Access to e-Government Services Employing Semantic Technologies

PRLog (Press Release) – e-ISOTIS (Information Society Open To ImpairmentS) participates in the European Project Access-eGov (Access to e-Government Services Employing Semantic Technologies) which is an IST project partially funded under the IST Programme of FP6 (eGovernment research). The consortium consists of eleven partners from five European countries: Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Egypt that will carry out the project between January 2006 and December 2008.

The main objective of Access-eGov is to increase the accessibility of public administration services for citizens and business users by supporting the interoperability among existing electronic and “traditional” government services.

With simple words, Access-eGov provides a solution whereby information about all government services registered in a system is available at each Access e-Gov “access mode”, which represents a clear added value from users’ perspective. On the other hand, in order to make an update of the provided government services easier, this information is kept in a distributed system, delegating the responsibility for registering a new e-service and later its update to providers of these services.

Both the service providers as well as its customers will benefit from such a transparent usage of eGov services, facilitating also further trans-national and transborder integration of various eGov services.

Special attention will be paid to the e-Inclusion criteria to guarantee that Access-eGov will be accessible also to disadvantaged groups of users, for which the system can be considerably beneficial. In this respect, e-ISOTIS will bring in their (web) accessibility expertise.

The functionality of the Access-eGov system will be demonstrated and evaluated through a number of distinct pilots in three European countries: Slovakia, Poland and Germany

The end users (citizens and businesses) of the services facilitated by the Access-eGov platform will be the main beneficiaries of this undertaking since there would be a better transparency in the existing government services, an “integration” of government services on the front-end side using the semantic web functionality and finally e-government services will become more accessible for disadvantaged groups such as people with disabilities and elderly.

e-ISOTIS (Information Society Open To ImpairmentS) is a non-profit making organisation founded in December 2002, working with People with Disabilities, Elderly, their spouses as well as members of the ICT (Information Communication Technology) community worldwide. Currently, its associated members represent 350.000 people with impairments, located in European countries.

e-ISOTIS’ scope is to ensure that People with Disabilities, Elderly and their families are fully involved in the preparations and activities in line with the slogan "nothing about people with disabilities without people with disabilities". By supporting People with Disabilities and Elderly, e-ISOTIS aims at assisting its members in overcoming the existing barriers and experiencing an Information Society that opens up new opportunities for development, prosperity and quality of life.

This press release was brought to you by e-ISOTIS (http://www.e-isotis.org)



For More Information, please contact:
Ms. Maria Aroni
e-ISOTIS
40 Klitaimnistras
Athens 131 22
Greece
Phone: +30 210 2693760
Fax: +30 210 2693775
www.accessegov.org.

Date of release: 09/7/2007