HOW TO DISCOVER EGOVERNMENT SERVICES EFFICIENTLY: AN ONTOLOGY-ENABLED PORTAL Nikolaos Loutas, Lemonia Giantsiou, Efthimios Tambouris, Vassilios Peristeras, Konstantinos Tarabanis Information Systems Laboratory, University of Macedonia Egnatia 156, Thessaloniki, 54006, GREECE ABSTRACT In this paper we present an ontology-enabled portal which aims to assist citizens in discovering eGovernment services that fulfill their needs. Using the portal the citizens will be guided through the discovery process via a structured online discussion. This discussion consists of a dynamically generated set of questions and answers and thus implements a user friendly interface between PA and citizens. The portal poses questions to the citizens and uses their answers in order to identify the PA service(s) that addresses their needs. This process is supported by ontologies and reasoning mechanisms. In this paper, we present the main functionalities of the portal, as well as its main software components. KEYWORDS Portal, Semantic Web, Ontology, Architecture, OWL, eGovernment 1. INTRODUCTION Public Administration (PA) and PA clients face serious problems with respect to PA services organization, discovery and execution. The PA clients are aware of their needs but they have no knowledge of the PA services that can address them. Although PA services are somehow related to specific needs, the mapping between a need and a PA service is usually not clear. To make things even more complex certain needs are satisfied by more than one PA services, certain PA services satisfy more than one needs and invoking certain PA services requires the prior invocation of other PA services. Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services introduce technologies that can be used for services’ discovery, organization and management. Therefore, in our work we use ontologies and reasoning in order to support the discovery of PA services. Moreover, we adopt the GEA Object model for Public Service Provision (GEA PA Service Model) (Peristeras, 2006) for describing PA services. Consequently, the terminology we use in order to express all PA-related concepts is borrowed from this model. This work is an extension of our previous work (Tambouris et al., 2007), where the portal’s conceptual architecture is presented. In this paper, we focus more on the implementation level. Therefore, we show here how our user friendly approach, which makes use of a semantic portal in order to guide the PA client through the PA service discovery process, is implemented. In a nutshell, discovery is facilitated by a structured online discussion (a set of predefined questions and answers) between the PA clients and the portal. Through this process the portal collects all the necessary information for the inference of the PA service version that addresses the PA client’s need and the latter is provided with information regarding this service version, i.e. which administrative documents are required as input etc. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3 provides an overview of the portal’s functionalities and Section 4 describes its software components. In Section 5 the ontologies that have been developed for our prototype are presented. Finally, in Section 6 we give some hints about our future work and we conclude the paper. ISBN: 978-972-8924-49-2 © 2007 IADIS 246