Combining and ranking semantic information for e-government: a citizen complaints management system

Abstract

Complaints management is an important application of E-government. Collecting, combining, and ranking citizens’ complaints is necessary for effective management. Existing complaints management applications expect the government officials to process each complaint one by one to decide which complaint should be dealt with first. However, this is time consuming and thus ineffective. In order to cope with this, we are developing an ontology-based complaints management system to manage complaints. We have developed a complaints ontology with which the complaints of the citizens can be expressed. Furthermore, we combine complaints that are similar based on some criterion. By specifying constraints on the complaints, the officials can specify which type of complaints are more important than others. We then apply these constraints on the citizens’ complaints using a reasoner. This allows us to prioritize the complaints automatically and rank them based on importance. The government officials can then process the ranked list, knowing that they are dealing with the most urgent complaint at any given time.