Semantic-Driven e-Government: Application of Uschold and King Ontology Building Methodology for Semantic Ontology Models Development

摘要

Electronic government (e-government) has been one of the most active areas ofontology development during the past six years. In e-government, ontologies arebeing used to describe and specify e-government services (e-services) becausethey enable easy composition, matching, mapping and merging of variouse-government services. More importantly, they also facilitate the semanticintegration and interoperability of e-government services. However, it is stillunclear in the current literature how an existing ontology building methodologycan be applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government servicedomain. In this paper the Uschold and King ontology building methodology isapplied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain.Firstly, the Uschold and King methodology is presented, discussed and appliedto build a government domain ontology. Secondly, the domain ontology isevaluated for semantic consistency using its semi-formal representation inDescription Logic. Thirdly, an alignment of the domain ontology with theDescriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) upperlevel ontology is drawn to allow its wider visibility and facilitate itsintegration with existing metadata standard. Finally, the domain ontology isformally written in Web Ontology Language (OWL) to enable its automaticprocessing by computers. The study aims to provide direction for theapplication of existing ontology building methodologies in the Semantic Webdevelopment processes of e-government domain specific ontology models; whichwould enable their repeatability in other e-government projects and strengthenthe adoption of semantic technologies in e-government.