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

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how the Uschold and King ontology building methodology can be effectively applied to develop, evaluate, and integrate semantic ontology models for e-government services, enhancing interoperability and semantic consistency.

Contribution

It applies and evaluates the Uschold and King methodology within the e-government domain, including semantic consistency checks and alignment with upper ontologies for broader integration.

Findings

Successful application of the methodology to build a government domain ontology.

Semantic consistency verified using Description Logic.

Ontology aligned with DOLCE upper level for better integration.

Abstract

Electronic government (e-government) has been one of the most active areas of ontology development during the past six years. In e-government, ontologies are being used to describe and specify e-government services (e-services) because they enable easy composition, matching, mapping and merging of various e-government services. More importantly, they also facilitate the semantic integration and interoperability of e-government services. However, it is still unclear in the current literature how an existing ontology building methodology can be applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain. In this paper the Uschold and King ontology building methodology is applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain. Firstly, the Uschold and King methodology is presented, discussed and applied to build a government domain ontology. Secondly, the domain ontology is evaluated for semantic consistency using its semi-formal representation in Description Logic. Thirdly, an alignment of the domain ontology with the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) upper level ontology is drawn to allow its wider visibility and facilitate its integration with existing metadata standard. Finally, the domain ontology is formally written in Web Ontology Language (OWL) to enable its automatic processing by computers. The study aims to provide direction for the application of existing ontology building methodologies in the Semantic Web development processes of e-government domain specific ontology models; which would enable their repeatability in other e-government projects and strengthen the adoption of semantic technologies in e-government.