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Esperteyu project

Semantic web for citizens

Motivation

Principality of Asturias, like other Spanish regions, publishes a regional bulletin, which contains all administrative events that the citizens should know, such as new regional laws, research fellowships, contract awards,...

A great variety of users read this information every day: students looking for competitive exams, government employeers searching other posts in public job or lawyers. Even though, the bulletin information is relevant to common people too. Unfortunately there are some difficulties in the access to information, for instance, poor search tools, vocabulary barriers or low knowledge of public administration internal structure. The vocabulary used in the contents of the bulletin, usually written by lawmakers, is very different to the commonly used one. This linguistic gap renders traditional syntactic search tools almost useless.

In order to solve these problems, and to ease the access to the bulletin, we apply semantic web techniques. This research area is currently in a heavy development stage. The semantic web dreams with a web where machines could understand the information, combine and filter multiple sources of data to provide accurate responses to the users. With these premises, the R+D Department of the CTIC Foundation is building a semantic search tool that finds the most relevant documents for the user search intentions. These intentions are extracted from the concepts underlying in the query typed by the user.

Project description

Semantic search example

Since 2005, we are involved in a project to develop a services platform using semantic web technologies. So far, we have implemented three use cases:

Semantic search engine: our approach recognizes the concepts behind the user query terms, and applies ontologies to retrieve and rank the relevant documents. There is an example.
Concept browser: we have modelled the structure of the Public Administration using ontologies. Our concept browser, using SVG graphs, exports this knowledge in a user-friendly and intuitive interface.
Subscription service: this feature allows the user to subscribe to the results of a particular query. In this way, she can receive daily updates of the information through RSS, SMS or e-mail.

Publications

Here are some papers and presentations about the project:

Searching over Public Administration Legal Documents Using Ontologies (Aug/2006). Proceedings of JCKBSE-2006, Tallinn, Estonia. (Paper) (proceedings)
Buscador Semántico para la Documentación de la Administración Pública del Principado de Asturias (06/04/2006). BLOGAK-2006, Bilbao, Spain (Slides) (Paper)
Servicios semánticos para la documentación de la administración pública del Principado de Asturias. CAEPIA-2005, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (Paper) (Slides) (bibtex)
CTIC Foundation's position about Semantics in Web Services. W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services (June 9-10, 2005. Innsbruck) (link)

Esperteyu project

Motivation

Project description

Publications

Links