Towards the government transformation: An ontology-based government knowledge repository

Computer Standards & Interfaces 32 (2010) 44–53

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Computer Standards & Interfaces j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / c s i

Towards the government transformation: An ontology-based government knowledge repository Aikaterini-Maria Sourouni ⁎, George Kourlimpinis, Spiros Mouzakitis, Dimitris Askounis National Technical University of Athens, Greece

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 30 December 2008 Received in revised form 7 April 2009 Accepted 19 June 2009 Available online 28 June 2009 Keywords: e-Government Ontology Transformation Repository e-Government knowledge

a b s t r a c t Government transformation is a new term used to signify practices undertaken by governments in order to change their processes and services towards the electronic automation. As services are being transformed every day in many countries, the involved stakeholders are in urgent need for introducing and utilizing powerful instruments to facilitate and organize service composition and provision. This paper presents the inspiration of a conceptual model capable to originate an effective, scalable e-Government ontology and further on, the implementation of an ontology-based repository for designing, modelling and even reengineering of governmental services; pilot tested in the Greek Government. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Improving the relationship between governments and their customers (citizens, businesses, banks and government) is a major challenge for e-Government research and applications. Current trends in Information Technology aim to exploit the development of tools and collaborative platforms for supporting formal description, composition, publishing and further on provision of e-services [19,24]. In private sector, companies have been exploiting for long the ever-increasing capabilities of ICTs in order to satisfy and earn their customers' loyalty. Nowadays, “people know how easy it is to do business over the Internet (with ICTs in general) and they are demanding the same level of service from government that they have come to expect from the private sector” [23]. Therefore, public administrations are striving to leverage modern technology trends to improve the quality of their services to citizens and businesses, to provide multiple communication channels and to make their internal and cross-organization operations more efficient, even if this requires changing their modus operandi. Nonetheless, in order, to fully realize the e-Government potential for productivity growth, it is not sufficient to modernize the front office by offering public services over the internet through e-Government portals [27]. The e-Government era implies fundamental knowledge redistribution and requires a careful rethinking of the management of information resources and knowledge bases [6]. The concept of knowledge management (KM) is not new to the public sector; either intentionally or unintentionally, KM initiatives ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (A.-M. Sourouni). 0920-5489/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.csi.2009.06.002

have always been integrated in government tasks, inseparable from strategy, planning, consultation and implementation. More and more governments are realizing the public administration KM area as a key factor of improving their effectiveness and efficiency [14]. In this context, the conceptualization of efficient cohesive eGovernment taxonomies and ontological approaches and moreover the effective utilization of ICT and KM tools based on those models, can enhance the access to and delivery of governmental knowledge and data to the public and other governmental agencies and bring about improvements and constructive transformation in governmental operational effectiveness, efficiency, and service quality. Currently the e-Gov Semantic Web applied approaches are still in an experimental phase, but their potential impact on social, economical and political issues can be of extreme significance [22]. In this paper, the usage of ontologies for meeting the modern trends and ongoing needs of public sector is examined and an ontological approach is proposed covering various aspects of e-Government knowledge, locating abstract and specific concepts as well, including standard and potential metadata. The structure of the paper is as follows: chapter 2 presents the research background and the motivation for this paper. The proposed ontological approach is analytically described in chapter 3. Chapter 4 depicts in details the e-Government Semantic Repository. In chapter 5 the population and the evolution of the approach is discussed, justified by a pilot testing in Greek Government. Related work in chapter 6 and conclusions in chapter 7 conclude the paper. 2. Background and motivation Ontologies can be viewed as a level of abstraction of data models, analogous to hierarchical and relational models, but intended for

