Putting Things in Context: Dynamic eGovernment Re-Engineering using Ontologies and Context

The proliferation of the Internet allows citizens to communicate with public administration using various channels. The diversity of tools allows citizens to become more involved in the daily decision making of public administration, especially when it comes to local governments. However, these new methods of communication require efficient techniques for handling an ever growing flow of information to civil servants. This position paper promotes a technical solution to allow efficient communication between citizens and civil servants, allowing a civil servant a flexible mechanism to automatically sort out any incoming data, analyzing it on-the-fly, directing it to the person who may find it most usable, and using it in evaluating services offered by the government. Such a solution paves the way for interoperability, while at the same time supporting re-engineering using local modifications and lending itself well to the needs of multi-lingual and multi-cultural environments such as the European Union.