A Semantic Approach to Evaluate Web Content of Government Websites

Abstract

Government agencies rely on websites to disseminate large volumes of information to the citizens. As public information changes over time due to changes in laws and regulations, maintaining currency and consistency of the web content becomes acutely important. Government agencies have to regularly evaluate the web content (WC) to ensure high quality of information available to the citizens, businesses, and public administrators. Currently there exists no standardized approach for monitoring and maintaining WC. In this chapter, the authors propose a WC ontology for the systematic and formal representation of the concepts and functions associated with the evaluation of web content on government websites. An ontology-based evaluation tool is proposed that can be used to improve the quality of web content and efficiency of the evaluation process. The ontological approach holds promising features and benefits including information sharing, reducing time and paperwork during evaluation, assuring more accurate results, and communicating evaluation results to knowledge engineers, public administrators, evaluators, and decision makers engaged in e-government initiatives.