An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms SWEG 2006 – The Semantic Web meets eGovernment 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Stanford University, CA, March 2006 Fabio Grandi Maria Rita Scalas Università degli Studi di Bologna Federica Mandreoli Riccardo Martoglia Enrico Ronchetti Paolo Tiberio Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Overview  Our research activities concern the implementation of Web information systems for eGovernment applications  Development of eGovernment initiatives: more and more on-line resources and services are being made available by Public Administrations (PAs)  We make use of temporal database and semantic Web techniques to provide personalized access to such resources and services  In particular, we consider multi-version norm texts (stored in XML format) available in Web repositories

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms time Original normative text 1 2 new version 3 Importance of versioning  Temporal concerns are ubiquitous in the law domain  Each normative text changes in time due to different modifications, but keeps its identity  The ability to model temporal dimensions is essential for the management of evolving norms  it is crucial to reconstruct the consolidated version of a norm  also past versions are still important

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Importance of versioning  Applicability (semantic) versioning also plays an important role  some norms or some of their parts have or acquire a limited applicability  personalized version of the norm  A version only containing articles which are applicable to a citizen’s personal case Self-employed Art. 1 (unemployed) xxy yyx yxyx yyyxx xyyx xxy yyx yxyx yyyxx xyyx Art. 2 (self-employed) aab bbab abab abba ab aab bbab abab abba ab Art. 3 (retired) qwqq ww wqqw wq ww qwqq ww wqqw wq ww

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Motivation  Large XML collections of norms are made available by the PA on the Web but personalization is:  Absent, e.g. (temporal versioning partially supported)  Predefined in the Website structure and contents, e.g. (hardwired by human experts following the life-events approach)  Lack of an effective, flexible, on-demand (“intelligent”, efficient) personalization facility

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Objectives  Development of an effective and efficient Web information system where:  norms are represented as XML documents  dynamics of norms in time is captured  limited applicability of norms (and their parts) is captured  selective access and reconstruction of versions is supported by a query engine  Aimed at:  enabling citizens to access personalized versions of multiversion resources  improving and optimizing the involvement of citizens in the eGovernance process

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Personalized access to multi-version norms Classification of the citizen wrt an ontology on the basis of his/her digital identity Retrieval and reconstruction of a personalized version of the norm to be delivered Citizen logged on to the Web repository looking for a norm of interest

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms The Technological Infrastructure WEB SERVICES OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION WEB SERVICES WITH ONTOLOGY O C XML REPOSITORY OF ANNOTATED NORMS SIMPLEELABORATIONUNIT 1 – identification phase: reconstruction on-the-fly of the digital identity of the authenticated user 1 class C x 2 – classification phase: use of the collected digital identity to classify the citizen with respect to the civic ontology O c 2 Public Administration DB creation /update 3 – querying phase: access and reconstruction of all and only norms which are applicable to the class C x 3 Querying phase

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms  Definition of a temporal XML model including  a temporal multi-version XML schema is based on the hierarchical organization of normative texts: contents-section-article-paragraph is based on the hierarchical organization of normative texts: contents-section-article-paragraph at each level of the hierarchy, the history of changes is represented by the (time-stamped) versions produced at each level of the hierarchy, the history of changes is represented by the (time-stamped) versions produced it supports ancestor-descendant inheritance it supports ancestor-descendant inheritance  temporal manipulation operations  Extension of the XML model with applicability annotations in order to support semantic versioning  Design, implementation and evaluation of system prototypes supporting the model Approach

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms The temporal XML schema 4 Temporal Dimensions: Publication time time of publication on the Official Journal Validity time time the norm is in force Efficacy time time the norm can be applied Transaction time time the norm is stored in the system Law TitleContents Publication – R Vt_Start – R Vt_End – O Tt_Start – R Tt_End – O Et_Start – R Et_End – O An_ref – O Ver Section Ver Article Ver Heading Paragraph Ver Heading Num – R An_ref – O Num – R An_ref – O Num – R An_ref – O Num – R Type – R Vt_Start – R Vt_End – O Tt_Start – R Tt_End – O Et_Start – R Et_End – O TA Vt_Start – R Vt_End – O Tt_Start – R Tt_End – O Et_Start – R Et_End – O TA Vt_Start – R Vt_End – O Tt_Start – R Tt_End – O Et_Start – R Et_End – O TA Vt_Start – R Vt_End – O Tt_Start – R Tt_End – O Et_Start – R Et_End – O TA

