Legal Ontologies for the spanish e-Government

The Electronic Government is a new field of applications for the semantic web where ontologies are becoming an important research technology. The e-Government faces considerable challenges to achieve interoperability given the semantic differences of interpretation, complexity and width of scope. In this paper we present the results obtained in an ongoing project commissioned by the Spanish government that seeks strategies for the e-Government to reduce the problems encountered when delivering services to citizens. We also introduce an e-Government ontology model; within this model a set of legal ontologies are devoted to representing the Real-estate transaction domain used to illustrate this paper

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

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

EGO Ontology Model: law and regulation approach for E-Government

The Electronic Government is a new field of applications for the semantic web where ontologies are becoming an important research technology. The e-Government faces considerable challenges to achieve interoperability given the semantic differences of interpretation, complexity and width of scope. In this paper we present the initial state of an e-Government ontology model called EGO. First as a part of a project commissioned by the Spanish government that seeks strategies for the e-Government and second for an ongoing project commissioned by the Mexican government. A set of ontologies (component of EGO), are used to illustrate this paper. Brief applications of this model on an Information Retrieval and on a Semantic Peer-to-Peer within the e-Government context are show

Semantic based P2P System for local e-Government

The Electronic Government is an emerging field of applications for the Semantic Web where ontologies are becoming an important research technology. The e-Government faces considerable challenges to achieve interoperability given the semantic differences of interpretation, omplexity and width of scope. This paper addresses the importance of providing an infrastructure capable of dealing with issues such as: communications between public administrations across government and retrieval of official and non official documents in a timely, secure and accurate way at the back office. A semantic peer-to-peer approach is proposed to enhance the information management at the e-Government domain; this approach is integrated with a Government Information Retrieval system and it reuses the EGO Model which can be deployed within the e-Government context

Semantic-enhanced hybrid recommender systems for personalised e-Government services

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.E-Government is becoming ever more active in terms of improving the provision of services to citizens from a citizen-centred perspective, in which online services and information are delivered to citizens on a personalised basis. Some developed governments have started to offer personalised services through their official portals. However, the personalised services that are offered are mostly limited to static customisation and are therefore far from achieving effective citizen-centred e-Government services. Furthermore, delivering personalised online services that match the different needs and interests of government users is a challenge for e-Government, specifically in connection with the increasing information and services that are offered through the medium of government portals. Therefore, more advanced and intelligent e-Government systems are desirable. Personalisation techniques, particularly in the form of recommender systems, are promising to provide better solutions to support the development of personalisation in e-Government services. Furthermore, semantic enhanced recommender systems can better support citizen-centred e-Government services and enhance recommendation accuracy. The success of semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches and the citizen-centric initiative of e-Government have fostered the idea of developing personalised e-Government recommendation service systems using semantic enhanced hybrid recommender systems. Accordingly, the effectiveness of utilising the semantic knowledge of e-Government services to enhance the recommendation quality of offered services is addressed in this thesis. This thesis makes five significant contributions to the area of e-Government personalised recommendation services. These contributions are summarised as follows: (i) the thesis first proposes a general framework for offering personalised e-Government services from a citizen-centred perspective based on the available user profiles information and semantic knowledge of a specific e-Government domain of interest; (ii) based on this general framework, a personalised e-Government tourism service recommendation framework is also proposed and considered as a target domain in this research study; (iii) new semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches are developed to support the implementation of the recommendation generator engines of the proposed e-Government frameworks. The recommendation generator engines represent the core components of the proposed frameworks; (iv) new semantic similarity measures based on semantic knowledge of a target domain ontology are proposed to effectively evaluate the similarity between e-Government service items. The new semantic similarity measures are incorporated within the proposed hybrid approaches to improve the quality and accuracy of recommendations and to overcome the limitations of existing hybrid recommendation approaches; and (v) a switching semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation system is further proposed to enhance the overall quality of recommendation, address the sparsity, the cold-start user and item problems. Experimental evaluations of the proposed semantic enhanced hybrid recommendation approaches and switching system, on a real world tourism dataset, show promising results against state-of-the-art recommendation approaches in terms of the quality of recommendations, capacity to alleviate the sparsity, cold-start item and user problems

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

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

A mechanism for discovering semantic relationships among agent communication protocols

One relevant aspect in the development of the Semantic Web framework is the achievement of a real inter-agent communication capability at the semantic level. Agents should be able to communicate with each other freely using different communication protocols, constituted by communication acts. For that scenario, we introduce in this paper an efficient mechanism that presents the following main features: (i) It promotes the description of the communication acts of protocols as classes that belong to a communication actsmontology, and associates to those acts a social commitment semantics formalized through predicates in the Event Calculus. (ii) It is sustained on the idea that different protocols can be compared semantically by looking to the set of fluents associated to each branch of the protocols. Those sets are generated using Semantic Web technology rules. (iii) It discovers the following types of protocol relationships: equivalence, specialization, restriction, prefix, suffix, infix and complement_to_infix.The work of Idoia Berges is supported by a grant of the Basque Government (Programa de Formación de Investigadores del Departamento de Educación, Universidades e Investigación). This work is also supported by the Basque Country Government IT-427-07 and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science TIN2007-68091-C02-01