Knowledge Organization in Portuguese Public Administration: From the Functional Classification Plan to the Creation of an Ontology from the Semantic Web’s Perspective

Abstract

This paper presents a functional classification plan supported on business processes for the Portuguese public administration as a tool to promote semantic interoperability. The author initiates discussion by presenting the classification of functional information, briefly reviewing literature to justify the classification of systems in archival information systems. Then, he presents the business plan classification and how it was constructed, to later conclude that it is a new approach not only in the organization, representation and retrieval of information/knowledge, but also in the management of archival information, making it a matrix model that links functions to business processes. Also, despite the importance of this tool, he recognizes the need to develop the business plan classification tool to an ontology based on WOL (Web Ontology Language), a language for knowledge representation, which has been proposed by W3C as a ‘standard’ to codify ontologies from the semantic web’s perspective. Introduction Considering the framework of European policies and strategies for interoperability, for the promotion of information access and for its reusability, as defined by the Decision No. 922/2009 and by the Directive 2013/37/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council, Portugal defined a structure of information classification for its entire public administration. The DGLAB (General-Administration of Book, Archives and Libraries), the coordinating body for the national archival policy, conceived this structure while working alongside with more than two hundred bodies of public administration (central, regional and local), over the last five years. Regarding the Program for Electronic Government and Interoperability, DGLAB created Meta-information for Interoperability (MIP), «a set of meta-information elements with the purpose of supporting semantic interoperability within an electronic government’s information production» (Silva, Guardado da, 2013, 4), as well as the Functional Macro-Structure (MEF) for Public Administration (version 2.0), which «is 1 Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, Centro de Estudos Clássicos. Professor of Information Science at the University of Lisbon. carlosguardado@campus.ul.pt .