Discovering and Integrating Web-based E-Services
by Brahim Medjahed
 

Digital government can be defined as the civil and political conduct of government using information and communication technologies. The development of techniques to efficiently access government databases and services is at the core of our research in digital government. For that purpose, we have teamed with the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) to help the needy citizens collect social benefits. The FSSA is composed of dozens of autonomous departments located in different cities and counties statewide. Each department's information system consists of a myriad of databases. To access government information, case officers first need to locate the databases of interest. This process is often complex and tedious due to the heterogeneity, distribution, and large number of FSSA databases. To deal with this problem, FSSA databases are organized as distributed ontologies. An ontology defines a taxonomy based on the semantic proximity of information interest Each ontology focuses on a single common information type (e.g., disability). On the other hand, FSSA case officers must deal with different situations that depend on the particular needs of each citizen (disability, children health, housing, employment, etc.) For each situation, they must typically delve into a potentially large number of applications and determine those that best meet the citizens' needs. To facilitate the process of collecting benefits, we wrapped each FSSA application with an e-service. Simply put, an e-service is an application functionality that can be programmatically invoked from the Web. Similarly to FSSA databases, we organized the e-services space into distributed ontologies vocabularies).