Semi-automatic Framework for Generating RDF Dataset from Open Data

The paper addresses the "timeliness" of data in open government data (OGD) portals. It is one of the primary principles of open data, which is considered to be a success factor, while at the same time it is one of the biggest barriers that can disrupt users trust in data and even the desire to use the entire open data portal. However, assessing this aspect is a very difficult task that, in most cases, becomes an impossible for open data users. There is therefore a lack of comparative studies on the timeliness of data of different national open data portals. Unfortunately, 2020 gave the opportunity to find out this. It became easy enough to compare how long is the data path from the data holder to the OGD portal by analysing the timeliness of Covid-19-related data sets in relation to the first case observed in a country. The study thus fills the gap of comparative studies by addressing 60 countries and their OGD portals concerning the timeliness of the data, providing a report on how much and what countries provide the open data as quickly as possible. It makes it possible to understand how quickly OGD portals react to emergencies by opening and updating data for their further potential reuse, which is essential in the digital data-driven world.

A longitudinal cross-sector analysis of open data portal service capability: The case of Australian local governments

In the era of government 3.0, the availability of open government-owned public data and data sharing with the private sector are important. We surveyed the status of public data openness in the healthcare domain and of compliance with the standard open data format based on the “5 stars of linked data” model. We examined healthcare data on the Open Data Portal (https://www.data.go.kr). We also surveyed data on the websites of the public institutions and state administrative agencies that provided healthcare data on the Portal. In terms of data on the Portal, all public institutions except the National Medical Center, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, and the Korea Environment Corporation were found to have provided data in the 3-stars format corresponding to the Public Data Open Standard Maintenance Guide. All data provided by state administrative agencies met the 3-stars format. Only 2 institutions (the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service and the Korea Health Industry Development Institute) released data in the 3-stars format on their websites. Among the major state administrative agencies providing data on the Portal, none released data in the 3-stars format on their websites. Government-owned data should be provided in a standard format both on the Open Data Portal and on data-holders' websites to facilitate communication and collaboration. Considering the huge potential of linked healthcare data from a single national health insurance system, providing open data in compliance with the standard open format will promote the opening and sharing of public data.

The era of digitalization requires an innovative and accountable government. Tangerang Regency has a variety of applications that are realized to accelerate services and good governance as a whole. One of them is through open government data, which is easily accessible by any party to achieve a goal, namely transparency and disclosure of information. The purpose of this study is to determine the level of digital literacy of the community and the extent of their use of the open data portal. This research uses a mixed method with quantitative analysis using a Likert scale. The population and sample of the study were the people of Tangerang district aged between 18 and 60 years old, domiciled in Tangerang, and had used the district's open data portal. The results of this study indicate that although most people in Tangerang district have relatively high digital literacy skills, they still do not fully utilize this tool in the context of using the open data portal. This is due to several factors such as lack of public awareness, socialization from the government, and features that are not fully optimized.

Governments worldwide have been releasing their owned data recently for public usage and arising lots of novel applications and services. Issues on open data were also intensively discussed from researchers and practitioners. One of the key issues in adopting open data is the accessibility of the data, which are generally collectively provided in open data portals. Open data portals categorize open datasets according to their domains, providers, formats, and other properties for better accessibility of the data. However, these portals did not follow a conforming standard in establishing their categorization structures. In this work, we try to assess the goodness of categorization structures of open data portals automatically by investigating the coherence of the datasets in the same category. The detailed methodology is described but preliminary experiments on Taiwan’s open data portals are still undergoing.

Open data portals are web services that serve as a central access point for all government-published open data and can exist at local, regional, national, and international levels. They are an important element of most open data initiatives that have enabled a large amount of government data to be widely available. However, data quantity and quality are not the only aspects that should be considered when publishing data. To improve the reusability of data and to achieve greater impact and benefits from open data, it is important to consider user-oriented aspects of the portal management, discovery, and use of data (e.g., organizing the portal in a user-centric way, providing accurate metadata, using a standardized and open data format, etc.). In this paper, we adopted the metrics proposed by the European Commission to assess compliance of the Croatian Open Data Portal with 10 user-oriented principles that open data portals should implement in terms of sustainability and added value. While the results show the government’s efforts in publishing data, some aspects such as better collaboration with data providers and other data portals, offering different visualization tools, etc. need to be improved to achieve active use and impact.

