Semantic-Driven e-Government: Application of Uschold and King Ontology
  Building Methodology for Semantic Ontology Models Development
  Electronic government (e-government) has been one of the most active areas of
ontology development during the past six years. In e-government, ontologies are
being used to describe and specify e-government services (e-services) because
they enable easy composition, matching, mapping and merging of various
e-government services. More importantly, they also facilitate the semantic
integration and interoperability of e-government services. However, it is still
unclear in the current literature how an existing ontology building methodology
can be applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service
domain. In this paper the Uschold and King ontology building methodology is
applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain.
Firstly, the Uschold and King methodology is presented, discussed and applied
to build a government domain ontology. Secondly, the domain ontology is
evaluated for semantic consistency using its semi-formal representation in
Description Logic. Thirdly, an alignment of the domain ontology with the
Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) upper
level ontology is drawn to allow its wider visibility and facilitate its
integration with existing metadata standard. Finally, the domain ontology is
formally written in Web Ontology Language (OWL) to enable its automatic
processing by computers. The study aims to provide direction for the
application of existing ontology building methodologies in the Semantic Web
development processes of e-government domain specific ontology models; which
would enable their repeatability in other e-government projects and strengthen
the adoption of semantic technologies in e-government.
