The article reviews the role of virtual communities as a knowledge management mechanism to support e‐government in developing countries. It explores the need for knowledge management in e‐government, identifies knowledge management technologies, and highlights the challenges for developing countries in the implementation of e‐government and especially knowledge management solutions. It further assesses the feasibility of this and other knowledge management mechanisms in light of the financial and technological limitations of developing countries. The article suggests that knowledge management is needed to facilitate information exchange and transaction processing with citizens, as well as to enable inter‐government knowledge sharing and integration. It concludes that simple knowledge management solutions, and especially virtual communities, will be the most appropriate for developing countries, while enterprise solutions are not suitable.
E-government webs are among the largest webs in existence, based on the size, number of users and number of information providers. Thus, creating a Semantic Web infrastructure to meaningfully organise e-government webs is highly desirable. At the same time, the complexity of the existing e-government implementations also challenges the feasibility of Semantic Web creation. We therefore propose the design of a two-layer semantic Wiki web, which consists of a content Wiki, largely identical to the traditional web and a semantic layer, also maintained within the Wiki, that describes semantic relationships. This architectural design promises several advantages that enable incremental growth, collaborative development by a large community of non-technical users and the ability to continually grow the content layer without the immediate overhead of parallel maintenance of the semantic layer. This paper explains current challenges to the development of a Semantic Web, identifies Wiki advantages, illustrates a potential solution and summarises major directions for further research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.