Interoperability frameworks for electronic governance panel discussion

Today, there is a growing awareness that the interoperability of national public information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures is a precondition for a more service-oriented and competitive public sector. Interoperability means the ability of ICT systems and of business processes they support to exchange data and to enable the sharing of information and knowledge. To help achieve interoperability, both within and across different policy areas, many countries have developed their own interoperability frameworks. However, in spite of the recommendations and guidelines provided by these frameworks, issues such as socio-economic disparities between regions challenge their effective and successful use. This panel will explore several key questions concerning success factors for an interoperability program from various perspectives, including: 1) When are organizations ready to think of running an interoperability initiative? 2) The actions the organization must take to ensure that the process is established and will endure. 3) Preconditions that must exist in the organization to implement interoperability (eventually through a framework). 4) Roles and procedures necessary to implement an interoperability program. 5) Is it possible to start an interoperability program in under-resourced administrations? Opportunities and challenges in less-developed countries. Copyright 2008 ACM

Interoperability frameworks for electronic governance panel discussion

Today, there is a growing awareness that the interoperability of national public information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures is a precondition for a more service-oriented and competitive public sector. Interoperability means the ability of ICT systems and of business processes they support to exchange data and to enable the sharing of information and knowledge. To help achieve interoperability, both within and across different policy areas, many countries have developed their own interoperability frameworks. However, in spite of the recommendations and guidelines provided by these frameworks, issues such as socio-economic disparities between regions challenge their effective and successful use. This panel will explore several key questions concerning success factors for an interoperability program from various perspectives, including: 1) When are organizations ready to think of running an interoperability initiative? 2) The actions the organization must take to ensure that the process is established and will endure. 3) Preconditions that must exist in the organization to implement interoperability (eventually through a framework). 4) Roles and procedures necessary to implement an interoperability program. 5) Is it possible to start an interoperability program in under-resourced administrations? Opportunities and challenges in less-developed countries. Copyright 2008 ACM

Building a global normalized ontology for integrating geographic data sources

Nowadays, the proliferation of geographic information systems has caused great interest in integration. However, an integration process is not as simple as joining several systems, since any effort at information sharing runs into the problem of semantic heterogeneity, which requires the identification and representation of all semantics useful in performing schema integration. On several research lines, including research on geographic information system integration, ontologies have been introduced to facilitate knowledge sharing among various agents. Particularly, one of the aspects of ontology sharing is performing some sort of mapping between ontology constructs. Further, some research suggests that we should also be able to combine ontologies where the product of this combination will be, at the very least, the intersection of the two given ontologies. However, few approaches built integrations upon standard and normalized information, which might improve accuracy of mappings and therefore commitment and understandability of the integration. In this work, we propose a novel system (called GeoMergeP) to integrate geographic sources by formalizing their information as normalized ontologies. Our integral merging process including structural, syntactic and semantic aspects assists users in finding the more suitable correspondences. The system has been empirically tested in the context of projects of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA, ex APAT), providing a consistent and complete integration of their sources. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

A Layered Ontology-Based Architecture for Integrating Geographic Information

Architectural solutions to information integration have extensively appeared during the last years, mostly from the federated system research field. Some of these solutions were created to deal with geographic information, whose inherent features make the integration process particularly complex. Among others, the use of ontologies has been proposed as a way of supporting an automated integration. However, how to specify and use a geographic ontology is not so clear in this context. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-based architectural solution as an extension of a federated system (Information Broker) built by the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT). Our extension is aimed at improving integration by adding semantic features through the use of ontologies and the ISO 19100 standards

GeoMergeP: Geographic Information Integration Through Enriched Ontology Matching

The combination of the use of advanced Information and Communication Technology, especially the Internet, to enable new ways of working, with the enhanced provision of information and interactive services accessible over different channels, is the foundation of a new family of information systems. Particularly, this information explosion on the Web, which threatens our ability to manage information, has affected the geographic information systems. Interoperability is a key word here, since it means, an increasing level of cooperation between information sources on national, regional and local levels; and requires new methods to develop interoperable geographic systems. In this paper, an ontology-driven system (GeoMergeP) is described for the semantic integration of geographic information sources. Particularly, we focus on how ontology matching can be enriched through the use of standards for implementing a semi-automatic matching approach. Then, the requirements and steps of the system are illustrated on the ISPRA (Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) case study. Our preliminary results show that ontology matching can be improved; helping interoperating systems increase reliability of exchanged and shared information

Domain Analysis for Supporting Commercial Off-The-Shelf Components Selection

Abstract. Though new technological trends and paradigms arise for developing complex software systems, systematic reuse continues to be an elusive goal. In this context, the adoption of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technologies introduces many challenges that still have not been fully overcome, such as the lack of comprehensive mechanisms to record and manage the required information for supporting COTS components selection. In this paper we present a domain analysis approach for gathering the information needed to describe COTS market segments as required for effective COTS components selection. Due to the diversity of the information to capture, we propose different dimensions of interest for COTS components selection that are covered by different domain models. These models are articulated by means of a single framework based on a widespread software quality standard.