Access-e Gov - Background, Motivation

Background, Motivation

The Access-eGov project is motivated by the needs to increase the interoperability of existing governmental services in existing or newly created e-Government solutions on local, national, and Pan-European levels. The interoperability was recognised as a precondition for the implementation of European eGovernment services in the eEurope Action Plan 2005 and is explicitly addressed as one of the four main challenges in the I2010 EU strategy. It is recommended to build the solutions supporting interoperability of governmental services on standards, open specifications and open interfaces.

From the three aspects of interoperability (i.e. organisational, semantic, and technical), the Access-eGov project is particularly focused on the semantic interoperability. The central idea is to ensure that the meaning of the shared and exchanged information is captured, formalised, and is understood in the same way by the people, applications, and institutions involved in the eGovernment solution. It can be achieved by enriching the provided governmental services and other information resources with a machine-readable semantic description, applying the semantic technologies as shared domain ontologies, formal ontology languages (e.g. RDF, OWL, WSML), Semantic Web Services and corresponding frameworks as e.g. RDF-S, WSDL, OWL-S, and WSMO (see also the list of Related projects). Within the Access-eGov, the WSMO framework was selected as a basic implementation platform.