gap Analysis Methodology for Identifying Future Ict Related eGovernment Research Topics – Case of “Ontology and Semantic Web” in the Context of eGovernment

Modern ICT enables governments all over the world to improve their operation in order to become more efficient and effective. Despite of all possible benefits of using modern ICT, governments still struggle with the problems of inefficiency of their operation. eGovernment is being discussed in many contexts. Expectations of research and implementation in this field were high. However, many investments have not met the visions and reached the maturity aimed at. What are the deficiencies of current developments in eGovernment? What is the role of research in advancing the field? In an European Commission - funded project, eGovRTD2020, eGovernment research is being investigated in terms of current state of play and future needs of eGovernment research based on visionary scenarios of governments using modern ICT in 2020 for their service provision and interaction with their constituency (citizens, companies, other governments, etc.). To understand the future needs of eGovernment research, a structured methodology of analyzing the gaps of current research in respect to the future needs has been developed. This paper presents the gap analysis methodology with the example of identified gap and future research theme “semantic web and ontology in the context of eGovernment”

The semantic architecture of the World-Wide Molecular Matrix (WWMM)

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.Abstract The World-Wide Molecular Matrix (WWMM) is a ten year project to create a peer-to-peer (P2P) system for the publication and collection of chemical objects, including over 250, 000 molecules. It has now been instantiated in a number of repositories which include data encoded in Chemical Markup Language (CML) and linked by URIs and RDF. The technical specification and implementation is now complete. We discuss the types of architecture required to implement nodes in the WWMM and consider the social issues involved in adoption.Peer Reviewe

WISM 2005 : web information systems modeling

Modern Web Information Systems (WIS) need to satisfy a large number of requirements coming from different WIS stakeholders. Modeling WIS by focusing at one design aspect at-a-time helps the implementation of these requirements. During the last years several model-driven methodologies have been proposed to support the WIS design. Strategic modeling is usually the first step in WIS design. It is a very general characterization of WIS which answers questions like: what is the purpose of the WIS?, which are the WIS users?, what functionality is provided by the WIS?, what is the content of the WIS?, what is the layout and atmosphere of the presentations provided by the WIS?, etc. It is only after answering the above questions at a high abstract level that the designer can proceed with the detailed specifications of the WIS. Data integration is one of the most important characteristics of WIS. Some examples of domains in which data integration is present are: public services and bioinformatics. WIS need to support user interfaces that make a lot of data coming from different sources available to the user in a transparent way. The Semantic Web technologies seem to facilitate the data integration problem on the Web by providing the necessary languages to describe the data semantics. Very often the Web user browses pages that he will like to view again at a later time. The present browsing history mechanisms included in Web browsers proved to be insufficient for an adequate retrieval of already seen information. A semantical organization of the previously visited pages can improve the process of retrieving previously seen data. There is an increasing demand to make WIS personalizable so that these systems better deal with the user interests. WIS design methodologies do propose adaptation techniques in order to realize WIS personalization. Despite the fact that some of these adaptation techniques are very similar (or even the same) in different methodologies, the notations to specify WIS personalization aspects are quite different. By defining a reference model for specifying WIS personalization one could improve the reuse of the personalization specifications and also enable a seamless translation between different specific personalization specifications. The above issues are some of the topics that are tackled in the workshop papers. We hope that we did raise the readers’ interest so that they will have a close look at the papers and possibly contribute to the fascinating and challenging area of WIS modeling