INT J COMPUT COMMUN, ISSN 1841-9836
9(3):261-275, June, 2014.
Advantages of Using an Ontological Model of the State
Development Funds
S. Arsovski, B. Markoski, P. Pecev, N. Petrovački, D. Lacmanović
Saša Arsovski
Guarantee Fund of Autonomous Province of Vojvodina
Serbia, 21000 Novi Sad, Hajduk Veljkova 11
E-mail: garfondapv@neobee.net
Branko Markoski*,
Predrag Pecev, Dejan Lacmanović
University of Novi Sad
Technical faculty "Mihajlo Pupin" Zrenjanin
Serbia, 23000 Zrenjanin, Djure Dakovica, bbi
E-mail: redrag.pecev@tfzr.rs, dlacman@tfzr.uns.ac.rs
*Corresponding author: markoni@uns.ac.rs
Neboša Petrovački
University of Novi Sad
Faculty of Technical Sciences
Computing and Control Department
Serbia, 21000 Novi Sad,Trg Dositeja Obradovića 6
E-mail: petrovackin@uns.ac.rs
Abstract: Ontologies generated from the workflow of administrative procedures,
can provide significant improvements and reduce the time of modeling, testing and
integration in the process of building an information system of the public adminis-
tration. In this paper we has analyzed the ontology annotation aimed to provide the
groundwork for automatic generation administrative act. The proposed semantic rep-
resentation of the administrative procedures enables use of the document templates,
which are the framework for the automatic generation of an administrative act. This
would be a result of the administrative procedures execution. The proposed approach
is verified by a case study of building an ontological model of the administrative
procedures for the Guarantee Fund of Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (APV).
Keywords: e-Government, ontology, services, information system.
1 Introduction
State development funds are an interventionist mechanism by which the state affects the
development of small and medium enterprises. These are institutions set up by authorities of
different levels (state, provincial, local government) and whose activity is aimed at stimulating
the development of small and medium-sized enterprises while reducing risk and transaction costs
related to the implementation of stimulating instruments (e.g. loans) of Small and Medium
Enterprises. The following development funds are established in AP Vojvodina: Vojvodina
Development Fund, Agricultural Development Fund, Capital Investment Fund and the Guarantee
Fund of APV. There are two scenarios of use of ontologies in the development of information
systems, depending on the type of information system that is being modeled [1]: Traditional
information systems: semantic content described in the ontology is transformed into a standard
component of the information system Ontology-driven information systems: the ontology is an
individual component of the information system.
Copyright © 2006-2014 by CCC Publications
262 S. Arsovski, B. Markoski, P. Pecev, N. Petrovački, D. Lacmanović
The ontological concept, which defines the administrative procedures and tasks, will be de-
scribed and analyzed in detail. The course of generating ontology will be resting on the role of
defined entity domains and the activities performed by those entities which are observed during
the process of the state administration.
The model should meet the following conditions:
1. To describe structural aspect of public administration, administrative units (Funds) and
their hierarchical relationship.
2. To provide an explicit representation of knowledge of administrative processes in Guarantee
fund of APV.
3. To provide ontological representation of the participants and documents in the develop-
ment funds.
4. To describe electronic services profiles those are providing the groundwork for automatic
generation administrative act.
Our main intention is to reduce development time and effort in order to meet the demands
of the information system based on knowledge of the administrative processes and documents.
The core idea in our method is ontology annotations with user interface components in order
to automatic generate user interface and modeling ontology of the electronic services that will
provide generation of the final administrative act.
Main advantages of the model which will be described hereinafter, is a semantic representation
of the administrative procedures business logic which, in the use of traditional techniques for
developing information systems, are firmly integrated into the user interface code. [4] [8]
The paper is organized as follows: the second section provides an overview of the related
work. The third section presents an ontological model of the Guarantee Fund of APV. The fourth
section shows the detailed administrative tasks semantic representation and shows practical use
of designed ontology. In the final, fifth section, concluding remarks and directions for further
research are given.
2 Related work
This section will present research results related to two aspects of the problem investigated
in this paper. The first aspect relates to the use of ontologies in modeling business processes of
public administration, and the second aspect relates to the use of ontologies in the generation of
the administrative act. A ontology is an information structure, which helps to acquire knowledge,
share it, and check consistency within knowledge. Authors in [19] conclude that the ontology
provides a better communication, reusability and organization of knowledge by decreasing lan-
guage ambiguity and structuring data. Author [18] proposed a formal definition of ontology as a
5-tuple (N, R, D, F, T) where each element is defined as follows: N, a set of nodes. R,N is a set
of relation Types. D, is a set of description logic sentences. Each sentence can use the elements
in N and two variables subject and object. Indicating respectively the first and third element in
5-tuple in T. F is a function that maps each element from R onto one element in D. T is a set of
relations which is defined as a set of 3-tuples where for each element consists of (s, r, o) where: s
is the subject, an element of N, r is the relation, an element of R and o is the object, an element
of N.
