An ontology for e-government service integration

Composition and delivery of e-government web services is a challenging task. The lack of semantics in the current Web Services Description Language (WSDL) prevents automatic discovery and hence, automatic invocation and composition of those services. This paper presents a knowledgebase design, which provides technical support for the implementation of dynamic integration of e-government web services in an intuitive and coherent framework by using and extending the Ontology Web Language for Services (OWL-S). This new ontology is a logical extension of OWL-S that is designed to overcome the shortcoming of OWL-S in composition of services from different WSDLs. We extend this existing approach to enable the design of a Metamodel that is used as an alterable workflow for a composite service. The resulting ontology covers specific web services semantic concepts to implement the phenomenon of LifeEvent in the context of e-government, by: (1 ) facilitating the construction of alternative service composition workflows from different web service providers; (2) enabling the repair or re-configuration of workflows in runtime. ©2012 CRL Publishing Ltd