Semantics Applied to Locate Services in the eGovernment Domain Luis Álvarez Sabucedo, Luis Anido Rifón, Rubén Míguez Pérez Departament of Telematics Universidade de Vigo Email: {Luis.Sabucedo, Luis.Anido, Ruben.Miguez}@det.uvigo.es Abstract— The provision of solutions to fulfill requirements in the domain of eGovernment is a complex task. In order to achieve high quality services, a lot of features must be taken into account: accessibility, interoperability, usability, and so on. One of those features that must be beard in mind is the support for retrieving the desired service from any Public Administration. Citizens should be provided with tools to conduct their searches in a convenient manner for their needs. To achieve this high level goal, this paper proposes some artifacts: LifeEvents and AdministrativeServices. Those concepts are described using semantic tools, i.e., formal description techniques for knowledge in software environments. Besides, this technologies provides support for advanced recovery procedures as shown on the paper. Keywords: eGovernment, Semantics, Accessibility, Discovery of services I. I NTRODUCTION From the huge quantity and quality of new services in the domain, it is clear that eGovernment is becoming more and more popular. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are providing a complete new support to deliver ser- vices to citizen in the scope of Public Administrations. The eGovernment domain is a promising eTechnology with a lot of future. eGovernment is defined, according to the United Nations, as “the use of information and communication tech- nology (ICT) and its application by the government for the provision of information and basic public services to the people”[1] According to the World Bank[2], eGovernment “refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government”. Therefore, it seems important to bear in mind that eGov- ernment is not solely a simple replacement of technology to provide a 24/7 service. Indeed, provision of eGovernment so- lutions involves a huge effort in re-engineering all processes involved in the public service to place the citizen at the center of the process. As a matter of fact, this technology forces PAs to re-orient and improve services by positioning the citizen at the center of all provided operations. These services should be, whenever possible, an end-to-end transaction in order to achieve a one-stop digital administration. Within the domain, a number of areas can be pointed out: eProcurement[3], eDemocracy[4], eVoting[5], eParticipation[6], eRulemaking, . . . Upon the review of already developed solutions, we find out limitations in deployed eGovernment web portals and identify some concrete problems to overcome (see section II). In particular, this papers addressed problems related to the discovery and accessibility (in terms of software architecture) for services in the domain. Bearing these concepts in mind, the use of a modeling tool called LifeEvent (LE hereafter) is proposed. This artifact models services from the point of view of the citizen in terms of their need. These LEs implies the use of Administrative Services (AS hereafter) to actually carry out services. The main goal of this proposal is to support in an simple manner from the point of view of the citizen searches and queries about domain services, as shown on section III. In order to increase the possibilities of the system regard- ing automatization and interoperability issues, semantics is bring into scene. Nowadays, among the scientific community, semantics is usually considered the enabler technology to develop this sort of solutions. This technology offers us a new set of tools and capacities which have not been completely explored yet (see section IV). Therefore, its application to LEs and ASs introduces a fairly nice support to advanced searches (see section V). Finally, some conclusions are presented to the reader in section VI. II. ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM & MOTIVATION As mentioned above, eGovernment can be considered as the next generation of service paradigm for the civil service. ICTs are surely bound to play a paramount role in this task. Also, we can notice a strong demand of eGovernment solutions. This demand has two components. On the one hand, there is a growing demand of public services from citizens who are willing to take advantage of ICT based solutions. On the other hand, there is a latent demand due to new laws in most countries compelling them to cover a wider range of services with telematic support. This can be illustrated with some meaningful examples such as the Spanish case. This administration has approved a law[7] to guarantee the access