Terregov: eGovernment interoperability on a semantically driven world

Interop-ESA/eGov Interop conferenceGeneva, February 2005

Santos Vicente, María Pérez, Xavier García, Ana Gimeno, María Pérez terregov@gfi-info.com

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

<?xml version="1.0" ?> <rdf:RDF xmlns="http://osm.cs.byu.edu/CS652s04/ontologies/OWL/carads.owl#" xmlns:carads="http://osm.cs.byu.edu/CS652s04/ontologies/OWL/carads.owl#" xml:base="http://osm.cs.byu.edu/CS652s04/ontologies/OWL/carads.owl#“xmlns:example="http://osm.cs.byu.edu/CS652s04/ontologies/annotatedPages/carSrch1_semweb.html#" xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#"><owl:Ontology rdf:about=""><rdfs:comment>OWL ontology example </rdfs:comment> <rdfs:label>Car Advistisement Ontology</rdfs:label> </owl:Ontology><owl:Class rdf:ID="CarAds"><rdfs:label xml:lang="en">CarAds</rdfs:label> <rdfs:subClassOf>

<owl:Restriction><owl:onProperty rdf:resource="#hasMake" /> <owl:minCardinality rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#nonNegativeInteger">0</owl:minCardinality>

</owl:Restriction></rdfs:subClassOf></owl:Class> … <owl:DatatypeProperty rdf:ID="featureValue">

<rdfs:domain rdf:resource="#Feature" /> <rdfs:range rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string" />

</owl:DatatypeProperty> <owl:ObjectProperty rdf:ID="hasMake">

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#FunctionalProperty" /> <rdfs:domain rdf:resource="#CarAds" /> <rdfs:range rdf:resource="#Make" />

</owl:ObjectProperty> <owl:ObjectProperty rdf:ID="featureFor"> <owl:inverseOf rdf:resource="#hasFeature" /> </owl:ObjectProperty> <owl:DatatypeProperty rdf:ID="carAdsValue">

<rdfs:domain rdf:resource="#CarAds" /> <rdfs:range rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string" />

</owl:DatatypeProperty>… <CarAds rdf:ID="CarAdsIns1"> <carAdsValue rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string">001</carAdsValue> </CarAds> </rdf:RDF>

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

eProcedures Semantic,Ontology,NLP

Collaboration environment

Basic Services

CivilServants

Experts

Services byAdministrations

eProcedureseProcedures Semantic,Ontology,NLP

Semantic,Ontology,NLP

Collaboration environmentCollaboration environment

Basic ServicesBasic Services

CivilServants

Experts

Services byAdministrations

Terregov: Functional Architecture

CivilServants

Citizens?

TerregovPilot Applications

Community of Practice

Free Text

Meta Data Social Ontology

Content and Knowledgeadquisition modules

Semantic Enhanced Data and services

Semantic Query Server

Dynamic Service discovery agent

Business components Dynamic WorkFlow

TerregovRepositories

Terregov Clearing House

Providers?A

pp L

ogic

/ X

ML

/ W

ebS

ervi

ces

Users Front-End Back-Office

MaintenanceTools

Administration Services / Information

CivilServants

Citizens?

TerregovPilot Applications

Community of Practice

Free Text

Meta Data Social Ontology

Content and Knowledgeadquisition modules

Semantic Enhanced Data and services

Semantic Query Server

Dynamic Service discovery agent

Business components Dynamic WorkFlow

TerregovRepositories

Terregov Clearing House

Providers?A

pp L

ogic

/ X

ML

/ W

ebS

ervi

ces

Users Front-End Back-Office

MaintenanceTools

Administration Services / Information

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.