A study on enhancing E-Governance applications through Semantic Web Technologies

7/29/2019 A study on enhancing E-Governance applications through Semantic Web Technologies

1/7

Vol 01, Issue 02, December 2012 International Journal of Web Technologyhttp://iirpublications.com ISSN: 2278-2389

Integrated Intelligent Research (IIR) 53

A STUDY ON ENHANCING E-GOVERNANCE APPL ICATIONSTHROUGH SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES

AbstractThe government of every nation has a lot of data and information related to its owncountry. This information is mutually owned by different states, departments, and agencies within thecountry. These owners have their own corresponding websites and they decide which data they wantto expose to the common public. However, as the data corresponding to the websites exists in silos, itcannot be connected across websites. This article looks at the challenges of the current websiteimplementations of the Indian government and highlights the benefits that can be obtained byimplementing Semantic Web Technologies.

KeywordsE-Government; Semantic Web; Public Service; Portal; Semantic Web Services; Linked

Open Data; RDF.

I. INTRODUCTIONThe current implementations of the websites

of the Indian Government are based on Web1.0 or Web 2.0. In these implementations,there is a lot of content that is scattered andspread across various websites. There is a needto look at ways to use technology to bring themeta data and content related to them underone umbrella and centralize them while at thesame time give the end user the freedom to use

data as a de-centralized separate unit. Whensuch a system is implemented in totality, thesize of the data managed as a single repositoryfor the entire country will be very large. Thebenefits of having all the data is dependent onour ability to derive or inference informationfrom it. The benefits derived from these largesets of data can be increased if the all the datais stored on the websites in a way that the datacan be understood by machines andprocessed as required to provide requiredinformation. It would be better if thisprocessing happens without human

intervention.

Semantic Web [3], also known as Web 3.0,is a step in this direction. The Semantic Web isthe future of the Internet as envisioned by TimBerners-Lee, the creator of the Internet.Although artificial intelligence has beenstudied a lot, the benefits that a normal userderives from artificial intelligence are verylimited. It is envisioned that users of the

Internet will benefit from the Semantic Web inthe future as concepts of artificial intelligenceget implemented easily in web-basedapplications.

The use of Semantic Web Technologies forweb implementations in E-Governance willbenefit end users as well as the decisionmakers in the government. The end userswould be able to get a transparent view of thesystemin work and provide their thoughts onthe same. At the same time the various

government agencies would be able to doproper data analysis and decide on the futurecourse of actions in a more accurate manner.

II. SCOPE AND OBJECTIVEThis paper aims to examine the issues in

implementation of Semantic WebTechnologies in E-Governance. The paperdetails out the current implementations ofwebsites and the challenges faced in them. Thepaper also explains in brief the recent newventure by the Indian government into

implementation of Semantic WebTechnologies and the challenges faced bythem.

This paper will give an opening forSemantic Web Technologies to provide betterGovernance solutions that can benefit thecitizens of the country as well as the governingagencies.

Mr.Bonson Sebastian Mampilli, J . MeenakumariDepartment of Computer Science, Christ University, Bangalore, India

{[email protected], [email protected]}


2/7



III.CURRENT IMPLEMENTATIONSThe Government of India has laid down

usability guidelines for web-based interfacesthat need to be adhered to for sites developedfor the government [7]. These guidelines make

sure that the websites created for theGovernment of India are universallyaccessible. Some of the guidelines arementioned below:

Easy Accessibility: Making sure thatvisually challenged or specially abledusers can easily access the website. Thisis done by giving the end user theoption to increase or decrease thecontrast or font size.

Screen Readers: Making the websiteaccessible to screen readers.

Scope of Content: Specifying the way inwhich documents, forms, circulars, andother information is shared on thewebsite.

Quality of Content: Specifying itemsrelated to the way content is displayedand the English language is used in thewebsite.

Design: Specifying the layout and thefeatures available to the user to modifythe content.

Development: Specifying guidelines fordevelopment and testing of the website.

A quick search and scan through theGovernment of India websites reveals that themain website of the Indian Government ishttp://india.gov.in. Hereafter, the main websiteof the Indian Government shall be refered toas the parent website. This website containsa lot of content and information. Along withall the content and information, the parentwebsite also has links that provide informationabout the state and the details related todifferent departments or offices of each state.Each of the states and their correspondingdepartments have separate websites that detailout complete information specific to their area.For Example: The Ministry of Finance has thesite http://finmin.nic.in and the Department ofElectronics and Information Technology hasthe site http://deity.gov.in. These are at acountry level. Similarly the state ofUttarakhand has its own site ashttp://www.governoruk.gov.in. All the

mentioned websites have URLs to differentsubpages and also various other resources likeforms, images, etc., which can be downloadedby the end user as required.