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Semantic versioning  Extension of the multi-version model based on temporal dimensions to include a semantic versioning dimension to provide personalized access to norm texts  Civic ontology: a classification of citizens based on the distinctions introduced by successive norms (founding acts) that imply some limitations in their applicability

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Semantic versioning   At this stage of the project, we manage “tree-like” ontologies   class taxonomies induced by the IS-A relationship   we exploit the pre-order and post-order properties of trees   New versioning dimension: applicability of different parts of a norm text to the relevant classes of the civic ontology   Applicability annotations (AA) are added to semantic versions

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Semantic versioning   Applicability is inherited by descendant nodes unless locally redefined   By means of redefinitions we can also introduce, for each part of a document, complex applicability properties   Restrictions with respect to ancestors   Extensions with respect to ancestors

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms  John Smith is a self-employed citizen.  He is interested in the text of all the norms... ... which contain paragraphs dealing with health care,... ... which were valid and in effect between 2002 and 2004,... ... and which are applicable to his case (civic class 7). Example of full search Structural constraint Textual constraint Temporal constraint Applicability constraint 4 orthogonal constraints

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms FOR $a IN norms WHERE textConstr ($a//paragraph//text(), ’health AND care’) AND tempConstr (’vTime OVERLAPS PERIOD(’ ’,’ ’)’) AND tempConstr (’eTime OVERLAPS PERIOD(’ ’,’ ’)’) AND applConstr (’class 7’) RETURN $a Example of full search Structural constraint Textual constraint Temporal constraint Applicability constraint 4 orthogonal constraints

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Norm Article 1 Par 1 Ver 1 AA=3 Ver 1 Par 2 Article 2 Health care… …text X Ver 2 Public health… …text Y Example of full search TA AA TA AA=4 TA Ver 1 AA=3,8 TA Health care… …text Z Civic ontology Normative DB …norm//paragraph//text()… ‘class 7’ …

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Our prototype system (“native” approach)  The query engine is able to access and retrieve only the strictly necessary data  selection relies on ad-hoc data structures supporting multi-versioning  storage granularity is finer than the entire documents used by standard XML engines  Only the parts which satisfy the temporal and applicability constraints are used for the reconstruction of the retrieved documents  There is no need to retrieve whole XML documents and build space- consuming structures such as DOM trees Enhanced query processing efficiency Reduced memory requirements

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Evaluation benchmark  Three XML document sets  5000 documents (120MB)  documents (240MB)  documents (480MB)  Variable document size  min = 2KB  avg = 24KB  max = 125KB  Five different query types  Queries on keywords (structural + textual constraints)  Q1 – keywords in contents  Q2 – keywords in type and contents  Temporal queries (structural + temporal constraints)  Q3 – conditions on publication, validity and transaction time  Mixed queries (structural + textual + temporal constraints)  Q4, Q5 – with keywords and temporal conditions  Five variants with semantic constraints  Qx-A – with additional applicability constraints PERSONALIZATION OF THE QUERIES

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Performance evaluation  Very high personalization query efficiency  The system is able to solve personalization problems by means of simple comparisons involving pre-post encodings  0.5-1% more time than for the original versions  3-4% storage space overhead

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Performance evaluation  Scalability tests  The computing time grows sublinearly with the number of documents  Good scalability of the system in every type of query context 5000 docs docs docs time 1046 msec 1366 msec 1741 msec

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Conclusions   We presented our research work concerning the design and implementation of efficient Web-based information systems for eGovernment applications   We introduced a personalized access to resources on the basis of the digital identity of citizens relying on semantic versioning and ontology mapping   We developed a efficient platform (“native” approach) for which a specialized Multi-version XML Query Processor has been designed and implemented   We proved our approach to be very efficient in a large set of experimental situations and showed excellent scale-up figures with varying load configurations

SWEG 2006 An eGovernment system for temporal- and semantic-aware access to norms Future Work   Extensions of the current framework   more advanced application requirements may include a more sophisticated ontology definition, possibly versioned, and more advanced reasoning services   Development of a complete technological infrastructure usable in a large Web-based eGovernment scenario, including   identification, classification and reconstruction services   Assessment of our prototype systems in a concrete working environment   with real users and with a large repository of real norms   Extension to a more general application domain (Web personalization via ontology-based user profiling)