e-Government Service Discovery based on Citizens' Desires

Since a couple of years there is intensive research in the field of semantic technology and its use in the e-government domain. Most of these efforts concentrate on creating semantic descriptions for web services which would allow intelligent software agents to automatically locate and consume these services. You can also often read about citizens' desires that are the starting point of the enactment of semantic web services. In several real life use-cases however, even expressing the citizen's desire already needs some (in-depth) knowledge about the service domain. Take the building permit process as an example. One short rule, expressed in the ontology, could be: If you want to erect a structure you need a building permit. Thus if you want to build a garage (which is a subtype of a structure), you need a building permit as well. Unfortunately building laws aren't that straight forward. In our use case the type of permission and therefore also the type of service you need depends on the size of the garage. If there will not be more than two cars in the garage than you just have to tell your building authority that you want the build this garage together with all the blue prints. However, if the garage is bigger you need to apply for a building permit. Information like this is typically found in some notes that accompany service descriptions. In this paper we present an approach to model such details as part of the e-government service ontology and how to use this model in an easy-to-use application called the "service navigator". This application, like an expert system, helps citizens to express their needs in all the necessary detail and identifies and accesses the necessary services (if any).