Open Government Data on the Web: A Semantic Approach

Abstract

Initiatives of making government data open are continuously gaining interest recently. While this presents immense benefits for increasing transparency, the problem is that the data are frequently offered in heterogeneous formats, missing clear semantics that clarify what the data describe. The data are displayed in ways, which are not always clearly understandable to a broad range of user communities that need to make informed decisions. We address these problems and propose an overall approach, in which raw statistical data independently gathered from the different government institutions are formally and semantically represented, based on an ontology that we present in this paper. We further introduce the approach deployed in publishing these data in alignment with Linked Data principles, as well as present the methods implemented to query single or combined dataset and visualize the results in understandable ways. The introduced approach enables data integration, leading to vast opportunities for information exchange, analysis on combined datasets, simplicity to create mashups, and exploration of innovative ways to use these data creatively.