Terregov: eGovernment interoperability on a semantically driven world Interop-ESA/eGov Interop conference Geneva, February 2005 Santos Vicente, María Pérez, Xavier García, Ana Gimeno, María Pérez

Overview Government Administrations need: –procedures integration, –distributed responsibilities, –agencies interaction. Semantic Interoperability Technologies solutions: –standardisation of business concepts, –automatic search on concepts, –automatic service discovery. Developments: –semantically enabled web services, –practical experiences: research and enterprise world.

eGovernment Interconnections in remote public services. Access to procedures in a transparent manner. Need of more distributed and inter-linked processes. Difficult to establish standards and heterogeneous procedures. Common knowledge is a key feature. Interoperability: –sharing information and exchanging data. –organisational issues. –security issues: authentication and certification procedures.

eGovernment Solutions Web Services as a way of access and discover interoperable information in agencies. Web Services benefits: –Interoperability: expose functionality to other applications. –any platform, any programming language. –e-business process efficiency. –Implementation of automated systems, service discovery and systems interaction. Lack of semantic definitions in traditional web services: Addition of semantics allow a better integration between agencies and dynamic service discovery.

Semantic Technologies Innovative implementation for eGovernment solutions. Semantic web benefits: –Efficient exchange and interoperation among agencies. –Standardise information as concepts. –Enable automatic service discovery.

Semantic web: knowledge representation Ontology: describe and represent interrelationships of the information in a domain. RDF: Resource Definition Framework. OWL: Web Ontology Language: –XML markup language to describe concepts, attributes and relationships among them. OWL-S: Web Ontology Language for Web Services: –Standard to describe web services specifications unambiguously. –Facilitates automation of web services discovery, interoperation, invocation and monitoring. –Definition of the profile, the process model and the grounding of the service.

OWL example <rdf:RDF xmlns=" xmlns:carads=" xml:base=" xmlns:example=" xmlns:owl=" xmlns:rdf=" xmlns:rdfs=" xmlns:xsd=" OWL ontology example Car Advistisement Ontology CarAds 0 … … 001

Semantic Applications eGovernment: –SWAD: Semantic Web Advances Development in Europe. –Ontogov: platform for eGovernment services. –Emayor: municipal eGovernment applications. –Terregov: eGovernment on Territorial Government Services. Commercial Products: –Kalido: data warehousing software. –Semagix: enterprise content management

Terregov European Union funded project to enable local governments to deliver online services in a transparent manner within european countries. Semantic enrichment of web services and information using ontologies: –language-independent mechanism, –structured knowledge, –automatic discovery of a request, –web services standards, –addition of semantic descriptions. European pilots: administrations in the social care context.

Terregov: Environment Diagram

Terregov: Functional Architecture

Conclusions eGovernment interoperability achieved by standardising public administrations. Security and legislative constraints. Semantic technologies: –add efficiency in the exchange of information and services among agencies. –interoperability among systems in a transparent manner. –dynamic web service discovery. Semantic solutions in eGovernment evolve in parallel with semantic technologies, which are in an ongoing research stage.