An ontological representation of public services: models, technologies and use cases

This paper presents our effort to "ontologize" a conceptual public service model in order to express in a formal way domain specific semantics and create a reusable service ontology for eGovernment applications. The conceptual model we have used comes from a broader public administration domain modeling effort, called Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA). With this as a starting point, we document our experience of using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for the ontological representation of the model. Moreover, we present a use case and a platform that is based and uses this ontology for the discovery of eGovernment services. These services are discovered by semantically matching citizens' profiles with formally described public services. The proposed domain ontology is reusable and can be exploited by a variety of semantic web applications for eGovernment whenever a formal and standardized model for public services is needed.

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