A semantic web service-based architecture for the interoperability of e-government services

We propose a semantically-enhanced architecture to address the issues of interoperability and service integration in e-government web information systems. An architecture for a life event portal based on Semantic Web Services (SWS) is described. The architecture includes loosely-coupled modules organized in three distinct layers: User Interaction, Middleware and Web Services. The Middleware provides the semantic infrastructure for ontologies and SWS. In particular a conceptual model for integrating domain knowledge (Life Event Ontology), application knowledge (E-government Ontology) and service description (Service Ontology) is defined. The model has been applied to a use case scenario in e-government and the results of a system prototype have been reported to demonstrate some relevant features of the proposed approach

Semantic-Driven e-Government: Application of Uschold and King Ontology Building Methodology for Semantic Ontology Models Development

Electronic government (e-government) has been one of the most active areas of ontology development during the past six years. In e-government, ontologies are being used to describe and specify e-government services (e-services) because they enable easy composition, matching, mapping and merging of various e-government services. More importantly, they also facilitate the semantic integration and interoperability of e-government services. However, it is still unclear in the current literature how an existing ontology building methodology can be applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain. In this paper the Uschold and King ontology building methodology is applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain. Firstly, the Uschold and King methodology is presented, discussed and applied to build a government domain ontology. Secondly, the domain ontology is evaluated for semantic consistency using its semi-formal representation in Description Logic. Thirdly, an alignment of the domain ontology with the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) upper level ontology is drawn to allow its wider visibility and facilitate its integration with existing metadata standard. Finally, the domain ontology is formally written in Web Ontology Language (OWL) to enable its automatic processing by computers. The study aims to provide direction for the application of existing ontology building methodologies in the Semantic Web development processes of e-government domain specific ontology models; which would enable their repeatability in other e-government projects and strengthen the adoption of semantic technologies in e-government.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure

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

Life event ontology based e-government service integration with privacy awareness

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The advancement of information and communications technology (ICT) and web services offers a promising opportunity for e-government service integration, which can improve the availability and quality of e-government services. One of the key challenges in electronic government (e-government) is the composition of standalone e-government services to achieve complex services. In recent years, the life event model as ontology has been introduced as the core element of integrating complexity of service delivery to improve the efficiency and reusability of e-government services, and web-based information management systems. Despite the conceptual emergence of life event ontology, the question as to how ontology can be used to effectively model life events to support e-government government to citizen service integration remains. Furthermore, privacy concerns represents a major barrier for citizens to accept e-government services, and the question of how to address these privacy issues is becoming increasingly important as the government moves to push service delivery online. Although solutions have been recently suggested in the literature to deal with privacy concerns, there are few practical approaches for helping citizens to create their preferences for privacy protection based on various aspects of privacy policy. These preferences include purpose, retention, consent and the protection of personal information in the context of using e-government services. As a step forward to satisfy the above requirements and to address some of the current challenges, this thesis presents a new framework for supporting e-government service integration based on a life event model. More specifically, the framework enables the system to automatically discover, select, compose and execute correct service across multiple web applications for appropriate life events and to allow a citizen to set up their privacy preferences and to support computerisation of these preferences so that these preferences can be guaranteed. The main contributions are fivefold: (i) the proposal of a conceptual framework of e-government service integration based on life events, (ii) the development of a new life-event model using ontology technique and the methodology to model life events as an ontology model for e-government service integration, (iii) the development of a novel citizen personal information sensitivity model with privacy awareness for supporting citizens in expressing their privacy preferences and for granting the protection of citizens’ personal information, (iv) the development of a suite of techniques to implement the framework including a practical solution to enforce the privacy policies in relation to citizens’ personal information during e-government service integration, and (v) the manifestation of the validity of the proposed framework, models and techniques through the creation of a working prototype of an integrated e-government service system in a specific e-government domain in Saudi Arabia. The significance of this study can be seen from the fact that it: (i) enables the domain expert to model effective life-events based on the use of ontology building methodology, (ii) enables effective modeling of citizens’ personal information, (iii) enables citizens to specify their privacy preferences, (iv) ensures that citizens can be well informed in terms of what information is used, what purpose is it used for, where and how it is stored and who will handle the information, and (v) enforces privacy policies which correspond to the citizens’ privacy preferences so that their privacy concerns can be properly addressed and that citizens’ personal information will be protected and guaranteed against unauthorized access, loss, misuse or alterations based on their privacy preferences. Based on the outcomes of this study, the integrated e-government systems can significantly improve the accessibility of e-government services and enhance the citizens' trust toward the integrated government e-service systems

