An Innovative Government Architecture with Semantic Technology

Over the past decade, authorities invested highly in public service provision over the Internet via portals. Back office systems of authorities collect and store data entered by citizens and enterprises to support decision-making by civilians. The data represents both the state of citizens and enterprises, public service transactions, and the physical infrastructure including ownership relations. Whilst civilians use the data for decisions, data quality influences decision quality. As data steward, civilians have improved data quality by removing duplicate data and created specific data stores for reference data like addresses, enterprises, and citizens. Citizens and enterprises can use reference data to complete electronic public service request forms. To further improve data quality, civilians perform physical inspections and/or assess external data sources to validate for instance data consistency. Besides data steward, civilians are also data custodian: they provide processing and storage facilities. In this contribution, the author will argue that an innovative architecture separating data steward and data custodian roles, currently held by civilians, decreases the Total Cost of Ownership of authorities' IT and contributes to economic growth. In the proposed approach, persons and organizations take the data stewardship role, facilitated by a provider of a data custodian role either in the public or private domain. Civilians can access the data for decision-making. Civilians still act as data steward with respect to additional data resources than provided by citizens and enterprises in decision-making. The approach is illustrated by a case and supported by the governance policy of for instance Dutch Customs Authority.