Towards the implementation of functional ontologies for federal government ministries

Abstract

This study focuses on the implementation of ontology-based e-government services for government departments to promote economic growth and sustainability and is called Nigeria Ontology-Based e-Government Services (NigOeGov). The dataset was obtained from literature, organisational documents, and the individual ministry website. Five steps were involved in its implementation, while a hierarchical breakdown structure was used for the ontology categorisation. Protégé OWL 5.5.0 and SPARQL were used for ontology development and query generation, respectively. The results based on the ontology's elements were: total axiom count, class count, object property count, data property count, and individual count; 127, 9, 8, 4, and 29, respectively. The result further shows various classes of federal ministries, their subclasses as departments, agencies, and units, and the instant of each ministry and the interaction among them. In conclusion, this semantic representation gives detailed information about each ministry from an interface, providing easy access to information for the citizens.