IV.ISSUES IN CURRENT IMPLEMENTATIONSLooking at the current web based

implementations, it is clear that while the basecontext is the same, there are multiplewebsites dealing with different aspects of theIndian government. These independentwebsites have their own databases and dataprocessing logics and all these websites existas silos and are not connected to each other.The current implementation of the governmentwebsites have issues that need to be addressed.These include [6]:

A. Data inconsistency across portalsData related to a particular topic may relate

to multiple agencies/department websites asthey may be overlapping in nature. This maylead to confusion in the minds of end users asto which websites need to be referred to forthe information. More importantly, will thedata be stored in both the databases that areused by the two different websites? Or will itbe maintained at a single location? How willthey be updated or managed?

For example, if an end user wants to knowinformation related to the financial budget forBangalore, the user might be confused onwhether to go to the Ministry of Financewebsite of the Indian Government or to thewebsite of Karnataka and search for financeinformation over there or to the BangaloreDevelopment Authority site.

B. Inadequate support for the Informationexplosion

The current government websites havecreated very large sets of information that areavailable to the general public for viewing anduse. The data and resources of these websitesis increasing daily, as there is a lot ofinformation that relates to different aspects ofsociety, including government announcements,employment, and policies, to name a few.

As the information keeps increasing, it isbecoming clear that a better mechanism forstorage and retrieval of data needs to bepresent as the current mechanism will soonturn outdated and slow.


3/7



C. Available information cannot beprocessed by machines

All the information available on the web isin HTML format that is readable andunderstandable by humans. But it is not in aformat that can be understood by machines to

do any form of processing. Therefore,although there is information available on thewebsite, it cannot be used by multipleapplications automatically for any processing.There is human intervention required forextracting the data and then using it in otherapplications for use.

For all the problems mentioned above,Semantic Web Technologies looks like one ofthe most promising answers.

V.SEMANTIC WEB WEB 3.0Web content can be read by humans by

going to a specific URL and reading up theavailable information. The content or the dataavailable on the website cannot be processedby machines. This is because a common globalstandard for data and website implementationdoes not exist across websites. Semantic Webhas laid down the standards to be followed sothat structure can be brought into web contentsuch that developers can develop semanticweb agents that can access these web pagesautomatically and have inference power to

conduct automated reasoning [4].

There are multiple terms or technologiesthat together make the Semantic Web. Theyare described below:

A. Resource Description Framework (RDF)The challenge for semantic web is to be able

to provide a language for both the data as wellas the rules for reasoning about the data. Themeaning is expressed in RDF as triples [3].Each triple contains a subject, predicate, andan object. I f two terms have the same meaning,

then the ontology provides a third basiccomponent of the Semantic Web that formallydefines the relationship among terms. Thereare multiple RDF formats likes RDF/XML,Turtle and N3.

B. Linked Open DataTo realise the full potential of the web, it is

essential to have all the web data to beavailable as a single global system. This is the

concept of Linked Open Data (LOD) wheredifferent organisations, government agenciesor individuals upload their data on to the websuch that it is interconnected and at the sametime accessible by semantic web-enabledapplications. Linked data is mainly aboutpublishing structured data in RDF using URIs[9]. It refers to a set of best practices to befollowed for publishing and connectingstructured data over the Internet [3]. SemanticWeb applications rely on people andorganizations publishing their data on to theLinked Open Data cloud in a structured format.Tim Berners-Lee outlined the set of principlesknown as the Linked Data principles to befollowed when publishing data on the web.The linked data principles [10] are as follows:

Use URIs as names for things. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look

up those names. When someone looks up in a URI,

provide useful information, using thestandards (RDF, SPARQL).

Include links to other URIs so that theycan discover more things.

Every Linked Open Data (LOD) dataset canbe understood as a Semantic Web applicationthat helps the end user in some way [8]. In2007, Chris Bizer and Richard Cyganiaksubmitted the application of Linked Open Data

(LOD) to W3C SWEO, representing the startof linked data development. As of September1st, 2011, 295 datasets have been publishedand interlinked by the project consisting ofover 31 billion RDF triples, which areinterlinked by approximately 504 million RDFlinks [11].

