DisGover is a joint project of OFFIS and KDO (Zweckverband Kommunale Datenverarbeitung Oldenburg) with the goal to improve the accessibility of information in government for inquiry offices. A common problem today is that relevant information on questions like „What do I have to do when I want to start an enterprise?“ is scattered to many different places and data sources. This can e.g. be an unstructured website of a small town or structured directories which display information according to organizational structures present in government. For inquiry offices, it is extremely difficult to find relevant information in these different data sources in order to quickly give correct answers to inquiring persons.

DisGover aims at coping with these demands by first analyzing, structuring and integrating relevant data sources, and secondly providing domain-specific user interfaces for making this information accessible. Besides being able to search for a specific piece of information it is also important to provide a way to easily navigate to semantically similar or complementing information.

OpenText’s SemanticNavigation technology could help in achieving these goals. SemanticNavigation overcomes the traditional search engine paradigm of giving a list of relevant results for a specific query by additionally providing connections to semantically related information, which was not explicitly queried, but can potentially help answering the initial question. We believe that these semantic interlinks could also help to better and faster answer questions in the government domain. Thus, it would be very interesting to apply the SemanticNavigation system to a limited set of government related websites and to study how and if this concept can improve semantic searches in the government domain in contrast to traditional web search engines.