Ontology-based E-government thematic services based on topic maps

This paper describes a novel ontology representation scheme for emerging e-Government systems, based on XML Topic Maps (XTMs). This scheme supports the provision of various services to the citizens guaranteeing independence of the knowledge between the actual sources of information and the data representation. Ontology is considered as an autonomous system, which acts as a linkage among the rendered services offered by an e-Government portal by providing and respecting the terminologies, metadata and rules defined by the State functionaries. The proposed ontology representation is supported by a Knowledge Base, which includes data about repositories, document types, domains, citizen profiles, themes for search and retrieval and service catalogues. The XTMs are created using a novel Topic Map Generator tool that is used to establish the necessary rules and constraints in the system. Finally, a use case is described in detail, for urban planning applications showing the advantages of the proposed approach.