C. Semantic Web ServicesSemantic Web Services (SWS) provide

features that allow new services to be added,discovered, and composed dynamically. Theprocesses that might be able to use the web

services are updated automatically to reflectthe new forms of cooperation. SWS combinethe flexibility, reusability, and universal accessthat typically characterise a web service alongwith the expressivity of semantic mark up andreasoning, in order to make the invocation,composition, mediation and automaticexecution of complex services feasible. [3].


4/7



D.Semantic Web ApplicationsApplications are built to use Ontologies and

data published in Linked Open Data as RDF todisplay and infer different conclusions basedon the inference model that has been created inthe application.

E. Ontology DevelopmentTraditionally, to facilitate the building of

ontologies for Semantic Web, text miningtechniques have been used to performontology learning from texts. However,traditional systems employ shallow naturallanguage processing techniques and focus onlyon concept and taxonomic relation extraction.Ontology development is a big area forSemantic Web related technologies and a lotof work is happening in this area for this [14].

Although the semantic web-relatedtechnologies look very promising, theacceptance and implementation of the samehas some challenges. The main issue is thatlike any software, semantic web-relatedtechnology also suffers from a vicious circleof data versus application availability.Organizations are not investing much topublish their data into the LOD cloud as thereare not a large number of applications that usethis data and provide business benefit. On theother hand, application developers are notcreating new and improved applications as

there is not enough data published on the LODthat can used by the new applications. Thisvicious circle of application versus data existswhen any new path breaking technology startsgetting accepted and implemented as a mainstream application.

VI.OPEN GOVERNMENT PLATFORMOn March 30th, 2012, the government of

India launched the Open Government Platform(OGPL). It is envisioned that the OGPL willlead to participative governance as the

government will share more and more data.

The OGPL has been jointly developed byIndia and United States. This collaborativeendeavour was started as part of a series ofinitiatives announced by Indian prime minister,Manmohan Singh and US president BarackObama in November 2010 in Delhi. Theinitiative on Indian side was led by Mr. SamPitroda, adviser to the Prime Minister on

Public Information, Infrastructure, andInnovations, and on the US side by AneeshChopra, the then Chief Technology Officer(CTO) to the US President.

The first release of OGPL contains essentialfeatures to establish an open data servicecapability along with some basic data sets.Future releases will enable users to createapplications that work on these datasets toprovide various functions. The developers can:

consume datasets using web services create mobile or other applications that

use these datasets directly access datasets for information

There is also a citizen engagement modulewhere the government can get feedback fromthe end users and actions taken. The data inthis module will be visible to everyone on thewebsite.

The users will also be able to publish theirdifferent datasets onto the website. These willget submitted as part of a workflow forapproval to the government agencies. Once thegovernment agencies are satisfied, the datasetwill be available to the public for use. Theusers that use the datasets can give feedbackon them, which will also be visible toeveryone. Based on the votes received fordatasets, the agency will be able to understandthe benefit or disadvantage of a particular

dataset and then look into it further. This waythey can control which datasets are removedand which continue. The OGPL platform alsoprovides a set of information to the ownerrelated to which users can have access towhich dataset and how many have found ituseful. This feedback can also be sent acrossto social networking websites.

OGPL has been completely developed usingopen source softwares including the ContentManagement System - Drupal. This makes thefront-end application highly configurable

based on the tastes of the end users. Also, theentire application is web-based. All that isneeded for this application use is a webbrowser.

VII. CHALLENGESThere are certain challenges that need to be

overcome when websites need to implementsemantic web technologies in them. Theyinclude:


5/7



Management of URIs [9]: Linked data ismainly about publishing structured datain RDF using URIs rather than focusingon ontological level or inferencing. Thissimplification lowers the entry barrierfor data providers just as the Internetbased on URLs simplified theestablished academic approaches ofHypertext systems. However, all theRDF data on the government sites needto be independently accessible usingURIs.

Creation and selection of vocabularies:An important aspect in the whole processof ontologies creation and selection isdeciding the ontologies to be used by thegovernment. It needs to be decided thatwhich of the existing vocabularies aregoing to be extended or reused.Experience shows that it is stronglyadvisable to reuse existing vocabulariesand extend them if required rather thancreate new ones based on the type ofapplication that is being worked on.