The authors in [2], propose a model of the system in which the procedures performed by
each administrative unit in the decision-making process and the creation of administrative doc-
uments are described. The main component of the proposed system is ontology of the public
administration. The proposed ontology comprises following aspects of the observed domain.
Structural aspects of public administration represent administrative units and their hierarchical
relationships. Textual aspect of ontology describes the documents that appear as a product of
Advantages of Using an Ontological Model of the State Development Funds 263
the administrative unit described in the structural aspects of ontology. Procedural aspects of
public administration ontology given in [2] are represented as an extension (specialization) to
OWL-S. Service aspect is also represented by OWL-S. An ontology modeled in this way allows
hierarchical control of the administrative units, control of administrative acts anticipated by leg-
islation, communication between administrative units involved in the creation of administrative
documents and calling of the procedures that trigger electronic services. The authors [5], [6],
define three main reasons for the use of ontologies in generating user interfaces: 1. Improved
visualization of UI; 2. Improvement of interactions between the system and users, 3.Improve-
ment of the development process of user interface. In [3] the authors propose the creation of an
ontology, which represents different aspects of service including administrative documents and
legislation. This ontological model is focused on describing the electronic services of public ad-
ministration. Basic concepts of the proposed ontology are Services, Service users, Organization,
Administrative, Service implementation, Legislation, Form, Document, Event.
The ontological model created in this paper relies on the results of [2] and [3].
In a study of applying ontologies in the development of e-Government the authors presented a
method of modeling ontologies in the domain of e-Government [15]. According to the authors of
[9], each public service of eGovernment is semantically modeled and contains references that point
to the required input data. Predefined values of input data or preconditions can be expressed
with semantic rules. In this way, this allows automatic creation of (web) forms and interactive
validation of input data. [13] According to the authors, the development of new applications and
projects begins with modeling the ontology. When modeling the ontology, the authors used two
types of classes and subclasses, by introducing the following assumptions:
Each class that contains a subclass is seen as an abstract class;
Each class that does not contain a subclass is considered a realistic class (the basis for the
creation of form);
Electronic services accept only the instances of realistic classes as input data.
The presented rules and ways of modeling ontologies, according to the authors of [9], allow
the unambiguous identification of e-Government services. The authors of [10] proposed the use
of algorithm for the direct transformation from OWL to relational data structures. The authors
of [11] also dealt with these problems. The basic idea is to transform the created ontology with
the help of the transformation tools in the DLL script and thus preserve all relations, constraints,
and information about the domain. DLL script is used to generate a relational database. Au-
thors of [14] proposes a feasible implementation of a multi-agent environment which makes use of
ontologies and ontology mapping to achieve semantic interoperability. Authors use an ontology
model to facilitate semantic interoperability in a simulated multi-agent environment. The Au-
thors in [16] exploits different semantic web technologies and builds a prototype of semantic web
mash up functionality based on combination of RDF/OWL with SQWRL. The main scope is to
improve decision-making processes. Sugumaran and Storey present a heuristics-based method
for developing and creating ontologies [17]. They identify all the basic terms; this is done by
using use cases and then revising synonyms and related terms manually or by an online the-
saurus. In the next step they identify the relationships among these terms. They define three
types of relationships: generalization, synonyms and associations. Generalization corresponds
to an is-a-relationship. This paper will present the methodology of ontology construction and
annotation of state development funds.
