How Semantic Knowledge can Enhance the Access to PA Online Services

Current e-government initiatives are offering a huge amount of information about available services, which tends to overload citizens, who are often "lost". Intelligent Web-based portals represent a possible solution to this problem, by providing an effective and user-friendly access to online information and service descriptions. In particular, this paper proposes an approach based on formal ontologies and shows how they can provide a great enhancement in this direction. Formal semantic knowledge, in fact, enables the exploitation of reasoning mechanisms to understand users goals and provide them with information and services satisfying their needs. The proposed approach has been tested on a set of services provided by a local Italian Public Administration and results are encouraging.