Chapter 7 - Open data portals for urban sustainable development: People, policies, and technology

Many applications and use cases which consume Open Data rely on up-to-date information. However, scarcely any major Open Data portal provides the users with tangible onhow current the data sources are. In order to create a freshnessmetrics that would solve the mentioned issues, we need to i) learnthe change history of a data source and ii) apply a heuristic toestimate how up-to-date a data source is. The following paperassesses which information about the change behaviour of adata source in an Open Data portal are available to derivesuch a change history. In addition, the paper examines andevaluates different freshness estimation heuristics and establishesa freshness metric for Open Data sources.

Purpose The purpose of this exploratory study is to provide modern local governments with potential use cases for their open data, in order to help inform related future policies and decision-making. The concrete context was that of the Växjö municipality located in southeastern Sweden. Design/methodology/approach The methodology was two-fold: 1) a survey of potential end users (n=151) from a local university; and, 2) analysis of survey results using a theoretical model regarding local strategies for implementing open government data. Findings Most datasets predicted to be useful were on: sustainability and environment; preschool and school; municipality and politics. The use context given is primarily research and development, informing policies and decision making; but also education, informing personal choices, informing citizens and creating services based on open data. Not the least, the need for educating target user groups on data literacy emerged. A tentative pattern comprising a technical perspective on open data and a social perspective on open government was identified. Research limitations In line with available funding, the nature of the study was exploratory and implemented as an anonymous web-based survey of employees and students at the local university. Further research involving (qualitative) surveys with all stakeholders would allow for creating a more complete picture of the matter. Practical implications The study determines potential use cases and use contexts for open government data, in order to help inform related future policies and decision-making. Originality/value Modern local governments, and especially in Sweden, are faced with a challenge of how to make their data open, how to learn about which types of data will be most relevant for their end users and what will be different societal purposes. The paper contributes to knowledge that modern local governments can resort to when it comes to attitudes of local citizens to open government data in the context of an open government data perspective.

With more and more applications providing semantic data to improve interoperability, the amount of available RDF datasets is constantly increasing. The SPARQL query language is a W3C recommendation to provide query capabilities on such RDF datasets. Data integration from different RDF sources is up to now mostly task of RDF consuming clients. However, from a functional perspective, data integration boils down to a function application that consumes input data as parameters, and based on these, produces a new set of data as output. Following this notion, we introduce SPARQ\(\lambda \), an extension to the SPARQL 1.1 query language. SPARQ\(\lambda \) enables dynamic injection of RDF datasets during evaluation of the query, and by this lifts SPARQL to a tool to write templates for RDF producing functions, an important step to reduce the effort to write SPARQL queries that work on data from various sources. SPARQ\(\lambda \) is moreover suitable to directly translate to an RDF described Web service interface, which allows to lift integration of data and re-provisioning of integrated results from clients to cloud environments, and by this solving the bottleneck of RDF data integration on client side.

In July 2011, the Kenyan Government became the twenty-second government worldwide and the second in Africa to release many of its data sets in an open and reusable format on the Open Kenya portal. This open data portal has presented great opportunities to develop applications, especially on the mobile platform. There have been, however, challenges in engaging the technical and industry experts in conversations around the open data. We are conducting an ethnographic study on an experiment that brings together subject matter experts in the Water, Education, Transport, and Local County sectors, together with open data evangelists and software developers to guide them through a design thinking approach to identifying, idea-ting, and prototyping open data applications. The main objective of this study is to identify best practices in increasing open data consumption through scalable mass appeal mobilization and civic engagement tools and applications.