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modelling knowledge about individuals, their attributes, and their relationships to other individuals [7]. The representational capabilities of ontologies can be additionally enhanced with reasoning and inference mechanisms, thus providing a cohesive framework that completely supports the eGovernment knowledge representation needs. In general, the usage of ontologies enables the integration of elaborated semantics into eGovernment knowledge modelling, multiplying the benefits of such approaches. Regarding e-business models and schemas, different aspects have been discussed by research and business work, nevertheless regarding to e-Government knowledge representation and concepts, a number of issues has to be addressed including: • Different levels of Abstraction. Governmental knowledge can be described and represented in different ways serving different needs of public administrations, nations or nation communities (e.g. European Union). A successful approach of governmental representation methodology should accomplish a multi-level abstraction, in order to reflect and effectively manage the data evolution, differentiation of needs and scalability of the approach. • Change Management. Existing approaches for change management in e-Government have been oriented mainly towards manual managing of changes particularizing them to isolated services [27]. Hereafter, a consistent propagation of change within a service or other e-Government concepts still remains a tempting challenge to be conquered. In Europe, interoperability frameworks have shown up as a key tool for interoperability in the deployment of e-Government services, both at national and at European level. The inclusion is still at early stages: the interoperability frameworks are mainly dealing with syntax issues, but increasingly tackling specific issues in semantics, namely ontologies. State of the art in Registries and Repositories for the public sector typically falls within the jurisdiction of the current European or National e-Government Interoperability Frameworks. In most cases, however, they initially focused on technical interoperability, but recently inclusion of semantics in the interoperability frameworks has started [8]. The modelling efforts at the data level use more mature and open technologies like XML and XML Schema (technical EIF level) and OWL/RDF (semantic level). In the area of process and organizational modelling several independent modelling initiatives exist [20]. Thus such repositories have tried to embrace the semantic aspect of interoperability with XML schemas for the exchange of specific-context information throughout the public sector within the country borders and do not cover service descriptions or web services deployment. For example in the European Union:

3. The proposed e-Government Ontology (e-GO) The main purpose of the work presented is to encompass an effective and scalable approach of e-Government knowledge modelling. For this reason, a four layer-of-abstraction ontology is proposed, in order to model, store and access e-Government knowledge models and then to populate and manipulate the content. Such an approach facilitates further incremental and multi-level ontology development and manipulation. These four layers are explained hereafter. 3.1. Layer 1 The first layer corresponds to the most abstract level (Fig. 1). It consists of a core conceptual model used in order to represent the ontological primitives of every kind of representational knowledge. The flexibility at this level is rather low but the potential provided from this layer to the upper ones is indeed significant. At this layer, abstract but also significant modelling decisions are taken and the model cannot be changed without redesign the logic of the approach. The abstract core model is a base for knowledge model designers to build more specific knowledge models; a meta-model defining the hard substrate on which more flexible structures referred to as knowledge models can be built [13]. The concepts contained in the first layer and their roles are explained below. • Entity. Entities are the base notions of the real world domain that are modelled. The entities are given a name, acquiring thus a semantic connection with the object they represent at design level. • Property. Entities have properties. The properties can be numerical, text, date, Boolean, lists (enums), xml structures, images, etc. Properties have also a name expanding thus the semantic representation. Properties reflect the real world properties that designers want the model to represent. • Property types. Properties have a type. This kind of reference offers some kind of inheritance at property level, in order to permit the assignment of properties in different entities with a common reference, even if the inheritance hierarchy does not connect the two entities. • Relationship. Entities are related through named relationships (binary or non-binary) that represent the relations they have in the represented reality. A relationship is defined by its invariant, and

• The United Kingdom has developed the XML Schema Library, containing approximately 78 XML Schemas. • Denmark has designed the InfoStructureBase system [4], including an international standards repository with business process descriptions, data-model descriptions, complex XML schemas and schema fragments from public and private organizations and a UDDI repository containing information on web services. • In Italy, one can find a similar approach in Arianna project [1], having deployed a services repository mainly at local level. Gaining knowledge, best practices and lessons learnt from the above, similar but partial, attempts this paper presents such an ontology-based and change-aware infrastructure that can effectively support the automated definition, manipulation, discovery and exploitation of services by users or systems, providing an important tool for achieving e-Government attainment, transformation and evolution.

