Utilizing Owl-S in multi-agent based architecture for semantic e-government services

Abstract

One of the major objectives of e-Government is to provide highest level of ease and satisfaction of to citizens. This requires a single window access to various services of government. An ICT solution for supporting such a use-case can be developed using web-services that interact autonomously with each other. However there are some limitations of web services that hinder the goal of seamless integration. Web services alone are not able to overcome these limitations due to the absence of some vital characteristics. Therefore to eliminate the limitations, this paper presents an architecture that augments web services with multi-agent technology and uses OWL-S for semantic description. The paper also discusses the implementation of the proposed architecture and also includes a critical evaluation of the proposal. This resulted in the identification of certain deficiencies in the proposed architecture as well as possible future enhancements which have been included in the paper. In addition to this, it also resulted in the identification of reasons behind the slow espousal of semantic web services'.