Interactive exploration and discovery of e-government services

Government e-services available to citizens represent one of the most frequent and critical points of contact between public administrations and citizens. In addition to common services such as id cards, permits, e-services represent the only practical way of providing incentives and support to specific classes of citizens. For this reason, discovery of e-services, rather than plain retrieval, is a critical functionality in e-government systems. The solution we present in this paper is based on dynamic taxonomies, a semantic model for the transparent, guided, user-centric exploration of complex information bases. It provides a single framework for the access and exploration of all e-government information and, differently from mainstream research in semantic web, it is intended for the direct use of end-users, rather than for programmatic or agent-mediated access.