Handlings provenance and trust [4]:From an interface perspective, thequestion of how to represent theprovenance and trustworthiness of datadrawn from many sources into anintegrated view is a significant researchchallenge. Tim Berners-Lee proposedthat the browser interface should be

enhanced with the Oh, yeah? button [2]to support the user in assessing thereliability of the information encounteredon the web. Whenever a user encountersa piece of information that they will liketo verify, pressing such a button willproduce an explanation of thetrustworthiness of the displayedinformation. This goal is yet to berealized.

Addressing quality of service [4]: Anoverview of different content-based,context-based, and rating-based

techniques can be used to heuristicallyassess the relevance and quality of datagiven. This is being addressed to acertain extent by the OGPL as the usersof the datasets are able to give a rating ofthe datasets. This can be viewed by otherusers of the dataset to understand itsquality.

Performance and scalability issues [4]:Linked data can be accessed by different

semantic web-enabled applications,using techniques like advanced crawlingand caching. However, the increase inthe number of datasets over time willdeteriorate the performance of thesemantic web-enabled applications.Therefore, this might necessitate widespread link traversal and crawling. It isnecessary to make sure that increase inthe data in the LOD does not impact theperformance of semantic web-enabledgovernment applications. Any issues inperformance will have a reverse effecton the popularity being gained bySemantic Web Technologies.

Improved User Interfaces [4]: One of thekey benefits of L inked Data from theuser perspective is the provision toaccess interlinked data from a widerange of distributed and heterogeneousdata sources. This may involveintegrating data from sources notexplicitly selected by the user. Forexample, if the user wants to know thenumber of people working with aparticular company in a particular city,this will require traversal and display ofinformation from multiple datasets. Inthe normal scenario, the browser backand forward buttons will take the user tothe next and previous pagescorrespondingly. However, in this

scenario, the user might want to traversefrom one data set to another that isdisplayed in the browser.

The Linked Open Data browsershould also provide options to add orremove datasets from the result. This isa very challenging task and needs to beanalysed to a greater level.

Schema mapping [4]: Once the data hasbeen retrieved from multiple datasets, itmust be integrated in a meaningful waybefore it is displayed to the user or it isfurther processed.

Link Maintenance [4]: The content of theLinked data is continuously changing oris continuously getting updated. TheRDF links between data sources areupdated sporadically. This leads to deadlinks pointing to URIs that are no longermaintained or even set in as the new datais published. Web architecture is tolerantto dead links but too many can lead tounnecessary http requests. This is also an


6/7



area of research that is receiving a lot offocus for improvement.

Licensing [4]: Applications that consumedata from the web must be able to accessexplicit information on the terms underwhich the data can be reused andrepublished. The availability ofappropriate frameworks for publishingsuch specifications is an essentialrequirement in encouraging data ownersto participate in the LOD. The dataowners thus will be assured that the dataconsumers to not infringe on the rightsof others.

The OGPL provides the feature ofgiving explicit licensing agreementdetails as it allows the data owners topublish licensing related information.OGPL in its future releases will alsoallow data owners to sell their data toconsumers as a service for a fee. Privacy [4]: The ultimate aim of aLOD is to have a single global database.However, this also brings with it dangerswith it. Protecting data in the LODcontext is likely to require a combinationof technical as well as legal means,together with a higher awareness amongthe user. Security is a very important aspect ofsemantic knowledge management. Tosecure the Semantic Web, all its layers

must be protected including RDF, XML,ontologies, and application integration.In the case of XML, it is important tosecurely publish XML documents oreven role-based access [10]. Someresearch has been done on the security ofRDF models as well. For securing thebusiness, the challenge includesidentifying and authenticating theconsumers as well as the businesses, andtracing all transactions.

Secure Knowledge Management andIntegration: This is required where two

agencies are involved in a transaction.Secure Knowledge Management toolsare utilized to determine whatinformation and resources are needed forthe transaction and whether theinformation and resources can beaccessed by the agencies involved.Essentially, security must beincorporated into all aspects of theprocess. Trust management and

negotiations play an important role. TheSemantic Web has inference capabilitiesbuilt into it that will exacerbate theinference and privacy problems.Therefore, developers must examineinference control and privacy preservingdata mining techniques and determinetheir applicability for the Semantic Web[13].

