# Ontology Based Governance for Employee Services
## 3 Methodology  
There are several approaches for designing and implementing e-government ontologies. In general, the methodologies are divided into two categories: top-down and bottom-up [38; 39]. In the first category, top-down methodologies attempt to cover the entire range of a domain by describing the concepts and relationships between them. These methodologies first model high-level concepts and subsequently they fine-grain them and go deeper into lower levels. According to [39], this approach has the advantage that the ontologies that are created can easily be reused and can be used as a basis for creating new ontologies. These ontologies also contain a semantically rich vocabulary of terms and relationships and offer better control of the level of detail. The top-down development of an ontology has the disadvantage that it requires a lot of time and effort. Designing an ontology with this methodology requires very good knowledge of the domain to produce adequate modeling. Moreover, the ontologies that are built with this methodology are more general and face difficulties in managing changes. On the other hand, in bottom-up methodologies, the modeling of concepts starts from the lower levels. In this approach, the concepts are easier to identify and the ontology is built faster. This methodology more easily identifies the biases and inconsistencies caused by humans. Moreover, the ontologies are modified more easily and respond more quickly to changes that take place [39]. Their disadvantages [39] include the fact that they have a high degree of detail, which creates problems in identifying common correlations and increases the risk of inconsistencies [40]. This approach does not use a common model and shape to represent the concepts. In addition, each ontology uses a different model for its development [29]. To develop our ontology we chose to use a bottom-up approach. Our ontology aims to serve the needs of a specific group of organizations. Despite the research that has taken place in recent years, the state has not adopted top-level ontologies that could stand as the backbone for our effort. Our goal was to create a vertical ontology that is flexible and can be easily extended to adapt to frequent changes. Initially, we performed a detailed mapping of the structure and function of the organizations. In order to record the procedures that are performed, interviews were conducted with domain experts (i.e., heads and employees of administrative departments). During the design, we started from the specific tasks we want to implement, taking into account the possibilities of extending the ontology. As [41] proposed, we developed our ontology incrementally. In the first steps, we integrated certain concepts and relationships and continued with defining new ones, or creating instances as needed. More specifically, we followed the following steps:  
1. **Mapping status. ** In this step we depicted the structure of the decentralized agencies and identified the processes that take place in these organizations. 2. **Selecting procedures** for implementation. We ranked the processes of the previous step using as criteria the number of individuals involved and the repetition period of each process, to select those that cause the greatest administrative burden. For each of the selected procedures, we followed steps 3 to 8. 3. **Analyzing procedures** by identifying the events (triggers) that initiate the procedures, the individuals and organizations involved in the procedures and the additional data that need to be retrieved from the organizations' files. We also analyzed the data processing that takes place and the outputs of the process. 4. **Ontology Design. ** We modeled the entities and separated them into \"Organizations\", \"People\", \"Documents\", and \"Data\" participating in the processes. 5. **Ontology Building. ** We implemented the ontology with the Protege tool. 6. **Ontology Population. ** To verify the functionality of the ontology we created a set of individuals. 7. **Procedure integration in the Portal.