Ontology-oriented e-government service integration utilising the semantic web

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.E-government service integration process has recently become an important research topic in e-government domain since many countries have developed various levels of e-government services. Non-interoperability between government agencies in service delivery implementation and platform posing the technical challenge, and the lack of the formulated modelling framework is the main methodological obstacle on the way of achieving dynamic delivery of integrated e-government services. This research is a study of the problems associated with the integration and delivery of integrated e-government services, and proposes a novel solution to tackle them. We start with investigating the fundamentals of e-government as a field of research to build a sensible argument for the questions investigated by this research, which lead to the exposure of the methodological as well as technological problems with the mechanics of e-government in the areas of service integration and delivery. The outcomes of this study in Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 respectively 1) suggests the most practically relevant and technically possible evolutionary pathway to e-government transformation, 2) proposes a modified software engineering process to achieve such transformation, 3) develops an innovative framework for modelling the service integration, 4) proposes an ontology as its knowledgebase, and 5) develops an innovative and intelligent software to support the practice of service integration and delivery. These outcomes collectively result in the introduction of a novel, complete and coherent solution for the abovementioned problems. This research is a cross disciplinary study of software integration engineering frameworks, e-government service delivery platform and semantic web technology, all working to devise the most efficient and robust framework of using semantic web capabilities to enable the delivery of integrated e-government services in an intelligent platform

Towards semantic-aware and ontology-based e-Government service integration - an applicative case study of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Scholarship program

By improving the quality of e-government services by enabling access to services across different government agencies through one portal, services integration plays a key role in e-government development. This paper proposes a conceptual framework of ontology based e-government service integration, using Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Scholarship Program (SAKASP) as a case study. SAKASP is a multi-domain program in which students must collect information from various Ministries to complete applications and the administering authority must verify the information supplied by the Ministries. The current implementation of SAKASP is clumsy because it is a mixture of online submission and manual collection and verification of information; its time-consuming and tedious procedures are inconvenient for the applicants and inefficient for the administrators. The proposed framework provides an integrated service by employing semantic web service (SWS) and ontology, improving the current implementation of SAKASP by automatically collecting and processing the related information for a given application. The article includes a typical scenario that demonstrates the workflow of the framework. This framework is applicable to other multi-domain e-government services. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010

E‐Service Composition Ontology

Recently, the concept of life event was coined in the literature to describe an event in a citizen’s life that would require at least one or in some cases a collection of public services from e‐government service composition prospective. A system to provide the required intelligence that would be able to compose the basic e‐services to build a composite service has recently become an area of debate with many solutions being proposed. This study building on prior publications is attempting to introduce and provide new technical guidelines for a new ontology that extends Ontology Web Language for Services (OWL‐S) as knowledgebase and intelligent actor for creating composite services to build a life event. This chapter proposes the life‐event ontology that is a logical extension of OWL‐S for implementation of e‐service integration modelling framework proposed in prior publications

A conceptual model for semantically-based e-government portals

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. At the same time, we outline a simple methodology for applying the proposed conceptual model into a specific scenario

Knowledge modelling for integrating semantic web services in e-government applications

Service integration and domain interoperability are the basic requirements in the development of current service-oriented e-Government applications. Semantic Web and, in particular, Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology aim to address these issues. However, the integration between e-Government applications and SWS is not an easy task. We argue that a more complex semantic layer needs to be modeled. The aim of our work is to provide an ontological framework that maps such a semantic layer. In this paper, we describe our approach for creating a project-independent and reusable model, and provide a case study that demonstrates its applicability