Abstract
Ontologies will pave the way in boosting e-government in the years to come. First of all public administrations need to have a shared understanding of public services amongst different levels of administration (e.g. state, country, county) in order to offer administration independent one-stop e-government and most flexible service execution. When it comes to business process (re)engineering, a repository of reference models and best practices can keep down costs. In order to provide good governance, traceable compliance with regulations becomes more and more important. We first present a methodology for ontology building that is compatible with software project management in the public sector; then we combine semantically enhanced process modelling with business rules resulting in what we call agile process management.
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Notes
- 1.
The classification is taken from IDABC (Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens) (Chevallerau, 2006)
- 2.
OntoGov (Ontology Enabled E-Gov Service Configuration) is a project funded in the IST Programme of the European Union (IST-2004-27090). For further information consult http://www.ontogov.com/
- 3.
The Swiss Federal Chancellery was a partner in the OntoGov consortium
- 4.
Application here is understood as any kind of software developed to execute public services (using semantic technologies)
- 5.
OWL: Web Ontology Language (McGuiness and vanHarmelen, 2004)
- 6.
SWRL: Semantic Web Rule Language (Horrocks et al., 2004)
- 7.
OWL-S: Web Ontology Language for Services (Martin, 2004)
- 8.
Protégé is a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework (http://protege.stanford.edu).
- 9.
Merriam Webster Online: Definition 4a: a term is a word or expression that has a precise meaning in some uses or is peculiar to a science, art, profession, or subject <legal terms>, URL: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
- 10.
completeness is a criteria very difficult to prove (cp. (Gómez-Pérez, 2001))
- 11.
The system is freely available and can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/texttoonto/
- 12.
An interesting topic for research is how term and fact modeling could be automated (as it is less formal) and how the semi-formal representation could then be used as input for automated ontology creation
- 13.
The attributes “label”, “definition” and “date issued” are attributes, “source” and “creator” are defined as meta-data terms by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (2006)
- 14.
In case the terms are extracted automatically this attributes can be created automatically, too
- 15.
The interface is adapted from the FIT Buildtime for Adaptive Processes developed by BOC Asset Management (http://www.boc-eu.com) within the FIT project.
- 16.
FIT (Fostering self-adaptive e-government service improvement using semantic technologies) is a project funded in the IST programme by the European Union (IST-2004-27090). For further information consult http://www.fit-project.org
- 17.
An interchange format is a format that allows transformationen from one model to another without loss based on agreed standards.
- 18.
For ontology modeling Protégé is taken; for graphical presentation the Ontoviz tab is activated
- 19.
A comprehensive overview is given by the IOWA State University, Departement of Computer Science: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/˜baojie/acad/reference/2003-07-09_dataint.htm (Date 20-12-06)
- 20.
For example: the public service “Anmelden/Abmelden” is performed by ne
- 21.
http://www.fhvr-berlin.de/vc-gpm/ (information in German only).
- 22.
The terms service and process differ in their coverage: whereas service comprises all aspects of e-government service provision a Public Administration has to offer, process is about the (IT-supported) tasks performed within a service.
- 23.
A process model is composed of atomic processes and/or composite processes. An atomic process is defined as a non-decomposable process, e.g. in a process implementation with web-services it can be executed using a single call.
- 24.
A business rule engine or inference engine is a software component that separates the business rules from the application code and allows deriving answers from a knowledge base.
- 25.
“The workflow enactment software interprets the process description and controls the instantiation of processes and sequencing of activities, adding work items to the user work lists and invoking application tools asnecessary. This is done through one or more co-operating workflow management engines, which manage(s) the execution of individual instances of the various processes.” (TC00-1003 Issue 1.1 Workflow Reference, Workflow Management Coalition Page 14 of 14, URL: http://www.wfmc.org/standards/docs/tc003v11.pdf.
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Hinkelmann, K., Thönssen, B., Wolff, D. (2010). Ontologies for E-government. In: Poli, R., Healy, M., Kameas, A. (eds) Theory and Applications of Ontology: Computer Applications. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8847-5_19
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