Semantic interoperability for enhancing sharing and learning through e-government knowledge-intensive portal services

E-Government emerges from the web sites that offer static information, documents and forms for employees and citizens to more advanced types of transactions, enquiries, and process automations to many types of stakeholders. Increasingly, different layers of government services are being consolidated into a knowledge portal providing on time and online services to the public. Such a knowledge portal not only provides a platform for integrating applications and information from all government sources, but also provides a platform for knowledge sharing and learning to the public with the objective to improve the efficiency and the quality of E-Government processes and services. However, due to the heterogeneity of applications and information across different levels of government agencies, a significant amount of work is usually needed to re-configure such applications and services into a new platform despite the progress made in service-oriented architectures. Semantics and in particular meta-knowledge about the nature and types of application services are often lacking. Semantic interoperability needs to be established for effective knowledge sharing and learning in E-Government. In this paper, we discuss how knowledge intensive portals can be used for enhancing sharing and learning in E-Government. We will also discuss the current state-of-the-art of how the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies can be applied in providing interoperability to leverage knowledge sharing and learning activities in effective and efficient ways, to the public.