Terregov: eGovernment interoperability on a semantically driven world

1. 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 terregov@gfi-info.com

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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

6. 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.

7. 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>

8. 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

9. 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.

10. Terregov: Environment Diagram

11. Terregov: Functional Architecture

12. 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.