Deliverable

The successful development of eGovernment is widely acknowledged as a key contribution to achievement of the European Union’s Lisbon agenda goals. There has also been increasing attention to the role of the public sector in the system of innovation, not only as a regulator or a financer, but as a set of economic organisations able to make a contribution. The full application potential of some SWS technologies, including Semantic Web Services (SWS) is not yet realised because of a lack of large-scale testing domains. It is thus argued that large, dynamic, heterogeneous and shared information spaces are required in order to enable effective evaluation. The development of ontologies and semantics, necessary for the interoperability of eGovernment applications, is potentially the first large-scale deployment of the Semantic Web. The eGovernment domain is unique because of the enormous challenges it faces in achieving interoperability and the need to manage complex causes of change. A key obstacle is the difficulty of automatically mediating the different meanings of data objects and interfaces. Setting up seamless e-Government services requires information integration as well as process integration involving a variety of objects with specific semantics. Among the major barriers and constraints to be addressed are: migration to semantic technologies; the slow pace of transition toward implementation; the need for industrial support; the greater involvement of users in service design; standardisation; the integration of semantic concepts; and key issues of privacy, security and trust. It will also be vital for future endeavours to promote the application of SWS in eGovernment by making the case in cost-benefit terms which are widely understood in the sector and to communicate potential benefits widely. The eGovernment use case (DIP WP9) has developed and tested two prototypes based on SWS in co-operation with Essex County Council (ECC), a large local authority i