3 Creating an ontology
This section presents a method aimed at building an ontological model of state development
funds. The basic administrative activities that are common to all development funds in APV
264 S. Arsovski, B. Markoski, P. Pecev, N. Petrovački, D. Lacmanović
are as follows: Registration of participants of the competition, Analysis of the submitted doc-
umentation, Risk Assessment of funds placement, The decision on funds placement, and Type
of placement. It is noticeable that the administrative activities are almost identical for all state
development funds, regardless of the type of fund and type of placement. The authors in [12]
propose the following four-level typology of administrative activities of public administration:
Identification-identification of types of services offered to end users:
1. Specifications specifying administrative procedures and documents for the identified type
of service;
2. Interaction specifying a communication protocol for the identified type of service (for
example, signing a contract);
3. Transaction the realization of services (for example, issuing guarantees for loan).
This typology can be applied to state development funds. An important role in the develop-
ment of ontology represents the conceptualization and organization of knowledge. The task of
conceptualization is to transform informal knowledge into an ontological concept with the help
of professionals in their field of ontology modeling. Figure 1 shows a simplified model of the
activities of state development funds. [7]
Figure 1: A simplified model of the activities of state development funds
Ontological descriptions of the administrative activities are generally applicable to all gov-
ernment development funds. Below is a detailed description of the ontological model of the
Guarantee Fund of APV (GFAPV OM), which defines the administrative procedures and tasks.
3.1 Ontological model of the GFAPV
The public administration aspects given in [2] were taken as the basis for the creation of
concepts in OM GFAPV. Ontology of public administration in [2] consists of two parts. In the
first part of the ontology, two aspects are defined:
1. A structural aspect of public administration in which administrative units and their hi-
erarchical relationship are described where hierarchical relationships between the administrative
units were presented with properties (belongs to and supervised by).
2. The textual aspect of ontology describes the documents that appear as a product of the
administrative units described in the structural aspect of the ontology. The textual aspect is
presented in the ontology with four main classes as follows:
1. Administrative documents -presented as a product of administrative units;
2. Civil documents -all types of documents that people create and fill out in the course of
communication with public administration;
3. The legal texts -the laws and secondary legislation;
Advantages of Using an Ontological Model of the State Development Funds 265
4. Court decisions -decisions related to administrative actions and decisions of the Supreme
Court.
In the second part of the ontology given in [2], both the procedural and service aspects are
presented.
The procedural aspect of public administration ontology is presented as an extension (spe-
cialization) of OWL-S. The basic concepts of procedural aspects are tasks, procedures and full
procedures. Tasks are atomic actions that cannot be further broken down and are executed by an
administrative unit. Each task has input data that needs to be filled by the system administrator
or worker. The result of executing the task is an administrative act. A procedure contains at
least one informative task (i.e. it tries to find or notify some information from/to another unit)
and only one executive task (i.e. it produces a single act). Thus, the procedures are composed
of one or more tasks. Each task is executed within a framework of procedure. Full procedure
represents a number of procedures intertwined. A full procedure may reflect to the provision of
a service to one or several entities (property providedTo). Procedures may be sequential or in
an acyclic graph. In this ontology, the control constructs of OWL-S are adopted. When defining
the ontological model of OM GFAPV, the following elements of the domain were analyzed:
1. Participants. This aspect corresponds to the structural aspect of the model [2]. It
represents internal funds structure and its position within the public administration, as well as
actors who perform tasks defined in the business process and external participants to the process.
2. Documents. This part, which corresponds to the text aspect of the model [2], represents
administrative acts appearing during the execution of tasks within business processes.
3. The business process logic, which corresponds to the procedural aspect of the model [2], is
defined by business rules and operating procedures of the business system (state credit guarantee
funds).
4. Electronic services are the services invoked in order to execute procedures implementing
business process logic.
In the case of OM GFAPV, administrative procedures are defined as ontology concepts.
Communication between administrative procedures and services is presented as atomic process.
In the case of OM GFAPV each service belongs to only one procedure that is defined in the
ontology. Services are described by service profile properties. The generalization (superclass-of)
and specialization (subclass-of) of ontological concepts is represented by the taxonomy of the
main concepts of the ontology of the Guarantee Fund of AP Vojvodina.
3.2 The taxonomy of the concept Participants
By this concept, all participants in procedures are represented. The concept Participants is
shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Participants-ontological concept
Three subclasses of the Participants class are defined in this way: Financial-institutions,
Public- administration, Clients.
266 S. Arsovski, B. Markoski, P. Pecev, N. Petrovački, D. Lacmanović
The Financial-institutions concept
This ontological concept describes financial institutions that cooperate with the Guarantee
Fund as well as external participants in carrying out work procedures of the fund. Two groups
of financial institutions were identified: 1. State institutions ( The National Bank ), 2. The
Independent financial institutions (Commercial banks, Credit Bureau Association of Serbian
Banks). The properties of these concepts are SubClassof and haveService. The property SubClass
of describes the structural position of the concept, while the property haveService indicates the
existence of external services that are invoked during the execution of procedures.