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Fig. 1. Core conceptual model (Layer 1).

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this invariant refers to all relationship participants (entities) either just two or more [31]. Relationship Types. Like properties, relationships have also a type. This kind of reference offers some kind of inheritance at relationship level, in order to permit the assignment of relationship in different entities with a common reference, even if the inheritance hierarchy does not connect the two entities. Inherits. Entities can inherit from other entities. When an inheritance is defined at design level, it means that the child entity inherits all the properties and the participations in Relationships of the parent entity. This common technique in object-oriented programming permits to have short and reusable representations. Additionally inheritance is in accordance with evidence from cognitive science about the way that human representational model, the one implemented by the human brain, categorizes real world objects and notions [15]. Entity instances. Entity instances represent real world instances. They have of course a reference to the entity they represent and they have also all the properties and take part in the relationships that the entity takes part in. Entity instances are connected to other instances with relationships as defined by the entity. Contains. Entities can contain other entities. This possibility has been designed in order to model groups of instances and to refer to them as one. It can also be used to model real relations where one real world instance literally contains other instances. It is a kind of relation that could be represented by a relationship like the ones described before but being defined separately it points out this special kind of relation where a group of instances can be referred to as one group.

3.2. Layer 2 The second layer is the Basic Entities layer (Fig. 2). This layer is also of low flexibility but less abstraction because at this level the model already has a semantic correspondence with the real world objects. However, the ontology at this level might still be relatively abstract, in

the sense that the designer has to model real world objects related to the specified field of e-Government, but in such an abstract way that specify but not limit the representational potential of the upper layers. This level of abstraction operates actually as a modelling template for the users and designers of the next layers defining the allowable concepts and relations (relationships and properties) that can be further used. The second layer includes the definition and the representation of the following basic e-Government entities: • Services, of various types, provided in conventional or electronic means, by Administrations towards citizens, businesses or other administrations. • Documents, in electronic or printed format, that constitute the inputs or outputs of a service or are involved during their execution. • Information Systems, which encompass the web portals as well as the back-office and the legacy systems. • Public Administrations, which embrace all the service points and the authorities of the public sector, nested at infinite levels, being ministries, regions, municipalities, organizations or their divisions and departments. • Electronic (Web) Services, being electronically provided services, either final or intermediate ones (contributing to the provision of final services). Furthermore, at this level, three particular properties of the aforementioned entities are included and represented as XML data and graph structures. • XML (eXtensible Markup Language) Schema Definitions, as the formal representation of data elements and documents. • BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) Models, for presenting their workflow models. • WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) Descriptions, characterizing Electronic (Web) Services with the respective systematic, machine readable description of their behaviour.

Fig. 2. Basic e-Government entities (Layer 2).

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As a matter of fact, the former (basic entities) are to be understood by all stakeholders, while the latter (particular properties) are supposed as much more technology-specific and should not be exposed to the “business” stakeholders. [10] However, in the particular sector of e-Government, to which this unified ontology is dedicated, XML, BPMN and WSDL standards have been widely adopted, and are almost necessary in any modelling approach. Using these standards, established in a worldwide scale by several Governments (i.e. UK, Denmark, US etc.), the proposed ontology earns much more prestige and validity. Nevertheless, these properties are de facto not to be manipulated by the business stakeholders; they are transparently managed by the respective information systems but in parallel should be presented to and monitored by all the stakeholders. Additional entities complementing the core e-Government elements are Addressees (of the Services, such as Citizens, Enterprises), Legal Framework Elements (that guide services provision), Life and Business Events that may invoke a service request, and Technical Standards (affecting the provision of electronic services). 3.3. Layer 3 The third layer is the Entities Refinement layer. This layer is very flexible and much less abstract. At this level the designers have the ability of customize and adapt their modelling approach, the government semantics to their needs and requirements. The flexibility is even higher at layer 3, when new Entities, Properties and Relationships can be defined enhancing or customizing the rest of the modelled knowledge. A refinement of the Basic Entities Layer can be inspired by the OntoGov Model [16] to a certain extent, incorporating different aspects of eGovernment knowledge with any kind of flexibility and scalability (Fig. 3). Such an ontology, specified and adapted to the Greek needs and policies — 37 classes,131 properties, 83 relationships and more than 60 restrictions — has been developed using open source ontology editor, namely Protégé [21], and presented in [25]. An exemplary approach for this layer of abstraction is presented below, as a starting point for any desired customization, extension and enhancement.

