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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3. RESEARCH AIM3.1 e-Government Meta-ModelIn order to minimize the diversity of relevant ontologies as discussed in section 1 and of course in order to beable to develop an ontology engineering methodology for public administration a basic meta-model has to beimplemented first. Related research in this field (see section 2.2) should be intensively used and analyzed.Existing work is mainly focused on the description of object models for service provisioning in publicadministration. Besides, further investigations towards finding abstract meta-concepts for particular domainsas well as investigations towards finding a meta-model for the procedural knowledge of public agencies'back-office activities will be conducted within this doctoral thesis.On the one hand, such a meta-model is a crucial basis to achieve semantically enriched E-Governmentapplications ready to use in a productive environment. On the other hand, results of this research focusshould be a step forward to reach a consolidated view of semantic interoperability in E-Government, stronglyrequested by [2].3.2 Human-centered Ontology EngineeringAs shortly mentioned in section 1 the process of ontology engineering today is a quite complex and softwaretechnologyoriented process. In order to formulate an ontology including more or less complex axioms andinference-rules it is nearly inevitable having some mathematics or software engineering background. Aim ofthis research focus is to investigate possibilities to empower the domain-expert himself/herself toautonomously develop most parts of a relevant domain-ontology. For this purpose tools and interfaces haveto be provided in order to simplify this complex task of ontology engineering. The HCOME methodology[19] already contributes a lot in this direction. There also exist other valuable approaches, especially in thefield of natural language processing (e.g. Oracle Policy Automation –http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/public-sector/058991.html). A comparison of existing work as well asfurther investigations in the field of human-centered computing in conjunction with ontology engineering inpublic administration should be part of this research focus.3.3 Ontology Engineering Methodology in the Context of PublicAdministrationAs already pointed out in section 1 most of today’s E-Government initiatives that cover the utilization ofsemantic technologies are rather in an early stage of integration into a productive environment and notfocused on deployment of ontologies and semantically enriched E-Government applications on a large scale.As a consequence, relevant domain ontologies tend to be built on an ad hoc basis rather than by following awell-defined engineering process. Based on the findings of 3.1 and 3.2, the research focus of this part of thethesis will be the definition of an ontology engineering methodology, especially designated for publicadministration. Ontology engineering for public administration and law might be a rather complex task (seeaspects of [18], summarized in section 1). One hypothesis thereby is obvious: Existing ontology engineeringmethodologies don't exactly fulfill the special requirements that might arise for the public administrationsector. Promising approaches from existing methodologies should be strongly considered and evolved,though. Finally, a tool-suite should be developed to support ontology modeling based on the resultingmethodology. The tool-suite should especially be designed for non-software experts, based on the results of3.2.4. SCIENTIFIC APPROACHThe outcomes of initiatives described in section 2.2 underpin the enormous potential of semantic webtechnologies for the public administration sector and lead to the hypothesis that the importance of semanticsystems in public administration is rising. The main objective of this thesis is to develop a methodology424