An Ontology based Framework for E-Government Regulatory Requirements Compliance

E-Government has gained an enormous amount of attention by researchers and practitioners interested in digitizing the public sector through enacting policies and regulations. Compliance of regulatory requirements from these policies and regulations is an important requirement in e-Government service development projects. However, the concepts of regulatory requirements compliance are still scattered around in developing e-Government services. This article presents an e-Government regulatory requirement compliance (eGRRC) ontology framework that describes the interrelated concepts of regulatory requirements compliance in e-Government service development. The proposed eGRRC ontology is then applied on the recently introduced general data protection regulation (GDPR) for personal data processing across European Union (EU) countries, in order to indicate how the concepts can be mapped to the defined entities. The contribution of this article is on introducing a framework for researchers and practitioners to explore regulatory requirements compliance and their interrelationships in e-Government service development. Furthermore, e-Government legislation can accordingly be modeled using on the eGRRC ontology, that serves as basis for queries to infer knowledge about the source of regulatory requirements, objectives of the regulation, various types of requirements, the services affected, orientation of regulatory rules in requirements, priorities, and amendments of regulations in e-Government service development.