A Semantic-Enabled Middleware for Citizen-Centric E-Government Services

Abstract

Research efforts toward effective e-Government infrastructures have gained momentum, motivated mainly by increasing demands to improve citizen participation in public processes, promote social e-Inclusion, and reduce bureaucracy. One of the biggest challenges is providing effective techniques to handle the inherent heterogeneity of the systems and processes involved, making them interoperable. This paper presents a semantically enriched middleware for citizen-oriented e-Government services (CoGPlat), which facilitates the development and operation of new e-Government applications with higher levels of dynamism. It introduces the use of composition techniques based on semantic descriptions and ontologies. Requirements like autonomy, privacy and traceability are handled by applying policies that govern the interactions among services.