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Each Entity of the above schema comprises a number of Properties, which can easily be manipulated and managed. An example of aspects of a service as well as a document incorporated and extended at this level of ontology is presented in Tables 1 and 2. These properties are exemplary and no way limitative, derived from a number of existing metadata structures in literature and practice, such as The Dublin Core metadata standard [5], which provides a generic set of attributes for any government resource, be it document or system, including various extensions [28], The European Interoperability Framework — EIF (1.0) published by the IDABC Programme [9] etc. 3.4. Layer 4 The fourth and final layer is the Instances layer. This layer is even more flexible and the less abstract of all four. Instances at this level represent e-Government object instances with their proper properties and relationships. The knowledge modelled at layers 2 and 3 is used at layer 4. This means that layer 4 is ‘aware’ of what has been modelled at layer 2 and especially layer 3 and ‘uses’ it. Instances of a specific Entity have inherited its Properties and can be connected to Entity Instances whose type is the type defined at entity level. These four layers are recapitulated in Table 3. 4. Developing the e-Government Knowledge Repository (e-GKR) The mission of the Repository developed is to facilitate the e-GO integration into an intelligent as well as scalable software tool. In order to provide an automated methodological process and data modelling for eGovernment services, an ontology-based intelligent web information system is necessary. To fulfil this need, the portal, implemented as an eGovernment Knowledge Repository (e-GKR), offers advanced semantics management, simple data entry and content manipulation, facilitates electronic data automated imports with custom system modules and also allows different user groups — with respect to the aforementioned abstraction levels — to be aware of the public sector administration and services provision through a wide range of simple, complicated and

Fig. 3. Entities refinement (Layer 3).

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Table 1 Service properties.

Table 3 Layered knowledge representation architecture.

Property

Description, type

Layer

Code Title Final service

The service code, unique, text The service title, unique, text Yes/no, if it is final service, giving output to the citizens or businesses, Boolean The service type, (e.g. registration, application, etc), list Service category, according to GCL (e.g. social service, taxation), list Manual, internet, SMS, I-TV, etc., list Frequency of request, by means of high–medium–low, list Yes/no, if service included in the i2010 20 core-services set, Boolean Yes/no, if service included in the National Digital Strategy core-services set, Boolean The source of information for the service, text The workflow diagram, Xml structure

Layer Layer Layer Layer

Type Category Ways of provision Frequency International policy National policy Information source BPMN model

statistical customizable reports. The target audience of e-GKR comprises multiple groups: the Government as the central responsible for ontology design and content monitor, every Public Administration that provides any type of governmental services, even ultimately citizens and enterprises as beneficiaries of the registered services.

1 2 3 4

Abstraction

Flexibility

VERY HIGH HIGH LOW VERY LOW

VERY LOW LOW HIGH VERY HIGH

• Public Administrations: in charge of providing specific governmental services, they have access and permission to manage the amount of data related to these services. Except for querying, they have the right of editing and reformulating the aforementioned data. Each update on the data has to be approved and confirmed by the Content Monitors (Ontology Layer 4). • Government: represented by senior managers, responsible for the proper and productive use of the Repository and the published data conformity to the related legal framework. Content Monitors are accountable for the whole system performance and use to the Government. • Citizens /Enterprises: they have free read-only access to main data of services, documents and public administrations for informational and service provision beneficial reasons.

