Implementing Formalised Provenances to Enhance Administrative Ontologies

The need for clarity of processes and interoperability of administrative applications has led to the creation of ontologies about the administrative domain. However, there is a gap in terms of traceability of the concepts. Unlike other domains, governance and administration is more trusted, usable, and effective when the entities and activities can be authenticated and verified. This research introduces a formalised provenance approach to ascertain the origin of concepts such as process status, digital resources, and personnel within the administrative domain. Firstly, an existing administrative ontology is identified as a case study. Provenance points are extracted from the ontology such as process provenance, document provenance and personnel provenance. The knowledge for verifying these provenance points is outlined in plain language and then formalised using description logic. The description logics are then formatted using Web ontology language (owl). Finally, Competency questions are used to validate the provenance ontology using SPARQL query. This research is an extension of existing administrative ontologies by adding provenance, thereby increasing the level of quality and trust in administrative applications when they make use of the ontology. It also improves the level of data integrity when these administrative applications share data between each other.