KWTR: egovernment

[edit] Contributors:

Lyndon Nixon, FU Berlin

• What is the state of the art of Semantic Web in your research field?

Recent conferences and events provide a good insight into the current state of the art:

• • Knowledge Management in Electronic Government (May 2003)
  • eGovernment Interoperability Conference (eGov INTEROP) (Feb 2005)
  • IDABC Event on Semantic Interoperability (Sept 2005)
  • The Semantic Web meets eGovernment @ 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium Series (Mar 2006)

Primarily it seems that actual governmental IT systems are not yet semantic but that there is growing awareness of semantic technology and first research activities.

The problems of knowledge management and data interoperability are heavily discussed and solutions strongly supported, so semantic technology has a real potential to achieve uptake here.

• Provide references and short abstracts of three papers you consider as significant in your research field.

• • Semantic Web for eGovernment,

http://www.springerlink.com/content/69rmtudpr46q5b9n/, Ralf Klischewski, Proceedings of EGOV 2003.

• Please provide one or more examples (either business, or research, or both) in which semantic web has been used (if you can, add some references).

• Are there existing tools or demos? Please indicate some of them.

• What are the open problems in your Semantic Web research field? Why?

• Semantic web services and eGovernment

• • Applicability to e-government services
    • SW service composition and its usefulness to egovernment
    • Experiences of existing frameworks and standards vs need for new ones
    • can we live with existing ones (OWL-S, WSMO/L/X, METEOR-S, etc) ?
    • If not, why? What is the problem with existing approaches ?
  • Semantic Web Services and Web Services
    • Can they live together in the eGovernment domain?
    • Problems? Experiences?
    • What is the most critical / difficult practical aspect of heterogeneity?
    • SWS resolves data / process / protocol heterogeneity
  • Experiences with real use cases
    • Problems, challenges and lessons learned ???
  • Problems and challenges from the organisational viewpoint
    • Government agencies problems in applying SWS technologies

• • Semantic eGovernment Portals
    • Benefits of semantic technologies in eGov portals
    • Is search and retrieval improved in semantic eGovernment portals?
  • Knowledge Management in Government and Semantics
    • Why should we address semantics in government KM?
  • Scenarios? Benefits? Drawbacks ?
    • Evaluations? Experiments that show the benefits of SW technologies?
  • Quality issues in Semantic Applications in Egov
    • How can we evaluate the benefits?
  • How to convince Public Administration?
    • Scalability Issues? Communication issues? Migration issues ?
  • From current solutions to semantic portals and from existing KM efforts to the use of semantics
    • New emerging approaches?
    • Mobile eGov? Grid-based approaches? Pervasive computing?

• • Ontology development: Do we need specific methods?
    • Are approaches like OTK, Methontology, etc adequate+useful ???
  • Ontology development: Do we need specific tools?
    • Are tools like Protégé, KAON2, adequate+useful ???
  • Ontology population issues in government agencies
    • (Semi-)automatic methods applicable? Need for HLT and NLP techniques?
    • Ontology mapping?
  • Special requirements from eGov ?
    • Ontology evolution and change management
    • Changes in laws require changes in processes and ontological structures? How can we cope with this?
  • Ontology reasoning: Do we need specific methods / tools?
    • Are approaches like SWRL, SweetRules, etc adequate+useful?
    • Cost of ontology development?
  • Prerequisites and hurdles in Public Administration
    • Introduction of ontology management in Public Administration?
    • Need for training? But also process changes?

• Provide references and links of the most relevant Semantic Web research projects in your field.

Europe: OntoGov, FIT, SAKE, SemanticGov, HOPS, Terregov, etc USA: WebDG, FEA, etc

• What challenges try these projects to overcome?

• What are their foreseen benefits (both in market and scientific community)?

Interoperability problem -> Commonly agreed interchange format

Retrieval / Integration problem -> Common domain model

(Self-) Adaptivity problem including knowledge update -> Formal representation / reasoning

• When, in your opinion, will projects’ results be ready for industry?

• Do you think that it is important to invest (money and time) in these topics? Why?

EU and national government initiatives are relevant to semantic solutions.

It is part of national and multinational guidelines, e.g. European Commission’s Directive on Interoperability for Pan-European eGovernment Services [13.2.2006, COM(2006) 45]

See http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=22166 for a statement from the head of the EC unit "European eGovernment Services" NB. Program running 2005-2010 focused on XML technologies, however it is clear that Semantic Web will become relevant here.

• What are, in your opinion, the most relevant Semantic Web challenges that will be solved in the long term (10 years)? Why?