Exploiting the Search Computing paradigm in e-government

Abstract

People shop online, compare online, book hotels and flights online. This happens because the data needed to complete these tasks are easily accessible and a lot of Web sites allows users to query the Web to obtain enough information to be confident. The aim of this work is to propose a framework tailored to extend the internet revolution to public administration. This work is the first step towards an infrastructure allowing people to know in a very easy way the information they need. This paper exploits the Search Computing paradigm. It is a new way for composing data. While state-of-art search systems answer generic or domain-specific queries, Search Computing enables answering questions via a constellation of cooperating data sources, called search services, which are correlated by means of join operations. Search Computing aims at responding to queries over multiple semantic fields of interest; thus, Search Computing fills the gap between generalized search systems, which are unable to find information spanning multiple topics, and domain-specific search systems, which cannot go beyond their domain limits.