A microformat based approach for crawling and locating services in the eGovernment domain

As a result of the soaring amount of solutions in the eGovernment domain, there is an increasing number of services available for citizens. This phenomena can introduce some level of confusion for citizens that may encounter difficulties to locate the desired service. Thus, mechanisms to search and locate a particular service must be provided. In this task, the use of semantic technologies is expected to play a paramount role. This papers aims at presenting a two-fold mechanism to fight back this issue. The proposed solution will be able to make semantic annotations on services and to crawl eGovernment Web pages in search for services. Finally, these services will be put at the disposal of citizen by means of a semantic search engine. All details regarding the semantic support and the technical details are fully discussed in the paper that also lays some conclusions.