Linked Data: A Framework for Publishing FiveStar Open Government Data

Abstract

With the increased adoption of open government initiatives around the world, a huge amount of governmental raw datasets was released. However, the data was published in heterogeneous formats and vocabularies and in many cases in bad quality due to inconsistency, messy, and maybe incorrectness as it has been collected by practicalities within the source organization, which makes it inefficient for reusing and integrating it for serving citizens and third-party apps. This research introduces the LDOG (Linked Data for Open Government) experimental framework, which aims to provide a modular architecture that can be integrated into the open government hierarchy, allowing huge amounts of data to be gathered in a fine-grained manner from source and directly publishing them as linked data based on Tim Berners lee’s five-star deployment scheme with a validation layer using SHACL, which results in high quality data. The general idea is to model the hierarchy of government and classify government organizations into two types, the modeling organizations at higher levels and data source organizations at lower levels. Modeling organization’s experts in linked data have the responsibility to design data templates, ontologies, SHACL shapes, and linkage specifications. whereas non-experts can be incorporated in data source organizations to utilize their knowledge in data to do mapping, reconciliation, and correcting data. This approach lowers the needed experts that represent a problem of linked data adoption. To test the functionality of our framework in action, we developed the LDOG platform which utilizes the different modules of the framework to power a set of user interfaces that can be used to publish government datasets. we used this platform to convert some of UAE's government datasets into linked data. Finally, on top of the converted data, we built a proof-of-concept app to show the power of five-star linked data for integrating datasets from disparate organizations and to promote the governments' adoption. Our work has defined a clear path to integrate the linked data into open governments and solid steps to publishing and enhancing it in a fine-grained and practical manner with a lower number of experts in linked data, It extends SHACL to define data shapes and convert CSV to RDF.