Ontology-Based Personalization of E-Government Services - CiteSeerX

Chapter VIII

Ontology-Based Personalization of E-Government Services Fabio Grandi Università di Bologna, Italy Federica Mandreoli Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy Riccardo Martoglia Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy Enrico Ronchetti Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy Maria Rita Scalas Università di Bologna, Italy Paolo Tiberio Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy

ABSTRACT While the World Wide Web user is suffering form the disease caused by information overload, for which personalization is one of the treatments which work, the citizen who gets ready to use the e-Government services which are made available on the Web is not immune from contagion. This seems a good reason to try to prescribe a personalization treatment also to the e-Government user. Hence, we introduce the design and implementation of Web information systems supporting personalized access to multi-version resources in an e-Government scenario. Personalization is supported by means of Semantic Web techniques and relies on an ontology-based profiling of users (citizens). Resources we consider are collections of norm documents (laws, decrees, regulations, etc.) in XML format but can also be generic Web pages and portals or e-Government transactional services. We introduce a reference infrastructure, describe the organization and present performance figures of a prototype system we have developed. Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

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Ontology-Based Personalization of E-Government Services

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FURTHER READINGS Abecker A., Sheth A., Mentzas G. & Stojanovic L. (Eds.) (2006). Semantic Web Meets eGovernment - Papers from 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium. Technical Report SS-06-06, Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Anttiroiko, A. V. & Malia, M. (Eds.) (2006). Encyclopedia of Digital Government (3 Volumes). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Bonett, M. (2001). Personalization of Web Services: Opportunities and Challenges. Ariadne, 28. Retrieved January 15, 2008, from http://www. ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/personalization/ Braynov, S. (2004). Personalization and Customization Technologies. In H. Bidgoli (Ed.), The Internet Encyclopedia - Vol. 2 (pp. 51–62), Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.


Brusilovsky, P., Kobsa, A. & Nejdl, W. (Eds.) (2007). The Adaptive Web - Methods and Strategies of Web Personalization. Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Vol. 4321. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag. Curtin, G. G., Sommer, M. H. & Vis-Sommer, V. (Eds.) (2003). The World of E-Government. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press. Davies, J., Fensel, D. & van Harmelen, F. (Eds.) (2002). Towards the Semantic Web: Ontologydriven Knowledge Management. Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley and Sons. The European Union eGovernment Research & Development Portal (n.d.). Retrieved January 15, 2008, from http://ec.europa.eu/egovernment

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ENDNOTES 1

Grandi, F. (2004). Introducing an Annotated Bibliography on Temporal and Evolution Aspects in the World Wide Web. ACM SIGMOD Record, 33(2), 84–86. Pascual, P. J. (2003). E-Government. Bangkok, Thailand: UNDP-APDIP. Retrieved January 15, 2008, from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Egovernment Sharman, R., Kishore, R., & Ramesh, R. (Eds.) (2007). Ontologies - A Handbook of Principles, Concepts and Applications in Information Systems. Integrated Series In Information Systems: Vol. 14, Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag.

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In order to avoid unauthorized accesses to protected information, we assume citizens can be uniquely and trustworthy recognized on the Web (e.g. through an electronic ID card or digital signature) so that they can be always granted the privileges to read all and only their data from the various PA information servers. In this way, the required portions of their digital identity can effectively be reconstructed on demand via the activation of the appropriate identification services. The norms are translated in our multi-version XML data model through a semi-automated process involving a human expert by means of an “intelligent” interactive editor (Palmirani & Brighi, 2002), which can be used to easily annotate the norms with the required temporal and semantic attributes and to record the annotated new norms in a legal database.