Interactive exploration and discovery of e-government services

ABSTRACT

Government e-services available to citizens represent one of the most frequent and critical points of contact between public administrations and citizens. In addition to common services such as id cards, permits, e-services represent the only practical way of providing incentives and support to specific classes of citizens. For this reason, discovery of e-services, rather than plain retrieval, is a critical functionality in e-government systems. The solution we present in this paper is based on dynamic taxonomies, a semantic model for the transparent, guided, user-centric exploration of complex information bases. It provides a single framework for the access and exploration of all e-government information and, differently from mainstream research in semantic web, it is intended for the direct use of end-users, rather than for programmatic or agent-mediated access.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods
          Subjects: Semantic networks

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
discovery of e-services, dynamic taxonomies, faceted classification