4.1. Design 4.3. Security The knowledge representation architecture proposed is inspired by current trends in Ontologies, bringing into action two other established technologies, relational databases and object-oriented programming, in order to fulfil the requirements of the conceptualized ontology. The simplified schema, presented at the first level of the ontology, has been adopted in order to demonstrate the underlying logic of the proposed architecture. The architecture consists of such an abstract core model in order to facilitate knowledge model designers to build more specific knowledge models in the easiest and most flexible way, via a user-friendly environment. Progressing in further levels, an even friendlier user interface allows simple users to be able to manage and manipulate the content (Instances layer) of the ontology. 4.2. Users and rights Repository has been implemented as an easy-to-use tool in order to capture and manage huge information volumes. From a usability perspective, five types of users can be deduced: • Ontology Administrators: providing an ontological framework to possibly enrich the knowledge with concepts and axioms for enhancing the organization of the content and its retrieval. Even the ontology administrators are not required to have skills in Semantic Web technologies. However, they are expected to have already mastered the e-Government knowledge sector, in order to be able to recognize and model, in a friendly environment, the necessary concepts and features (Ontology Layers 2,3). • Content Monitors: responsible for publishing adequate content in the Repository, verifying the reliability of the information provided by Public Administrations (Ontology Layer 4). Table 2 Document properties. Property

Description, type

Code Title Type Format Language Issue date Information source XML structure

The The The The The The The The

document code, unique, text document title, unique, text document type, (e.g. certificate, application, etc), list document format, list language the document is published, list date the document has been issued, date source of information for the document, string data structure of the document, Xml structure

This system has a security sub-system based on four profiles: external level, private level, monitoring level and administration level: • External Level: everybody can use the system at this level without any verification. Its main goal is to give access to the users of the outmost level, i.e. citizens and enterprises. This access allows for browsing the main data of the Repository by using simple searches. • Private Level: it allows for accessing and manipulating (read, write, delete), at content level, the sum of information corresponding to the type of the registered user. This kind of access is password-protected. • Monitoring Level: at this level it is possible to check and modify user information to detect the inadequate use of the tool so that data integrity and verification can be ensured. • Administration Level: it allows for design, management and manipulation of the ontology (third layer), in order to add, remove and update entities, properties, relationships, inheritance chains and so on. 4.4. Inference and querying One of the core aspects of the approach based on semantic repositories [17] concerns the exploitation of inferences enabled by the ontology to support the repository administrators and, especially, to increase the knowledge explicitly provided to users. Two explicit kinds of state of the art inferences are enabled by the semantic representation of the repository. • Consistency check has a notifying role for the in/consistencies of data, relations and constraints when changes at the second or third layer of the ontology are performed by administrators. • Inferences based on semantics of relations exploit the transitiveness, symmetry, functionality and inversion of the properties, enhancing the information extensionally contained in the repository. For example, when a binary Relationship is filled in the inverse one is automatically inferred. Furthermore, at content level, the repository offers text-based structured reports and also advanced statistical spreadsheet reports. Being able to ‘ask questions’ and getting answers is very important to the ‘learning’ processes humans follow. Getting answers to spontaneous questions empowers the discovery process because it permit the extraction of specific features out of a bigger aggregation, the