The Public-administration concept
The classes described by the concept Public-administration represent the organizational struc-
ture of state administration in AP Vojvodina and the place and role of the Guarantee Fund of
APV in this organizational structure.
The Fund concept The classes identified in the taxonomy of the Fund are, as follows:
Managing Board, Fund director, Professional Service, Administrative Office, Commission for the
issuance of guarantees.
The Clients concept
The classes described by the concept Clients represent participants who are allowed to apply
to Fund open competition. The classes identified in the taxonomy are: Legal entity and Natural
person
3.3 The Documents concept
The concept Documents is created by analyzing all of the documents identified in the Guar-
antee Fund of APV. Figure 3 shows the taxonomy of the Documents concept.
Figure 3: Taxonomy of the Documents ontological concept
Three groups of documents were identified: Administrative acts, Planning acts, and General
acts.
Advantages of Using an Ontological Model of the State Development Funds 267
The Administrative-act concept
As defined above, administrative documents are the product of administrative tasks within
business procedures. Semantic descriptions of documents that have been identified as a result of
the execution of administrative tasks are given below. If we look at the documents as a product
of administrative tasks in the case of the Guarantee Fund of APV, the following documents that
appear as a result of the execution of administrative tasks in the business process of issuing a
guarantee can be identified:
The application document to Open Competition;
The proposals document to the Commission for the issuance of guarantees;
The decision proposal document for the Board;
The decision document of the Board;
The contract document to issue guarantees.
The document of guarantees Administrative-act concept is a subclass of the Documents
concept. In addition, it is associated with the property Producedby that describes it in terms
of administrative procedure which produces the document of Administrative-act type, and the
property FillBy which determines the entity from the Participants taxonomy who fills out a
pre-defined form of the document of Administrative-act type.
The Planning-act concept
Documents belonging to this group are created each year. This group includes the following
documents: Work program, and Open Competition text. Apart from their property SubClass of
which defines hierarchical relations among documents, they are associated with properties that
describe them in terms of creation and approval:
Createdby defines the entity from the Participants taxonomy that created the document.
Acceptedby defines the entity from the Participants taxonomy that approved the document.
The General-acts concept
The documents that determine the legal framework of the fund belong to this group. In the
case of the Guarantee Fund of APV, these are the following documents: The Establishment
Decision, The Statute, The Fund Business Rules, and The Fund Code of Conduct. Apart
from their property SubClass of which defines hierarchical relations among documents, they
are associated with properties that describe them in terms of creation and approval:
Createdby defines the entity from the Participants taxonomy that created the document.
Acceptedby defines the entity from the Participants taxonomy that approved the document.
3.4 Procedures concept
The Procedures concept represents taxonomy of the administrative procedures of the fund.
This taxonomy is created based on operational procedures for issuing guarantees and procedures
relating to the creation of planning acts of the fund. In addition, the taxonomy contains proce-
dures related to utilization of the documents that define legal and regulative framework of funds
within the state administration. The taxonomy is shown on Figure 4.
The taxonomy of the Procedures concept consists of following classes: Planning-procedures,
Operative-procedures.
268 S. Arsovski, B. Markoski, P. Pecev, N. Petrovački, D. Lacmanović
Figure 4: The Procedures taxonomy
Planning-procedures concept
This concept describes the procedures aimed at planning annual activities of the Fund. The
outputs of these procedures are various documents that contain activities to be performed in
a calendar year and related financial resources. The following procedures have been identified:
Creating an annual work plan document, and Creating an open competition document. The
properties of classes describe these procedures:
SubClass of identifies the structural position of the concept within the Procedures taxonomy.
HaveOutputDoc -identifies the document that results from performing general administrative
procedures.
PerformedBy -identifies the perpetrators of the procedure.
GeneralActsReferenced identifies all General-Act concepts, which are legal/regulative basis
for the created planning document.
Operative-procedures concept
Basis for creating the Operative-procedures ontological concept are: Task, Procedure, and
Full Procedure as defined in [2]. Each task is executed within a Procedure. Each task has input
data that an administrative worker or system should fill out and the result of the execution of
the task is an administrative act. The Procedure contains only one task with the corresponding
input and output data, which is filled out by an administrative worker or system. Full-Procedure
is composed of one or more procedures, while Operative- procedure is composed of one or more
tasks. In the case of the Guarantee Fund of APV, the Full-Procedure is the procedure of is-
suing the guarantee. Analyzing Operative-procedures concept the following classes are iden-
tified: Application-Processing, Committee-Preparation, Committee-Decision, Board-Decision,
Contract-Generation, and Guarantee-Generation. Figure 5. depicts Application-Processing
class, and properties and relations of the Operative-procedures concept.
