Extracting linked data from statistic spreadsheets

Abstract

Statistic data is an important sub-category of open data; it is interesting for many applications, including but not limited to data journalism, as such data is typically of high quality, and reflects (under an aggregated form) important aspects of a society's life such as births, immigration, economy etc. However, such open data is often not published as Linked Open Data (LOD) limiting its usability. We provide a conceptual model for the open data comprised in statistics published by INSEE, the national French economic and societal statistics institute. Then, we describe a novel method for extracting RDF LOD, to populate an instance of this model. We used our method to produce RDF data out of 20k+ Excel spreadsheets, and our validation indicates a 91% rate of successful extraction.