Semantic Technologies for E-Government: An Overview (original) (raw)

2009, Semantic Technologies for E-Government

Semantics, in the context of information systems, allows for a rich description of information or behavioural models that improve application processing, integration, and performance. Research and development into semantic technologies is today centred around Semantic Web, which covers various areas of computer science including knowledge engineering, software and service engineering, data interoperability, logical languages, user experience, social networks, and last but not least, business applications. While a vast number of different semantic technologies already exist, it is not fully clear how industry may profit from them and what they bring on top of other solutions already available in the market. For this reason, many research efforts focus on showcasing semantic technologies in various domains, such as e-business, e-health, e-learning, telecommunications, transport, and e-Government. E-Government, like other mentioned areas, is facing several problems in systems and information integration, information extraction, and information representation across heterogeneous organizations. In particular, e-Government faces big challenges to achieve interoperability and integration, taking into account differences in laws, regulations, services, administrative processes, and different languages across regions and countries. Such differences are related to a great variety of computerbased solutions used at various levels and create the requirement for technical, content, and process integration. On the other hand, semantic technologies have been of interest to the research community for the last 7-8 years, and as any other research domain, they require a large, dynamic, heterogeneous, and shared information space to be effectively tested and evaluated. Therefore, the combination of these two areas is very much natural. E-Government provides an ideal test-bed for semantic technologies research and, on the other hand, semantic technologies provide an ideal platform for the vision of a knowledge-based, citizen-centric, and citizen-empowering, distributed and integrated e-Government. In addition,