Solving Semantic Interoperability Conflicts in Cross-Border E-Government Services

Abstract

Interoperability is one of the most challenging problems in modern cross-organizational information systems, which rely on heterogeneous information and process models. Interoperability becomes very important for e-Government information systems that support cross-organizational communication especially in a cross-border setting. The main goal in this context is to seamlessly provide integrated services to the user (citizen). In this paper we focus on Pan European e-Services and issues related with their integration. Our analysis uses basic concepts of the generic public service model of the Governance Enterprise Architecture (GEA) and of the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO), to express the semantic description of the e-services. Based on the above, we present a mediation infrastructure capable of resolving semantic interoperability conflicts at a pan-European level. We provide several examples to illustrate both the need to solve such semantic conflicts and the actual solutions we propose.