Services that call the specified Operative-procedures during their execution are presented by
their profiles (Pservice-A-P, etc.). Communication between these procedures and the service can
be defined as an atomic process since the action of the service can be performed in a single
interaction with the service.
Advantages of Using an Ontological Model of the State Development Funds 269
Figure 5: Properties and relations of the Operative-procedures concept
3.5 The Services concept
Classes of internal and external services that are invoked for executing the work procedures
of issuing guarantees are described in this taxonomy. The following classes are defined: Inter-
nalServices and ExternalServices. Internal Services are the services that are provided by the
Fund, while External services are those that are provided by third parties like banks, other ad-
ministrative bodies, etc. Both have same properties SubClass of and availableOn. The property
SubClass identifies the structural position of the concept within the Services taxonomy, while
the property availableOn indicates service provider URI. Members of the class InternalServices
(Service-A-P, Service-C-P, etc.) are presented by the PresentedBy property. This property
points to the service profile that presents the service and the operational procedure that uses
this electronic service.
4 The semantics of the administrative task
As described above, in our model, an Operative-procedure is composed of one or more tasks.
We call these tasks Administrative tasks. Figure 6 shows the ontological representation of an
Administrative task.
Figure 6: Ontological representation of an Administrative task
Each class and subclass of the ontology within the concept of the Operative-procedures
has input data. Properties dataProperties describe input data of each Operative-procedures
class. An administrative worker or service fills input data into pre-defined Document template(s)
corresponding to an Administrative task. Document template is an active document that contains
a code aimed at invoking a service presented by InternalServices profile. It serves as a starting
point for a new document creation. Individuals of each Operative-procedures class represent
corresponding service and corresponding document template that are filled with input data
during the execution of an administrative task. Result of an Administrative task execution is a
270 S. Arsovski, B. Markoski, P. Pecev, N. Petrovački, D. Lacmanović
custom administrative act Output document (one or more in general, because the ontology allows
it). Output documents of an administrative task have their corresponding Object Properties.
These properties describe all relations between an Administrative task and concepts Documents
(Producedby, FillBy) and Participants (Performedby). Figure 7 shows the ontological model of
the administrative task aimed at processing applications on open competition.
Figure 7: Ontological model of the Administrative task
Semantics of an administrative task can be described as follows: The procedure Application-
processing is executed by the Administrative-Office. The document application-document-to-
Open-Competition is the result of the execution of Application-processing procedure. The pro-
cedure for application processing has a unique document template TxtApplication. The ser-
vice profile Pservice-A-P describes the electronic service invoked by the procedure Application-
processing.
4.1 Application of the ontology of administrative task
The annotation of the ontology with elements of user interface is based on the rule that
administrative tasks have input data. As shown in Figure 7, input data is a series of variables
that are filled with the resulting document template of the administrative task. The names of
the input data are represented with dataProperties of the observed task. The descriptions of
input data are defined in dataProperties isDefinedBy property in the following form:
Component_type...(Type of the UI /database component )
data_type.(Data Type (string), (integer))
X.(Component index order on the form)
.(Label of the Component)
unique_name(Unique name of the defined Component)
Individuals of each class denote the template of the document that is filled with input data
The feature Data-Properties-assertion references a document that represents the template.
Data-Properties-ID defines the order of execution of the administrative procedures and/or
tasks.
An algorithm for a direct transformation of the semantic description of the administrative
task in the user interface components is shown in Figure 8.
Advantages of Using an Ontological Model of the State Development Funds 271
Figure 8: Transformation ontology into user interface
Module for semantic content transformation: The requirement set in the introductory section
of this paper is that the created ontology should enable automatic generation of information sys-
tem components. The basis of this procedure is the transformation of the created Administrative
Task ontology represented in OWL format in two XML documents witch enable creation of the
user interface. The module for transformation of semantic content represents the application that
loads the created ontology and executes SPARQL queries. Parsing the query results generates
two XML documents (OntoClass, OntoForm).
Administrative tasks sorted in the order of execution within the administrative process are
presented by a Tree View component. For each administrative task, it is necessary to load the
descriptions of the components of the information system from the property DataProperty -
isDefinedBy.
The first XML document is a representation of classes and subclasses of the ontological con-
cept Procedure that represents an ontological description of the administrative business processes.
