Terregov: eGoverment Interoperability on a Semantically Driven World

Abstract

In a context of different administrations procedures integration and distributed responsibilities, the capacity of interaction between different agencies regardless of in home nomenclature or language would be a must. Semantic Interoperability Technologies will allow this kind of multicultural environments by the fact of standardising the concepts under a business area and after that, providing definitions based on these concepts for the different procedures provided for all the entities on the system. Once all the procedures on a system are defined according to these standardised concepts, automatic search based on concepts would be a take off point for enabling non supervised information systems interaction and automatic service discovery. On this article we will put the focus on providing an extended overview about semantic interoperability technologies from the relying concepts to practical experiences which are going on. After providing the overall technological picture, the focus will be granted to semantically enabled web services as one of the most promising approaches to allow the final deployment of these technologies as key enablers of agencies integration. Finally a pragmatic overview will be provided through the presentation of typical use cases and the description of practical experiences coming both from the research and enterprise world. Closing the article, a conclusions section would be provided showing current advantages and weaknesses of semantic technologies.