Combining Service Models, Semantic and Web 2.0 Technologies to Create a Rich Citizen Experience

e-Government portals suffer from various shortcomings, such as the lack of formal service models for documenting services, the complexity of the user interfaces, the badly structured content etc. In this work we start from a mature model for modelling public services and employ semantic and Web 2.0 technologies in order to develop a citizen-centric e-Government portal. Content managers are provided with a mechanism for adding structured service descriptions. A rich user experience has been created for all the users of the portal. The user interface can be personalized, visual browsing mechanisms and efficient search mechanisms have been implemented on top of the underlying service repository. Structured service descriptions, which are semantically annotated using the RDFa mechanism, are made available to the users. In addition, the users can annotate the service descriptions using tags similar to what is currently done for popular Web 2.0 portals and the portal also logs the users’ behaviour when using the portal. Hence, user-defined service metadata are created, which then support service and tag recommendation mechanisms.