Automatic generation of e-government forms from semantic descriptions

ABSTRACT

Currently there are numerous initiatives for applying Semantic Web technologies to e-Government. Most of these efforts concentrate on the definition, discovery, orchestration and execution of Semantic Web services. The focus is thereby often on system-to-system communication and less on human-computer interaction. In this paper we present a way to generate web-forms out of an existing semantic description. The core difference to most of the existing similar approaches is that our semantic description does not focus on web-service description: it simply utilizes Semantic Web technologies to provide a logic description of Public Administration Services and relevant parts of the e-Government domain. The idea is to automatically identify relevant input for a Public Administration Service based on the semantic description of the service and its business rules that must be applied to create the particular results. According to the relevant input a web-form is generated to gather the needed information from the citizen. This input is interactively checked against the procedure's business rules. If the provided data is correct and conforms to the ontology's restriction, the data, represented as XML and RDF, can be consumed by any application supporting the data interchange standard including Semantic Web services.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods

Additional Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.1 ADMINISTRATIVE DATA PROCESSING

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Standardization, Verification

Keywords:
GEA, OWL, RDF, XForms, XSD, e-government, semantic web