Facilitating the Semantic Discovery of eGovernment Services: The SemanticGov Portal

In this paper we propose a way to facilitate the issue of discovering the eGovernment services that address a citizen's need. This approach is implemented in an application, which we call a semantic portal. The semantic portal is part of our SemanticGov project architecture. The portal's components and its architecture are presented and explained. The portal's conceptual modeling is based on the generic public service object model of governance enterprise architecture (GEA) while Web service modeling ontology (WSMO) is used as the semantic Web services framework for application implementation. . We describe the ontologies required using the Web service modeling language (WSML). The reasoning tasks are performed accordingly using a WSML reasoner. Goals are WSMO elements that describe aspects related to user desires. The input to the application consists of information regarding the user's profile, i.e. age, marital status etc., while the output is a concrete WSMO Goal that expresses the citizen's need. This Goal is forwarded to the discovery engine, which has to discover all the services that address this Goal and return them to the citizen.