# Ontology Based Governance for Employee Services
## 1 Introduction
Few organizations provide services that are started electronically and completed manually (stage 3 services) and even fewer provide services that are completed entirely electronically (stage 4 services). In addition, few agencies have been involved in offering integrated services to their employees. Knowledge management is of particular importance for the development of a system. Traditional knowledge representation systems have a centralized structure and impose strict rules for data representation. This results in reduced flexibility and soon leads to management problems. Besides, it limits the information we can retrieve and its scalability [3]. Knowledge management in e-government applications must take into account its online nature. A key element is the need for user interaction. This interaction replaces the physical transaction of the citizen with the state and offers integrated services to the citizen. Developments in the field of the World Wide Web promote the interaction of users through the Social Web (Web 2.0). However, the amount and structure of data generated with Web 2.0 are not properly structured to facilitate data interconnection and reasoning [4; 5]. The Semantic Web (Web 3.0) adds logic to the web and provides a solution to these problems. The Semantic Web is an extension of the Web that organizes data in a formal, structured form and sets inference rules [3]. Ontologies depict a shared, agreed, and detailed model (or set of concepts) of a domain. Another advantage of using a domain ontology is the definition of semantic models of the data combined with the associated domain knowledge [6]. In general, knowledge management becomes more efficient when using the linked data technology stack. It is important that the data is machine-readable and ensures interconnection with other data sets [7] Formal ontologies help the data to be represented at a higher conceptual level, regardless of the task they are called to perform [8]. The combination of Social and Semantic Web is essential for the effective implementation of e-government. Remarkable is also the research in the field of ontologies in e-government. The majority of these proposals use a top-down approach and are mainly concerned with defining horizontal ontologies. Besides, there are few e-government applications based on ontologies. Finally, it is noteworthy that despite the research carried out, there is difficulty in defining backbone ontologies by governments. In this paper, we present on the one hand the development of an ontology to support administrative work and on the other hand, a good practice for the process of developing an e-government portal that will provide comprehensive services to employees. The portal is based on the proposed ontology, both for the modeling and for data management. We followed a bottom-up approach, starting with the analysis of the requirements of the organizations and continuing with the design and implementation. The decentralized Primary and Secondary Education Agencies under the Ministry of Education of Greece were selected as the scope of application. These organizations have a common administrative framework and are called to serve the needs of more than 200,000 permanent and contract teachers in Greece. Within this work, we propose a model for the development of e-government, through the development of individual specialized vertical ontologies developed with a bottom-up approach and the interconnection between them. The contribution of this work lies in exploring the development of ontologies for government to employee. Within our work, we highlight the effectiveness of ontologies in developing web applications for e-government. We also focus on the usefulness of vertical ontologies in the provision of integrated electronic services for both modeling and mainly for data management, by presenting a good practice model for e-government. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we present relevant work in the field of e-government. In Section 3 we present our methodology.