Towards semantic-aware and ontology-based e-Government service integration - an applicative case study of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Scholarship program

Abstract

By improving the quality of e-government services by enabling access to services across different government agencies through one portal, services integration plays a key role in e-government development. This paper proposes a conceptual framework of ontology based e-government service integration, using Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Scholarship Program (SAKASP) as a case study. SAKASP is a multi-domain program in which students must collect information from various Ministries to complete applications and the administering authority must verify the information supplied by the Ministries. The current implementation of SAKASP is clumsy because it is a mixture of online submission and manual collection and verification of information; its time-consuming and tedious procedures are inconvenient for the applicants and inefficient for the administrators. The proposed framework provides an integrated service by employing semantic web service (SWS) and ontology, improving the current implementation of SAKASP by automatically collecting and processing the related information for a given application. The article includes a typical scenario that demonstrates the workflow of the framework. This framework is applicable to other multi-domain e-government services. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.