Enabling Semantic Interoperability in Bhutan's E-Government: An Ontology-based Framework

Interoperability in e-Government is important to improve public services by enabling systems to exchange, integrate, and use information in a meaningful manner. However, e-government systems along with heterogeneous databases have created difficulties in interoperability. These heterogeneous databases lead to data redundancy, data inconsistency, and difficulty to integrate data and process data among agencies. The representation of heterogeneous systems through common standards and vocabularies is considered a valuable solution for interoperability. In this paper, an ontology-based framework for Bhutan's e-government is proposed to support semantic interoperability. To evaluate the framework, the domain ontology for Bhutan's Administrative Division, namely BTNAD is developed and discussed. BTNAD Ontology has been implemented and verified using Protégé, and its practical usage has been validated by checking against the defined competency questions and the corresponding SP ARQL query implementation. The presented study can clearly demonstrate the Single Source of Truth (SSOT), hence enabling the data reusability and collaboration, and interoperability within and across the agencies. Finally, the research discusses some recommendations from the proposed framework and interoperability challenges.