Organizing Federal E-Government Schemas

In this paper we present an approach to organize e-government schemas in Switzerland. On the political side, Switzerland is a challenging environment for any federation-wide harmonization and cooperation, because many authorities are organized independently. On the technical side, we describe an approach which aims at increasing the federation-wide cooperation through providing interested parties with a low barrier-to-entry, and with clearly visible benefits through the continuous evolution of a directory of e-government schemas. This paper describes a light-weight Semantic Web approach, enabling schema authors to create namespace descriptions that provide a minimal semantic description of the namespace’s subject. Using these namespace descriptions, RDF data is extracted and serves as source for a highly interlinked directory of e-government schemas in Switzerland.