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

Semantic Data Storage in Information Systems

The storage and retrieval of information are important functions of information systems (IS). These IS functions have been realized for decades, due to the maturity of the relational database technology. In recent years, the concept of Semantic Information System (SIS) has emerged as IS in which information is represented with explicit semantic based on its meaning rather than its syntax to enable its automatic and intelligent processing by computers. At present, there is a shortage of discussions on the topic of semantic data storage in IS as compared to the relational database storage counterpart. This study uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to discuss semantic data storage in IS. The qualitative method is by means of literature review to learn the existing techniques for representing and storing semantic data. The quantitative method is done with experiments to empirically discuss these techniques. The empirical findings of the study shed light on the technologies and approaches utilised to store semantic data in relational databases. This may contribute to the understanding of semantic technologies in IS and foster the development of semantic information systems

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

Methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. Where is their meeting point?

In this paper we review and compare the main methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies that have been reported in the literature, as well as the main relationships among them. Ontology technology is nowadays mature enough: many methodologies, tools and languages are already available. The future work in this field should be driven towards the creation of a common integrated workbench for ontology developers to facilitate ontology development, exchange, evaluation, evolution and management, to provide methodological support for these tasks, and translations to and from different ontology languages. This workbench should not be created from scratch, but instead integrating the technology components that are currently available

Smart City Ontologies and Their Applications: A Systematic Literature Review

The increasing interconnections of city services, the explosion of available urban data, and the need for multidisciplinary analysis and decision making for city sustainability require new technological solutions to cope with such complexity. Ontologies have become viable and effective tools to practitioners for developing applications requiring data and process interoperability, big data management, and automated reasoning on knowledge. We investigate how and to what extent ontologies have been used to support smart city services and we provide a comprehensive reference on what problems have been addressed and what has been achieved so far with ontology-based applications. To this purpose, we conducted a systematic literature review finalized to presenting the ontologies, and the methods and technological systems where ontologies play a relevant role in shaping current smart cities. Based on the result of the review process, we also propose a classification of the sub-domains of the city addressed by the ontologies we found, and the research issues that have been considered so far by the scientific community. We highlight those for which semantic technologies have been mostly demonstrated to be effective to enhance the smart city concept and, finally, discuss in more details about some open problems

Semantic Retrieval System for Nigerian Onion Domain Ontology

With the recent Nigerian Government’s effort to diversify its economy, several efforts have been put in place by the Government to revitalize Nigerian Agricultural sector as part of the diversification effort. Part of effort put in place to revitalize Agriculture it to encourage local and international investment into Agriculture in the country.  However, due to lack of enough information on the agricultural activities in the country remains a challenge in the revitalization of the country’s agriculture. Although Google and other search engines provide access to data on the Web, these search engines are base on traditional keyword search and therefore lack semantics which affect the effectiveness of the retrieved results.   This paper presents semantic document retrieval of Nigerian Onion domain. The work involves developing Ontology for Nigerian Onion domain. Protégées Ontology editor is then used to store the Ontology and OWL-DL query is used to retrieve the documents semantically.  To measure the effectiveness of the proposed work, precision and recall evaluation metrics were used. Keywords: Ontology, Onion, Information Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval, Domai

Service-oriented design of environmental information systems

Service-orientation has an increasing impact upon the design process and the architecture of environmental information systems. This thesis specifies the SERVUS design methodology for geospatial applications based upon standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium. SERVUS guides the system architect to rephrase use case requirements as a network of semantically-annotated requested resources and to iteratively match them with offered resources that mirror the capabilities of existing services