Publication
Government institutions and their documents: an ontological approach
| Summary: | E-Government studies are of growing importance in our times. Two factors contribute to this: first, the need for better services to citizens and, second, the enormous volume, diversity, and variety of government data. This scenario characterizes e-Government initiatives as a socio-technical system in the current big-data environment. To face these modern challenges, system and service designers need techniques and tools that contemplate solutions for two fundamental problems, namely, the complexity of socio-technical processes required to government functioning, and the obligation to coexist with large legacy databases. One approach that has proven valuable to address these challenges is conceptual modeling supported by ontologies. This modeling mode allows new systems to incorporate two essential functionalities: knowledge representation and heterogeneous data integration. Knowledge Representation is a field of Artificial Intelligence that enables the codification of knowledge about the world in order that a computer system can use it to solve complex problems. In this context, heterogeneous data integration is known as Ontology-Based Data Access: a technique that has proven worthwhile, especially for data stored in relational databases. This work presents the essentials of this theoretical field and a practical experiment in data integration. The study is based on the Theory of Social Acts and is implemented with the ontologies available on the OBO Foundry. Specifically, we demonstrate the principles of the Document Acts Theory and its corresponding ontology, the D-Acts ontology. The philosophical foundations on the nature of public corporations are also explored, and a Systematic Review of e-Government Literature is presented. We focus on government systems, and, for that purpose, a government process and its actual data, both described in the Brazilian Government Open Data Portal, are used as an instance of research. According to considerations of scientific research methodology, the present work was classified as applied and qualitative research, with some exploratory characteristics. The essential thesis contribution is to propose a method to combine two public and generic components able to build an ontological model as well as a piece of an integration system that works to access heterogeneous relational databases. We claim that this construction may be generalized for other government processes and even for a generic business process. |
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| Main Authors: | Jaime Andrade Pinto |
| Subject: | Ontologies Knowledge Representation OBDA BFO Ontology D-Acts Ontology Social Ontology Ontologias Representação do conhecimento |
| Year: | 2020 |
| Country: | Brazil |
| Document type: | doctoral thesis |
| Access type: | unknown |
| Associated institution: | IBICT |
| Language: | English |
| Origin: | Oasisbr |
| Summary: | E-Government studies are of growing importance in our times. Two factors contribute to this: first, the need for better services to citizens and, second, the enormous volume, diversity, and variety of government data. This scenario characterizes e-Government initiatives as a socio-technical system in the current big-data environment. To face these modern challenges, system and service designers need techniques and tools that contemplate solutions for two fundamental problems, namely, the complexity of socio-technical processes required to government functioning, and the obligation to coexist with large legacy databases. One approach that has proven valuable to address these challenges is conceptual modeling supported by ontologies. This modeling mode allows new systems to incorporate two essential functionalities: knowledge representation and heterogeneous data integration. Knowledge Representation is a field of Artificial Intelligence that enables the codification of knowledge about the world in order that a computer system can use it to solve complex problems. In this context, heterogeneous data integration is known as Ontology-Based Data Access: a technique that has proven worthwhile, especially for data stored in relational databases. This work presents the essentials of this theoretical field and a practical experiment in data integration. The study is based on the Theory of Social Acts and is implemented with the ontologies available on the OBO Foundry. Specifically, we demonstrate the principles of the Document Acts Theory and its corresponding ontology, the D-Acts ontology. The philosophical foundations on the nature of public corporations are also explored, and a Systematic Review of e-Government Literature is presented. We focus on government systems, and, for that purpose, a government process and its actual data, both described in the Brazilian Government Open Data Portal, are used as an instance of research. According to considerations of scientific research methodology, the present work was classified as applied and qualitative research, with some exploratory characteristics. The essential thesis contribution is to propose a method to combine two public and generic components able to build an ontological model as well as a piece of an integration system that works to access heterogeneous relational databases. We claim that this construction may be generalized for other government processes and even for a generic business process. |
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