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Semantic Web for eGovernment Workshop |
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Welcome to the website of the workshop on Semantic Web for eGovernment of ESWC 2006 |
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NEW:The workshop programme is available in the Program page, as well as a pdf document. You may also download the proceedings with all the papers as a pdf document here (4.5 MB). Seven papers have been accepted for presentation at the workshop. Authors of accepted papers please send your revised papers following the guidelines defined in the submissions page to “Stojanovic AT fzi.de” till 19 May 2006. We would like to thank the academics and practitioners who submitted a paper to the ESWC workshop, as well as the reviewers who supported us in the review process!
Motivation for the Workshop The domain of eGovernment provides an enormous challenge to achieve interoperability, given the manifold semantic differences of interpretation of, e.g., law, regulations, citizen services, administrative processes, best practices, and, last, but not least, the many different languages to be taken into account within and across regions, nations and continents. These semantic differences are related to a great variety of IT solutions (on local, regional, inter-/national level) which will have to be networked (despite any effort of standardisation). In consequence, some of the key obstacles for networked computer applications in governmental processes and services are those kinds of barriers in which the different meanings of data objects and interfaces cannot be automatically mediated. Setting up seamless eGovernment services requires information integration as well as process integration involving a variety of objects with specific semantics. On the other hand, Semantic web (SW) has been in the focus of the AI community for the last five years and after years of successful research, it requires a large, dynamic, heterogeneous and shared information space to be effectively evaluated. Therefore, the combination of these two domains seems to be quite natural: the eGovernment domain can provide an ideal test bed for SW research, and SW technologies can be an ideal platform to achieve the vision of a knowledge-based, citizen-centric, and citizen-empowering, distributed and networked eGovernment. Moreover, due to its open architecture, eGovernment provides a palette of new research questions for SW, like inter-portal search (e.g., searching for additional resources on other portals to reply to a primary user or agent request). eGovernment further exhibits some remarkable characteristics which make it more demanding on one hand, but also more promising, on the other hand, than common eBusiness scenarios; to mention some for these characteristics: high degree of formality of key areas (law); extreme requirements to come to same decisions in similar situations; high demands with regards to security, privacy, and trust; sometimes extremely long-running process instances (e.g. in urban and regional planning); sometimes extreme information imbalances between stakeholders, as well as many different stakeholders in the same process (e.g., citizen vs. city council, county council, federal government) and many more. In this workshop we invite contributions which tackle theoretical, technical and application aspects of the usage of SW methods for e-Government problems. See the topics of the Symposium. We invite contributions on all theoretical, technical and application aspects of semantic eGovernment, especially emphasizing the real-world business and technology questions to be dealt with in realistic, useful applications for eGovernment. This workshop will be the successor of the AAAI 2006 spring symposium “Semantic Web meets eGovernment” – SWEG’2006 that will be held at the Stanford University, California, USA, March 27-29, 2006. The focus is more on strengthening the European community and on familiarization with the established European Semantic Web community. The amount and quality of submissions to SWEG’2006 indicate that there is a critical mass of researchers and research approaches in the intersection of Semantic Web and eGovernment. This ESWC workshop should enable consolidating, in the first instance, the Europe-wide semantic eGovernment community, that needs specifically targeted events to present and exchange ideas and results – even more since harmonization of approaches and standardization of results will be a major prerequisite for smooth transition to widespread real-world application. Our intention is to establish such a serial of workshops/events that would take place co-jointly with first class international conferences. Workshop Goals The workshop intends to bring together researchers and practitioners from such research areas as ontology engineering, semantic web services, information retrieval, quality management, knowledge acquisition, human language technology, document processing, adaptive web portals, and eGovernment, to discuss various aspects of semantic technologies in eGovernment in an interdisciplinary way. The workshop will be fuelled by the tension between different relevant disciplines and between formal methods and practical applications. The goal of the workshop is to share experiences and to establish common strategies for semantic eGovernment. Moreover, due to an increasing number of projects related to semantic eGovernment, we expect that the workshop will enable cross-fertilization between projects, identification of complementarities, as well as the engagement in new collaboration activities between related projects such as clustering, networks of excellence etc. |
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Semantic Web for eGovernment |
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FIT: Semantic Technologies for Self-adaptive eGovernment |
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DEMO_NET: Network of Excellence in eParticipation. |
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Semantic-enabled Agile Knowledge-based e-government |