An Ontology-based Inquiry Framework.

Quality of service (QoS) and citizens satisfaction are primary objectives for any eGovernment project. Quality can be inspected directly through measurements of speci¯c QoS indicators; in the midst of innovation processes it is however more convenient to estimate quality indirectly, through questionnaire submissions to the involved citizens. The eGovernment Inquiry Framework (eGif) has been designed as a key tool to keep innovation projects controlled also being the first component of an eGovernment service oriented architecture with semantic capabilities. Written in Java, based on well known open source libraries, exposed as a standard WSDL-defined web service, eGif helps survey campaign designers by keeping semantic information about the statistical variables used and interacting with servers for user identification. Questionnaire OWL-based ontologies are now investigated as a means to facilitate the creation of reusable survey knowledge base.