Task 14: Seminar 13

Title: Ontology, Semantic Web and Electronic Government

Lecturer: Dr. Adegboyega Ojo

Affiliation:

• United Nations University, International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST), Macao
• University of Lagos, Nigeria

Time: 7 October 2005, 9:30 - 12:30

Venue: Rua do Campo, no 78, Edificio Chung Kin, 10th floor

Abstract:

There is growing awareness of the importance of interoperability in e-government. Governments at the same time have recognised that they have an important role to play in achieving interoperability. This is evident in the number of interoperability frameworks and blueprints now available such as the European, Singapore and Hong-Kong Interoperability Frameworks.

While there are success stories and many best practices for technical interoperability based on XML technologies and standards, semantic interoperability still remain largely elusive, especially in the public sector. With the emerging semantic web and related technologies, there are hopes for making large-scale semantic interoperability a reality. The semantic web promises more meaningful collaboration between people and organizations as well as machine understandable contents.

The semantic web relies on explicit specifications of the relations among the various resources on the web. Ontologies are the primarily vehicle for specifying these relationships. When Ontologies are combined with metadata frameworks, the promises of the semantic web become feasible.

1. provide an exposition to the field of ontology - background, basic concepts, languages and applications
2. examine the semantic web phenomenon and show why ontology play a major role in its development
3. highlight some current e-government projects related to ontology and the semantic web
4. discuss two applications of ontology and semantic web in e-government: semantic message exchange and semantic portal development

Materials: slides

Target audience: Managers, IT Professionals, and Developers.

Prerequisites:

Bio: Adegboyega Ojo is a Project Staff at the International Institute for Software Technology of the United Nations University (UNU-IIST), Macao SAR. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Department of Computer Sciences, University of Lagos, Nigeria. His research interest includes e-Government, Conceptual Modeling, Formal Methods, Ontology Development and Applications of Computational Intelligence. His particular interest in e-Government covers: Measurement and Benchmarking, e-Service Development, Inter-government Workflow Management and Semantic Interoperability. Gboyega holds a doctorate degree in Computer Science from the University of Lagos in Nigeria. He is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He can be reached by email at ao@iist.unu.edu.