WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010TOWARDS A DOMAIN-EXPERT CENTERED ONTOLOGYENGINEERING METHODOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OFPUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONBernd Stadlhofer and Peter SalhoferFH JOANNEUM, University of Applied Sciences, Dept. of Information ManagementAlte Poststrasse 149, 8020 Graz, AustriaABSTRACTThis paper presents a proposal for a doctoral thesis regarding the development of an ontology engineering methodologyespecially dedicated for domain-experts in public administration. Numerous existing initiatives already show theenormous potential of Semantic Web technologies concerning transparency and citizen orientation of publicadministration agencies. In order to reach the next step of matureness of such semantically enriched E-Governmentapplications there arises the need for a well-defined ontology engineering process, which should be tackled by this thesis.Although there already exist a number of ontology engineering methodologies in general the decentralized nature of thepublic sector in Europe with its diversity in local laws and regulations is hardly any considered. Emphasizinginvestigations towards human-centered computing and natural language processing should empower domain-experts toautonomously develop most parts of relevant ontologies. The resulting methodology will be a crucial success factortowards the goal of the deployment of ontology-driven E-Government applications on a large-scale.KEYWORDSE-Government, Ontology Engineering Methodology, Domain modeling, Human-centered computing1. MOTIVATIONApplying emerging semantic technologies in E-Government has been deeply investigated in numerousnational and transnational initiatives, lately (see section 2.2). These initiatives mostly investigate theestablishment of semantic interoperability between several stakeholders in public administration processes aswell as the deployment of public administration services as so called semantic web services. Thereby, theauthors of [2] observe the problem that the results from earlier projects described in section 2.2 are rarelyconsidered in latter ones even when carried out within the same program framework. Thus, a consolidatedview of semantic interoperability in E-Government is still missing and desirable in order to achieve the goalof semantic interoperability on a large scale.Latest semantic interoperability efforts mainly focus on modeling the meta-model for publicadministration (e.g. WSMO-PA service model by [23]), thus modeling an object model for serviceprovisioning in public administration – or modeling the top-level ontology for public administration.Certainly, this is one of the very first and most important aspects in order to reach the goal of semanticinteroperability. However, what has not been intensively investigated so far is the fact, that behind these toplevelontologies for public administration there is a second crucial type of ontologies namely domainontologies. Such ontologies specify the vocabulary and knowledge basis of the specific domains in publicadministration. E.g. public administration service providers offer procedures and services for the buildingdomain, trade or industry domain, childcare, etc. Besides the vocabulary – the structural knowledge ofdomains – also procedural knowledge is from major interest when building a knowledge basis for a specificcontext. There are some promising approaches available for modeling semantically enriched businessprocesses [24] [25] [26]. Whereas such efforts already found their way into aspects of cross border serviceprovisioning and collaboration, the back-office processes in public agencies are rarely considered in existingresearch approaches.421