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validation check of something we assume to be true and, finally, the investigation of several hypotheses [13]. The proposed architecture defines a querying mechanism characterized by three important features. • The semantics, added to the second and third layer of the ontology, can be used by the querying mechanism. • Property and Relationship criteria can be combined thus producing larger sets, which satisfy complicated combinations of ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ operations to pairs of criteria and the ‘NOT’ operator to a single criterion. • Large result sets are combined to even larger giving the possibility to find results that satisfy two or more sets of criteria. Hereafter, Administrators and Monitors are able to customize, enhance, add and also check the consistency of existing and new query reports. Users are one click away from producing several types of reports through simplified forms or advanced complicated query combinations. There are three main categories of reports which provision is facilitated by the repository (Table 4). • Type A (Main Elements Reports): simple or advanced reports related to the instances of the main elements of the Ontology, representing requested properties, relations etc. Authorized or anonymous users (with limited data access) can choose among a plethora of criteria and also select the details' level which s/he is interested in. • Type B (Content Consistency Reports): a specific type of reports which have a notifying role for the integrity and in/completeness of data, relations and constraints stored and represented in the Repository content. • Type C (Sophisticated Reports): complex reports representing indirectly derived results and statistical information crucial for further e-GO data utilization and public sector further development and improvement.

4.5. Technical implementation The e-Government Knowledge Web Repository described above has been developed by using the latest web programming techniques. The Web Interface has been developed in the ASP.NET 2 web application framework running in integrated mode on Internet Information System 7.0. The DBMS used in the development of this system is SQL Server 2005; chosen for its performance and scalability as one of the latest trends in database development. In the pilot operation of the Repository, as the popularity and the overall usage of the portal have exceeded the expected levels, the portal suffered from an extremely low responsiveness. The main reason for this problem was the highly enriched graphical user interface that on the one hand offered many useful controls and utilities enhancing its usability but on the other hand slowed down the overall performance. In order to increase the portal's efficiency, an HTTP compression filter was enabled to make better use of available bandwidth. Data is now compressed before it is sent from the server and compliant browsers will decode the data on the client side and therefore the portal's responsiveness was drastically increased.

Table 4 Reports categorization in user groups.

Content monitors Public administrations Government Citizens/enterprises

Type A

Type B

Type C

✓ ✓

✓

✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ (limited access)

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5. Population of the repository 5.1. Population of e-Government Knowledge As explained before, the process of knowledge exploitation begins by modelling the needed entities, their features, relationships and axioms. This happens in a user-friendly environment, permitting the designers (administrators) to focus on their main task and not make them deal with complex syntax or time consuming interactions with some “sophisticated” user interface. In terms of the layers mentioned in the previous section, it concerns the enhancement of the second layer of abstraction moving towards the third layer. The designer is able to enhance the entities defined at the second layer at properties and links level but he cannot remove or edit the already defined entities, properties and links as they comprise the e-Government alphabet and they are evidently necessary for any kind of eGovernment knowledge modelling attempt. The interface for populating these levels is quite different from the instances population. 5.2. Pilot population A pilot population implementation of the Repository has been undertaken for testing reasons in the context of Greek Government Transformation, Greek e-Government Interoperability Framework [29]. This initiative has been greatly assisted by the Greek Ministry of the Interior. At first, the ontology has been populated at the third layer, more customized to Greek needs and then the content population has been initialized through the following automated and semi-automated activities for existing data in electronic form: • Automated import of more than 1797 public administrations including ministries, prefectures, districts, municipalities and public sector organizations. • Automated import of 1009 governmental service definitions, with basic features values and frequency indications, stemming out of 3,000,000 service requests by citizens and businesses during the last year. • Modelling of the 109 initial, core governmental services (including all i2010 services and the services amounting to 85% of the yearly service requests). • Modelling of 1111 documents with property values for 300 of them. • Automated import of 90 designed core XML schemas related to the corresponding document definitions. • Modelling of 10 web services and 76 IT systems and portals with their corresponding property values. Except for the technical difficulties, mentioned in the implementation part, there have been several issues and challenges to tackle in the pilot period, especially with respect to users' acceptance and satisfaction. Thus, efforts have been targeted to the following objectives, which have appeared quite beneficial: • Initial training of key staff within Ministry of Interior and other public administrations regarding the core concepts of e-Government knowledge, e.g. terms definition, concepts explanation etc. • Engagement of the public servants; more effort have been put towards encouraging stakeholders to interact with the repository and among themselves, building synergies across the public sector authorities in a truly interdisciplinary way. Several examples have been presented below showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach in the semantic cohesion and navigation among the e-Government knowledge. Examples are not adequate for creating and communicating an ontology but are inarguably helpful to illustrate it. [10] Specifically, as an adequate example of the proposed methodology, has been decided to present a unified model of Layer 4, incorporating the appropriate instances of the aforementioned ontological entities, adapted to Greek policy. Fig. 4 depicts the e-Government