OntoClass.xml is an XML document, which represents a workflow of the defined administrative
procedures. The second XML document represents components that are extracted from the se-
mantic description of the administrative task. As shown in Figure 8, our model proposes the
application of ontologies for the representation of administrative processes defined in workflows
and extraction of information system components from the generated ontology. Figure 9 shows
the user interface of the module for the transformation of semantic content.
The module for semantic content transformation provides the following functions:
Selection and loading of the desired ontology;
Entering the names of basic classes of the ontology that describe the tasks of the business
process;
Generating the first XML document;
Entering the name of an administrative procedure for which it is necessary to generate user
interface components;
Generating the second XML document;
Generating user interface for the selected administrative task.
As described, annotating administrative task ontology with user interface components, enable
automatic creation of the User Interface for each procedure defined in the ontology. Depending on
the application, the appropriate XSL file provides mechanisms of transformation and formatting
OntoForm.xml and OntoClass.xml documents into user interface components.
Ontological representation of the administrative task contains the resulting document tem-
plate of a selected task. Listing 1 displays the SPARQL queries by which we extract the name
of the resulting document template of the chosen procedure.
272 S. Arsovski, B. Markoski, P. Pecev, N. Petrovački, D. Lacmanović
Figure 9: The module for semantic content transformation
Listing 1. Query code for the template extraction
PREFIX xsd:
PREFIX rdfs:
PREFIX owl:
PREFIX gf:
PREFIX rdfs:
PREFIX rdf:
SELECT ?x ?y WHERE {
?x rdf:type gf:Adm_Task_1
?x gf:DocTxt ?y
}
4.2 Using document templates
Each administrative task has exactly two ontological individuals: a corresponding service
and a corresponding document template to be filled with input data during the execution of
the administrative task thus generating the final document of this administrative task. IT and
legal experts are responsible for creating document templates and corresponding electronic ser-
vices based on the semantic annotation of the administrative task. An example of executing
Application-processing procedure, which illustrates the flexibility of the administrative task rep-
resentation achieved by the proposed administrative task semantic description and use of docu-
ment templates, is shown in sequel:
When a user select desired administrative task (on the generated user interface Application-
processing Figure 10) and fill out all the required fields, corresponding service generate document
template shown on Figure 10. Document template acquires application data from the generated
User Interface and enable generation of the final administrative act.
Advantages of Using an Ontological Model of the State Development Funds 273
Figure 10: Functionality of the created document template
5 Conclusion
eGovernment solutions represent a major challenge in redefining the role of public adminis-
tration agencies and organizations. Creating and using ontologies of knowledge of administrative
processes and modeling and controling systems that would speed up and automate the work of
state administration, constitute prerequisites for technical and organizational interoperability of
different government agencies.
The proposed method reduces development time and effort in order to meet the demands of
the information system based on knowledge of the administrative processes and documents. In
this paper, we presented a methodology for ontology creation and annotation utilized to describe
knowledge of the administrative task.
In this paper, we have proposed an ontological model of state development funds. The
proposed model enables document templates creation, which are the framework for the automatic
generation of an administrative act as a result of the administrative procedures execution. The
proposed approach is verified by a case study of building an ontological model for the Guarantee
Fund of APV. When defining the ontological model of OM GFAPV, the following elements of
the domain were analyzed:
1 Participants, represents internal funds structure and its position within the public ad-
ministration, as well as actors who perform tasks defined in the business process and external
participants to the process;
2 Documents, represents administrative acts appearing during the execution of tasks within
business processes;
3 The business process logic, is defined by business rules and operating procedures of the
business system (state credit guarantee funds);
4 Electronic services are services that are invoked in order to execute procedures implementing
business process logic.
The generalization (superclass-of) and specialization (subclass-of) of ontological concepts are
represented by the taxonomy of the main concepts of the ontology of the Guarantee Fund of AP
Vojvodina. An atomic process presents communication between administrative procedures and
services. In the case of OM GFAPV, each service belongs to only one procedure that is defined
in the ontology. Services are described by service profile properties. Following the proposed
ontology, semantics of an administrative task is described in details. Finally, an example illus-
trating usage of the proposed ontology for implementation of Application-processing procedure
is presented. Further research should focus on the development of ontologies of administrative
274 S. Arsovski, B. Markoski, P. Pecev, N. Petrovački, D. Lacmanović
processes within the domain of state bodies. Such ontologies could serve for fast and efficient
creation of interoperable eGovernment applications.
Acknowledgement
This work was partially supported by the Serbian Ministry of Education and Sciences (Grant
No: 171039).
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