Enticing users into exploring Open Data remains an important challenge for the whole Open Data paradigm. Standard stock interfaces often used by Open Data portals are anything but inspiring even for tech-savvy users, let alone those without an articulated interest in data science. To address a broader range of citizens, we designed an open data search interface supporting natural language interactions via popular platforms like Facebook and Skype. Our data-aware chatbot answers search requests and suggests relevant open datasets, bringing fun factor and a potential of viral dissemination into Open Data exploration. The current system prototype is available for Facebook (https://m.me/OpenDataAssistant) and Skype (https://join.skype.com/bot/6db830ca-b365-44c4-9f4d-d423f728e741) users.

There has recently been an increase in the number of RDF knowledge bases published on the Internet. These rich RDF data sets can be useful in answering many queries, but much more interesting queries can be answered by integrating data from different data sets. This has given rise to research on automatically linking different RDF data sets representing different knowledge bases. This is challenging due to the scale and semantic heterogeneity of these data sets. Various approaches have been proposed, but there is room for improving the quality of the generated links. In this demonstration, we showcase ALEX, a system that aims at improving the quality of links between RDF data sets by using feedback provided by users on the answers to linked data queries. ALEX starts with multiple RDF data sets that are linked using any automatic linking algorithm. ALEX enables the user to issue queries that integrate data from different data sets, and to provide feedback on the answers to these queries. ALEX uses this feedback to eliminate incorrect links between the data sets and discover new links. In this demonstration, we show ALEX in action on multiple data sets from the Linked Open Data cloud.

Abstract. Access, availability, and general interest in open data have increased significantly over the past decade. Open data can be published by various organizations and individuals, with public organizations being the largest producers of open data. Despite governments' efforts to publish a large number of high value datasets on open data portals, data reuse is still not satisfactory because users often lack the technical skills required to reuse data. Research has shown that providing open-source software and tools can help solve this problem. Since statistical datasets are among the high-value datasets and their visualization on a map can help in decision-making, this research explores the possibilities of using the Eurostat-map.js library, a novel JavaScript tool, to enable non-specialized users (e.g., researchers, journalists, and citizens) to use Eurostat statistical data to create thematic maps. By analysing use cases that utilize the Eurostat-map.js library and exploring cartographic principles and techniques available for mapping official statistical data, this research addresses its capabilities, limitations, and opportunities for future development. Although the eurostat-map.js library aims to provide a user-friendly approach, it is important to note that non-specialist users may still face challenges in using the library due to their limited technical and cartographic expertise. Creating maps and effectively visualizing Eurostat data requires a certain level of technical skills and cartographic knowledge. Non-specialist users, such as researchers, statisticians, journalists, and government agency personnel, who do not have extensive experience in programming or cartography, may find it more difficult to use the library than specialists in these fields.

With the existence of open data, journalists have additional investigative tools to report on issues in the public interest and to hold the government to account. However, it remains outside the mainstream of journalism due to the limitation to access and work with data. The open data initiative in Indonesia has started since 2010. Adhering to UU No. 14 Tahun 2008 about Public Information Openness, Indonesia has implemented an open data portal, called Satu Data Indonesia in 2019. There are indeed a handful of studies that examine the implementation of open data portals in Indonesia. However, only a few studies have given attention to how data journalists are using these data and their perceptions about the quality of data provided by the government. This study uses a descriptive qualitative approach and collects data through semi-structured in-depth interviews. It is intended to see the process on how data journalists in Indonesia turn data to news stories. By studying Lokadata.id and Katadata.co.id, we found that data provided by the authority sources (government) are still the main sources for data journalists in Indonesia. Despite the fact that the quality of data is getting better, most journalists in this study argued that the government’s open data has not yet integrated and has no basic standard that is collectively used. Therefore, the verification process and data processing in each media is important. The most common ways that journalists use to verify the data are by exploring the raw data, contacting the institution that provided the data, and considering the reputation of the data sources. However, there is a tendency of data journalists to be passively relying on official sources and ‘hide behind’ the perceived credibility of their sources.