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Fig. 4. Ontology instantiation case.

Knowledge Instantiation around the selected Public Service: “Family Status Certificate Issuing.” Thereinafter, instances of main entities have been examined along with their properties — values. 5.2.1. Service: “Family Status Certificate Issuing” Property

Value

Code Title Final service Type Category Ways of provision Frequency International policy National policy Information source

0002 Family Status Certificate Issuing Yes Certificate issuing Family Manual, Internet High Yes Yes http://www.kep.gov.gr/kepportal/CitizenGuide/ CitizenGuideC1/CitizenGuideC2/CitizenGuideC3? PARAM1=1890&lng=EL Fig. 5

BPMN model

5.2.2. Electronic service: “Family Status Certificate Issuing” Property

Value

Current electronic provision level Target electronic provision level Multilingual content Offline provision potentiality Electronic authentication type

Level 3: two-way interaction n/a Yes No Username–password

5.2.3. Document: “Family Status Certificate” Property

Value

Code Title Type Format Language Issue date Information source XML structure

0002_3_01 Family Status Certificate Certificate Printed Greek, English 26/09/2007 KEP eGIF_FamilyStatusCertificate-v1-0.xsd

5.2.4. Public administration: “Ministry of Interior” Property

Value

Code Title Type Legal form Website Address Telephone E-mail

20003 Ministry of Interior Ministry Public administration www.ypes.gr 15, Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, GR-106 74 Athens, Greece +30 210 339 3537, +30 210 339 3581 [email protected]

5.3. Change management approach Change management is the timely adaptation of a “system” to the changes in business requirements, users' needs, etc. as well as the

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Fig. 5. BPMN model of “Family Status Certificate Issuing.”

consistent propagation of these changes to dependent artefacts [27]. A modification in one part of the ontology may generate subtle inconsistencies in other parts of the same ontology, in the ontologybased instances as well as in depending ontologies and applications [11]. This variety of causes and consequences of the changes makes change management a very complex operation that should be considered as both an organizational and a technical process [26]. This approach does not include a fully-automated change management process as presented in [27]. However, the architecture and the methodological approach of the proposed repository provide some features that enable a kind of automated or semi-automated change management process. The inference mechanism facilitates consis-

tency check notifications. The affected services (or service portions) are in this way located in order to undergo maintenance activities. Additionally, cascading effects are invoked, e.g. if service A Is Linked to, Inherits from or Is Contained to service B and service B is modified, harmonization actions may be needed for service A. 6. Related works A proposal for the definition of a repository technology appears in [2]. Repositories of services in the area of distributed computing are proposed in [3]. The role of a service repository in platforms for onestop-shop e-Government is discussed, e.g., in [32]. With respect to the

