Personalized Access to Multi-Version Documents for E-Government Applications

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of two prototype systems for the efficient management of multi-version XML documents in an e-Government scenario. The application aim is to enable citizens to access personalized versions of resources, like norm texts and information made available on the Web by public administrations. In the first system developed, four temporal dimensions (validity, efficacy, transaction and publication times) were used to represent the evolution of norms in time and their resulting versioning and a “stratum” approach was used for its implementation on top of an object-relational DBMS. Recently, the multi-version management system has migrated to a different architecture (“native” approach) based on a multi-version XML query processor developed on purpose. Moreover, a new semantic dimension has been added to the versioning mechanism, in order to represent applicability of norms to different classes of citizens according to their digital identity. Classification of citizens is based on the management of an ontology with the deployment of semantic Web techniques. Preliminary experiments showed an encouraging performance improvement with respect to the “stratum” approach and a good scalability behavior. This work has been supported by the MIUR-PRIN Project: “The European citizen in e-Governance: philosophical-juridical, legal, information and economic profiles”.