Locating and Crawling eGovernment Services A Light-weight Semantic Approach

The application of Web 2.0 tools and methodologies in the domain of eGovernment is not yet a fully exploited area due to the immaturity of the software support, and the lack of commitment from Public Administrations. This paper proposes a solution to locate a service which a citizen may be interested in. The solution uses particular features from this environment, such as microformats, metadata and dynamic procedures on the Web. The paper describes a semantic model for the domain, and tools to annotate, publish and crawl services in Public Administrations are discussed in depth. The paper details the entire software platform, and it presents conclusions and a number of proposals for future research efforts.