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proposed repository, the above mentioned solutions have been oriented towards eServices and Web services lacking knowledge about the business processes, and the “knowledge environment” related to the requested service. In the area of Service Oriented Architectures, UDDI registries [30] of services are proposed as repositories to support discovery, selection and composition of Web services, exclusively. Furthermore, it is frequently recognized in the literature that UDDI registries are poor in semantics [18] and do not provide a description of the services based on their contents, capabilities, and qualities. Indeed, with respect to UDDI specifications, a number of semantic representations have been proposed on the top of them. In [12], semantic problems in e-Government are identified. Even though a research agenda to guide and to support the application of Semantic Web (SW) technologies in e-Government is available, until now there are still very few approaches that tackle theoretical, technical and application aspects of the usage of SW solutions for eGovernment scalability, interoperability and change management problems. This paper is one step towards this direction. As already discussed, this paper presents the conceptualization and development of a framework aimed at achieving a good balance between expressiveness of e-Government knowledge representation and feasibility of the repository update. The proposed ontologyinspired approach to model and access knowledge is a structured description of the e-Government primitives. Although similar approaches exist, the proposed approach innovates by focusing on creating a universally accessible knowledge management tool, rather than a sophisticated and semantic specialized technology. One of the research goals has been to test the usability and intuitiveness of such a flexible modelling approach, when combined with simple yet expressive interface.

7. Conclusions This paper has presented a semantic repository solution to support e-Government change, transformation and evolution, exploiting a semantic representation of services and the relationships with their knowledge environment, supporting in parallel a satisfactory inference potential. The common understanding and the explicit eGovernment knowledge ensured by the proposed approach bridge the gap between decision making and technical realization of e-Gov services while supporting all phases (design, configure, deploy, run) in the lifecycle of e-Gov services. The most interesting contribution of this approach is probably the flexibility and the multi-layered modelling abstraction combined with an easy-to-use software environment. This repository can be used and utilized by any kind of government in the world and any kind of user without specific knowledge of ICTs and Semantic Web Technologies. However, e-Government systems are subject to a continual change. Better change management is nowadays more important due to the evolution of Europe towards a multicultural, more open and international society. With respect to the presented approach, it is under study and investigation how to integrate an independent — flexible and scalable — rule-based knowledge representation model which combined with the proposed ontology-based approach will offer the ability to have, apart from explicitly declared knowledge, extrapolated knowledge and to support inference and hypothesis testing abilities to our architecture. The syntax and functional specifications that will permit to build knowledge rules containing entities and entity instances described by knowledge models existing in the architecture are under construction. Further on, an inference engine that will use these rules and implement even more reasoning capabilities of the underlying approach has to be built. Subsequently, there are plans for implementing an extra module for automated BPMN models generation, following content population of the ontology's instance layer.

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Aikaterini-Maria Sourouni born in Athens on 08.10.1982, has graduated from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Currently she is a Ph.D. candidate in the NTUA in the field of E-Government. Her scientific research concerns methodologies and technologies to support governmental transformation projects with the use of semantic knowledge-based technologies. Apart from her academic activity, during the last four years, she has been involved in various projects related to e-Government and e-Business, process modelling, planning, management and implementation of IT projects.

Spiros Mouzakitis is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. He has nine years of industry experience in conception, analysis and implementation of information technology systems. His current research is focused on decision analysis in the field of eBusiness, enterprise interoperability and e-Government.

George Kourlimpinis after finishing his Electrical & Computer Engineer Diploma, has acquired two masters’ degrees, one MBA in “Telecommunication Enterprises’ Management” and one in “Fundamental & Applied Cognitive Science”. Since 2005, he is a Ph.D. candidate and his research concerns knowledge-based systems and management methodological approaches to support the implementation of reengineering projects throughout their lifecycle. Apart from his academic interests he contributes to the specification, the design, the development and the deployment of numerous medium and large scale management information systems as well as to the implementation of research and consulting projects.

Dimitris Askounis is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He has been involved in numerous EU funded IT research projects since 1988 (ESPRIT, BRITE-EURAM, FP5, FP6, and FP7) in the areas of business and data modelling, interoperability, ebusiness, e-Government, enterprise resource planning, decision support, knowledge management, project management, quality management, etc. He has also participated in several other EU-funded projects within the EUROPAID framework in CEEC, NIS and MEDA countries concerning management training, monitoring and evaluation of large projects, energy policy and planning.