An ontologically principled service-oriented architecture for managing distributed e-government nodes

The need for managing distributed systems is prominent in e-government. Different applications and platforms that cover the overall range of the e-government implementation area need to interoperate in order to provide integrated governmental services to the citizens. This paper proposes an ontologically principled service-oriented architecture for the administration and integration of distributed nodes in an e-government network. The goal of the proposed design is to improve effectiveness and coherence by taking advantage of the enabling technologies of service-oriented computing, web services and ontologies. A two-level semantic mediator model is proposed to both provide an integrated description of entities and map actual information to them. This architecture was used on a prototype system developed for managing distributed educational directorates in the prefecture of Achaia, Greece. The pilot use of the system led to efficient decision making since it managed to mine information that was previously ‘buried’ in the local governmental infrastructure nodes.