Role of Semantically Enriched Ontologies for Information Retrieval in Indian E-Governance Namrata Rastogi 1 , Dr. Parul Verma 2 Dept. of Information Technology Amity University, Lucknow, India Abstract—A major driving force required for Electronic Government (E-Government) is the dominant concept of Semantic Ontologies. Semantically enriched Web Ontologies aims to provide a superlative level of automation and better performance of government functions and services. Due to the heterogeneous structure of the government sector, achieving the interoperability and integration of government departments is the biggest challenge for a perfect e-Government. Therefore, the amalgamation of E-Government and Semantic Ontologies is the need of the time. In this paper, we present a role of semantically enriched ontologies in Indian E-governance. The aim of our approach is to improve the E-government- citizen relationship by providing automated information retrieval to citizens of India and reducing the heterogeneity of various government divisions and thereby optimizing E-Government functions and services. KEYWORDS - semantic web, ontology, E-government, information retrieval I. INTRODUCTION Today, we are living in a world where Information Communication Technology (ICT) is becoming a part of almost every spheres of human activity at an unprecedented rate. In the past few years, ICT is being used for providing information related to public services, improving managerial effectiveness and promoting democracy, which is commonly termed as e-government. E-Government in India aims to develop computer based solutions to support the interaction of citizens with the public Sector and improve their participation in the public and social life [3]. Semantic technologies aim to provide advanced E- Government solutions and hence require development of E- Government based ontologies. One of the key objectives of semantic technologies applied to E-Government is to provide better services while enhancing the participation of citizens to the public life. Semantic technologies, to be effective, need to be based on sound ontologies that need to be shared within the participating social communities [5]. A. The issues in manual government:  Long waiting queues in government offices – The total time a citizen spends getting his work done in a satisfactory manner including waiting time in queues, total response time given by the government official on duty.  Corruption and quality of service – The total bribe paid at various desks to get the same work completed in an orderly and timely manner and hence degrading average quality and trust of service between citizen and government officials.  Redundancy of similar data of citizens’ in various government departments – Recoding and maintaining similar data records of each citizen by every service departments like Electricity department, LPG connection, Income tax department, EPIC card, etc. and thus creating redundancy of similar data records.  Faulty and poor overall governance – No quality maintained in establishing transparency, quality of feedback, fairness of treatment, accountability levels and reducing corruption.  Lack of Interoperability, heterogeneity of government sectors II. SEMANTIC WEB ONTOLOGIES Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the WWW and has worked on the Semantic Web in 1980s, states that the Semantic web “is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” [2]. Thus, the Semantic Web [16, 19] is distinguished by a more meaningful representation of information for humans and computers, providing a depiction of its contents and services in machine-readable format; it also enables services to be automatically annotated, discovered, published, advertised and composed. It thereby facilitates interoperability and the sharing of knowledge over the Web. The Semantic Web is distributed and heterogeneous by nature an hence has two visions of its future development, the first is to improve its usability by collaborating various distributed ACEIT Conference Proceeding 2016 IJCSIT-S199