Goal-oriented service selection

Semantic technologies are going to be applied to almost all aspects of e-Government. Most of the approaches described so far deal with automatic web service discovery used by software agents. This paper focuses on the use of semantic technologies to support citizens when interacting with e-Government sites. Our experience has shown, that sometimes identifying the appropriate service that is needed to accomplish a tasks can require some in-depth knowledge of existing regulations. To overcome this potential barrier we suggest a relatively simple approach based on the use of ontologies to support citizens to select the correct administrative service. Our approach assists a citizen in formally expressing a goal that can in turn be used for service discovery. This is done by introducing some guidelines and constraints on the model; while this process can be simplified the complexity can be hidden from the user.