An Ontological Business Process Modeling Approach for Public Administration

In this chapter, an electronic model of Public Administration’s operation using an ontology as a means to a formalized representation of knowledge is presented. According to the proposed model, every public administration procedure is viewed as a service offered to some external entity and is represented as a (Semantic) Web service, semantically annotating its functional parameters, profile, and workflow. The modeling of public administration services/procedures involved the commonly used IOPE (Inputs – Outputs – Preconditions – Effects) model of OWL-S for Semantic Web Service description. This chapter also presents a specific use case about the Human Resource Management department of the Region of Central Macedonia. In order to do so, certain extensions/adaptations of the general methodology were needed. In this chapter the authors fully present and justify these adaptations that were deployed in order to turn the general methodology into a really flexible and re-usable tool to model any public administration procedure. Furthermore, the authors describe the full knowledge engineering cycle for developing the ontology of this department’s business processes.