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)constitutes a real and growing need formost enterprises. In EAI, the focus ismainly on syntactical integration.Dealing with the semantic aspect willpromote EAI by providing it with moreconsistency and robustness [15].

VIII.CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER WORKThis study reveals that users and

government agencies alike are coming toslowly realize that keyword-based search isnot enough and Semantic web-basedapplications need to be designed [5]. The realpower of the Semantic Web will be realizedonce developers start creating Semantic Webenable software agents that collect webcontent from diverse source, process theinformation, and exchange results with otherprograms. Semantic Web will provide afoundation and framework that makesartificial intelligence more feasible. Semantic

Web can assist in inferencing knowledge to beused by humans. There is a lot of scope forwork in the government domain as well asother domains in Semantic Web technologies.The implementation of Semantic Webtechnologies is at a very infant stage in theIndian context and there is a huge scope forimplementations which would make the datarelated to the government easily accessible.This would also in the future help in providingbetter analysis tools to the government forbetter decision making.

REFERENCES

[1] A Gugliotta et al., "Deploying SemanticWeb Services-Based Applications in thee-Government Domain", J ournal on DataSemantics X Lecture Notes in ComputerScience, 2008, Volume 4900/2008, 96-132, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77688-8_4

[2] Berners-Lee, T., Cleaning up the UserInterface, Section The Oh, yeah?-


7/7



Button.http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/UI.html(accessed August 15, 2012)

[3] Berners-Lee Tim, Hendler James, andLassila Ora. The Semantic Web.Scientific American May 2001 pp. 35-43.

[4] Bizer Christian, Health Tom, Berners-LeeTim. Linked Data The Story So Far.International Journal on Semantic Weband Information Systems Vol. 5, Nr. 3(2009) pp. 1-22.

[5] E. Arnold Stephen Semantic technology:From sentiment to applications. KMWorld; Jul2011, Vol. 20 Issue 7, p1-20,2p, 1 Graph | ISSN : 10998284 |Accession Number : 64165397

[6] Gailing The Analysis of the E-Government Service Portal Based on theSemantic WEB. Advances inInformation Technology and IndustryApplications, LNEE 136, pp. 481-487

[7] Guidelines for Indian GovernmentWebsites. http://web.guidelines.gov.in/(accessed August 15, 2012)

[8] Halb Wolfgang, Raimond Yves,Hausenblas Michael. Building LinkedData For Both Humans and Machines.Linked Data on the Web Workshop at the17th International World Wide WebConference 2008 (WWW2008), Beijing,China, 2008.

[9] Hausenblas Michael. Exploiting LinkedData For Building Web Applications.IEEE Internet Computing July-Aug. 2009vol. 13 no. 4 pp. 68-73,doi:10.1109/MIC.2009.79.

[10]Heath, T.,Bizer, C.: LinkedData:Evolving the web into a Global Data

space. Morgan and Claypool (2011),http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/(accessed August 15, 2012)

[11]Hongbo Lai, Yushun Fan, Le Xin andHui Liang, "The Framework of Web 3.0-Based Enterprise KnowledgeManagement System" 7th InternationalConference on Knowledge Managementin Organizations: Service and CloudComputing Advances in IntelligentSystems and Computing, 2013, Volume172, 345-351, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-30867-3_31

[12]Izza Said, Vincent Lucien, Burlat Patrik."Dealing with Semantic ApplicationIntegration within Large and DynamicEnterprises."International Journal ofCooperative Information Systems;Dec2006, Vol. 15 Issue 4, p507-534, 28p

[13]Thuraisingham Bhavani. Directions forSecurity and Privacy for SemanticBusiness Applications. Communicationsof the ACM; Dec2005, Vol. 48 Issue 12,p71-73 | ISSN: 00010782.

[14]Xing Jiang, Ah-Hwee Tan. "CRCTOL: Asemantic-based domain ontology learningsystem." Journal of the American Societyfor Information Science & Technology;Jan2010, Vol. 61 Issue 1, p150-168, 19p

[15]Zhang W. Y , Y in J. W., Lin L. F., Zhu T.H. Towards a general ontology ofmultidisciplinary collaborative design for

Semantic Web applications.International Journal of ComputerIntegrated Manufacturing; Dec2009, Vol.22 Issue 12, p1144-1153 | DOI:10.1080/09511920903030379.

Documents

A study on enhancing E-Governance applications through Semantic Web Technologies