In recent years, online services have received considerable attention worldwide. One crucial online service during the coronavirus disease pandemic was e-governance. In which governments provides various services to their citizens using information and communication technology. However, the residents of Arab countries have faced numerous of obstacles and have not received the full benefits of e-governance. One of the main reasons is the absence of integration and information sharing. Therefore, in this study, a novel domain ontology for the Egyptian e-government has been proposed. The developed ontology can be used to solve a variety of interoperability problems. The development process starts with building ontology-driven conceptual model using OntoUML. It is one of the most used ontology-driven conceptual modeling languages. The proposed model is then converted to a computable web ontology via the Web Ontology Language. The resulted ontology is evaluated by the OntoMetrics quality metrics. Results are compared with the metrics collected from 20 e-government ontologies and proved that the proposed ontology has better understandability measurements.

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Ontologies provide a powerful method for representing, reusing, and sharing domain knowledge. They are extensively used in a wide range of disciplines, including artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering, biomedical informatics, and many more. For several reasons, developing domain ontologies is a challenging task. One of these reasons is that it is a complicated and time-consuming process. Multiple ontology development methodologies have already been proposed. However, there is room for improvement in terms of covering more activities during development (such as enrichment) and enhancing others (such as conceptualization). In this research, an enhanced ontology development methodology (ON-ODM) is proposed. Ontology-driven conceptual modeling (ODCM) and natural language processing (NLP) serve as the foundation of the proposed methodology. ODCM is defined as the utilization of ontological ideas from various areas to build engineering artifacts that improve conceptual modeling. NLP refers to the scientific discipline that employs computer techniques to analyze human language. The proposed ON-ODM is applied to build a tourism ontology that will be beneficial for a variety of applications, including e-tourism. The produced ontology is evaluated based on competency questions (CQs) and quality metrics. It is verified that the ontology answers SPARQL queries covering all CQ groups specified by domain experts. Quality metrics are used to compare the produced ontology with four existing tourism ontologies. For instance, according to the metrics related to conciseness, the produced ontology received a first place ranking when compared to the others, whereas it received a second place ranking regarding understandability. These results show that utilizing ODCM and NLP could facilitate and improve the development process, respectively.