The semantic public service portal (S-PSP)

  • Authors:

  • Nikolaos Loutas;Deirdre Lee;Fadi Maali;Vassilios Peristeras;Konstantinos Tarabanis

  • Affiliations:

  • DERI, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland and Information Systems Lab, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece;DERI, National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), Galway, Ireland;DERI, National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), Galway, Ireland;European Commission, Directorate-General for Informatics, Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations;Information Systems Lab, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

  • Venue:
  • ESWC'11 Proceedings of the 8th extended semantic web conference on The semanic web: research and applications - Volume Part II
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

One of government's responsibilities is the provision of public services to its citizens, for example, education, health, transportation, and social services. Additionally, with the explosion of the Internet in the past 20 years, many citizens have moved online as their main method of communication and learning. Therefore, a logical step for governments is to move the provision of public services online. However, public services have a complex structure and may span across multiple, disparate public agencies. Moreover, the legislation that governs a public service is usually difficult for a layman to understand. Despite this, governments have created online portals to enable citizens to find out about and utilise specific public services. While this is positive, most portals fail to engage citizens because they do not manage to hide the complexity of public services from users. Many also fail to address the specific needs of users, providing instead only information about the most general use-case. In this paper we present the Semantic Public Service Portal (S-PSP), which structures and stores detailed public-services semantically, so that they may be presented to citizens on-demand in a relevant, yet uncomplicated, manner. This ontologybased approach enables automated and logical decision-making to take place semantically in the application layer of the portal, while the user remains blissfully unaware of its complexities. An additional benefit of this approach is that the eligibility of a citizen for a particular public service may be identified early. The S-PSP provides a rich, structured and personalised public service description to the citizen, with which he/she can consume the public service as directed. In this paper, a use-case of the S-PSP in a rural community in Greece is described, demonstrating how its use can directly reduce the administrative burden on a citizen, in this case is a rural Small and Medium Enterprise (SME).