An ontology based data collection service to support eGov service design

Abstract

In the past few years, the eGovernment sector has engaged into the use of semantic representations for data models and datasets, in particular with the open government data movement and the creation of initiatives to share semantic resources (JoinUp portal) and create core vocabularies (e.g., Core Business). In the scope of the EU SPOCS project to implement a cross border service infrastructure, a semantic layer allows exchanging documents to support procedures related to the service directive. It highlighted the necessity to collect data from public administrations on the procedures and documents but also on the equivalence of documents issued by foreign countries. The implementation of a data collection system based on ontologies raises challenges in relation with the generation of questions from ontologies as well as the annotation and update of the ontology to create and validate the data collected. In order to address these challenges, we are implementing a mechanism to generate questions and trace the information over a question answer process with an annotation framework based on the W3C Open annotation model. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.