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 Process for Engineer Domain Ontology: An Experience in Developing Business Analysis Ontology

During the last years several works have been aimed to improve ontology technological as-pects, like representation language and inference mechanisms. This paper presents a discussion on the process and product of an experience in developing ontology for the public sector whose organization requires a strong knowledge management. This process is applied to engineer and develop ontology for Business analysis domain.Ontology, Ontology Engineering, Methodology, Protégé, Business Analysis

Development of an e-government ontology to support risk analysis

The complexity of governments is one of the biggest problems citizens face in engaging with them. This complexity is seen in the growing number of departments and services that a government is made up of and the need for citizens to interact with these departments or services independently. This research shows a lack of efficiency in the E-Government domain due to the vertical alignment of services and the need for complex collaboration across the departments, which all too often does not exist. We propose that an ontology could potentially help to foster interactions between departments and services, and thereby manage this complexity more efficiently. Although ontologies exist for different subject domains, the quality and suitability of these ontologies in the government domain at the present time gives rise for concern. Ontologies have the potential to play an important role in the design and development of government services. The key reason behind the development and design of an ontology for the E-Government domain is to use knowledge that is resident in the domain of governments to reduce risks associated with the delivery, combination and dependencies that exist amongst services so that the resilience of the E-Government domain can be improved throughout government. This paper addresses the issue of identifying and analysing risk in the development and deployment of E-Government services. Relevant information on risks that may occur with respect to services can be collected, compiled and disseminated which can serve as prediction tools for future governments as well as enable service providers make choices that would enable them fulfil service requirements adequately. The aim of this research is to contribute by constructing an ontology that is aimed at gauging the risks associated with using solutions across departments and even governments. Further, we also document how we have made use of queries to validate this ontology

Unlocking the potential of public sector information with Semantic Web technology

Governments often hold very rich data and whilst much of this information is published and available for re-use by others, it is often trapped by poor data structures, locked up in legacy data formats or in fragmented databases. One of the great benefits that Semantic Web (SW) technology offers is facilitating the large scale integration and sharing of distributed data sources. At the heart of information policy in the UK, the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) is the part of the UK government charged with enabling the greater re-use of public sector information. This paper describes the actions, findings, and lessons learnt from a pilot study, involving several parts of government and the public sector. The aim was to show to government how they can adopt SW technology for the dissemination, sharing and use of its data

Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

A Methodology for Ontology-based Knowledge-level Inoperability among Parliaments

Most of the information systems (IS) interoperability research and practice in the e-government area has been focused on the operational level, aiming mainly at enabling the delivery of integrated electronic services involving several government agencies to citizens and enterprises based on the ‘one-stop shop’ model, and the support of co-operation among government agencies from the same or even different countries at the operational level. This paper is dealing with knowledge-level interoperability, which aims at the support of higher knowledge-intensive tasks of government, such as the formulation of legislation. In particular, it presents an ontology-based methodology for achieving knowledge-level interoperability among IS of Parliaments. It is based on the common use by Parliaments of the ontology of the ‘Issue-Based Information Systems’ (IBIS) framework for codifying the public policy related knowledge produced in the various stages of legislation formulation. Also, an application of the proposed methodology is presented for the case of the Law concerning ‘Contracts of Voluntary Cohabitation’ that has been recently passed by the Greek Parliament; its evaluation resulted in a proposal for a refinement of the above ontology that can be used for achieving a better codification of the knowledge that the main content (articles) of Laws contains

Advance Interoperability in e-Government with Standardized Core Directories

Many new requirements for the public sector arise from the change of the society and the “Age of Knowledge”. Globalisation leads administrations to become more interoperable, irrespective of national borders. To meet these requirements, administrations and IT systems need to become more efficient. One of the main principles in software engineering is reusability. This can be applied on all levels. There is still a lot of potential at the content level. The idea of reusing content is not new but especially in federal structures where central solutions are nearly impossible this is a great challenge. The document describes an approach that allows information to be collected in a decentralised way and makes it available in an interdisciplinary manner and across regional borders. Core Directories will be designed and used as an infrastructural component to make them accessible for multiple applications. In order to share information, data interoperability standards are needed

Component-based process modelling in health care

Structural changes and increasing market dynamics in the health care sector intensify the hospitals’ need for cost-savings and process optimization. A first step is the documentation of processes in order to clarify the actual needs. As in health care processes are rather complex and often different players with divergent demands are involved, a disciplined approach to effectively and efficiently model processes is required. For this purpose, in this contribution a component-based modelling approach is presented and applied