SemA2B Project

The new ICT technologies (semantic Web, smart-cards, digital TV, grid, ambiental intelligence, biometrics, etc.) entail new challenges in the e-government field. Regarding the Semantic Web technologies, ended or ongoing projects in the world research have been or are developing ontologies and service modeling tools and platforms focusing on the cooperation both intra- and inter-public organizations.

SemA2B is a CEEX project aims at building an infrastructure, based on the semantic s-based technology, for the cooperation between public organizations (POs) in Romania and for the integration of the services they provide in order to support the development of private company initiatives. During the project, Chambers of Commerce (CCs) will be analysed and involved in research validation , but future extensions of the infrastructure with other POs (municipalities, regional development agencies etc) are also foreseen.

Practically, the project consortium will :

(3) build a portal that will enable the end users (mainly private companies) from Romania or abroad to access, in a seamless mode, the services provided by POs (acting as service providers (SPs));

(4) implement an experimental software system to support the modelling and execution of SP-specific and business-oriented services and processes. It will be able to connect the SPs' internal systems and make their resources available as Web services. Although, during the project, only services and processes specific to CCs will be analysed and defined, software support and guidelines for the definition of services and processes provided by other types of SPs in Romania will be provided as well.

During the project, only services and processes specific to CCs will be defined, but software support and guidelines for their definition by other types of SPs in Romania will be provided as well. Main goals in using the semantic s-based technology are:

(1) the semantic interoperability of POs, by common knowledge and vocabularies, complying with Romanian and European e-government principles and rules;

(2) easy extensibility of SEM-A2B infrastructure with new types of SPs and easy integration and execution of new types of services and processes, by reusing generic or SP-specific service and process templates;

(3) easy integration of Romanian POs in European software infrastructures for e-government.

In order to reach these goals, two-level ontologies and business rules will be defined:

(1) common (generic) ontologies (representing generic business processes, resources , services, and service requests) and common business rules, applied to concepts in these ontologies; and

(2) SP-specific ontologies (initially for CCs), as well as SP-specific constraints and rules for service and process execution, all built by specializing the common ontologies and rules.

Project sponsorship: Romanian Ministry of Education and Research

Project consortium:

1. National Institute in R&D and Informatics (ICI) (project coordinator)

2. "Politehnica" University

3. SIVECO Romania SA

4. University of Bucharest

Activity description : Responsible of the project for the "Politehnica" University.