A framework for linking open environmental data

The concept of open government has promoted several initiatives in order to progress in their implementation in different governmental agencies. Generally, implantation is carried out, in the first place, based on transparency and the opening of data, giving citizens relevant information about their community. Within that information, data about the rational use of natural resources and care of the environment can be found. In this context, and taking into account the ongoing analysis, it was discovered that, apart from the positive measures taken for the progress of the implantation, the main existing flaw is the possibility to link and relate the existing data in different data sources. The linking of data will allow for a closer analysis that can generate a wider context for information. This paper is based on a PhD thesis in process whose aim is to generate a framework that allows the linking and relationship of information related to the environment published in different open government portals.Instituto de Investigación en InformáticaInstituto de Investigación en Informátic

PaaS Cloud Service for Cost-Effective Harvesting, Processing and Linking of Unstructured Open Government Data

Selle projekti eesmärk on luua pilveteenus, mis võimaldaks struktueerimata avalike andmete töötlemist, selleks, et luua semantiline andmete (veebis olevatest dokumentidest leitud organisatsioonide, kohanimede ja isikunimede) ressursikirjeldusraamistiku - Resource Description Framework (RDF) - graaf, mis on ka masinloetav. Pilveteenus saab sisendiks veebiroomaja toodetud logifaili üle 3 miljoni reaga. Igal real on veebiaadress avalikule dokumendile, mis avatakse, loetakse ning kasutades - tööriista eestikeelsest tekstist nimeolemite leidmiseks- Estnltk-d, eraldatakse organisatsiooonide ja kohtade nimetused ja inimeste nimed. Seejärel lisatakse leitud nimed/nimetused RDF graafi, kasutades olemasolevat Pythoni teeki RDFlib. RDF graafis nimed/nimetused lingitakse nende veebiaadressidega, kus asub seda nime/nimetust sisaldav avalik dokument. Dokumendid arhiveeritakse lugemise hetkel neis olnud sisuga. Lisaks sisaldab teenus igakuist andmete ülekontrollimist, et tuvastada dokumentide muutusi ja vajadusel värskendada RDF graafe. Genereeritud RDF graafe kasutatakse SPARQL päringute tegemiseks, mida saavad teha kasutajad graafilise kasutajaliidese kaudu või masinad veebiteenust kasutades. Projekti oluline väljakutse on luua arhitektuur, mis töötleks andmeid võimalikult kiiresti, sest sisendfail on suur (test-logifailis on üle 3 miljoni rea, kus igal real olev URL võib viidata mahukale dokumendile). Selleks jooksutab teenus seal kus võimalik, protsesse paralleelselt, kasutades Google’i virtuaalmasinaid (Google Compute Engine) ja iga virtuaalmasina kõiki protsessoreid.The aim of this project is to develop a cloud platform service for transforming Open Government Data to Linked Open Government Data. This service receives log file, created by web crawler, with URLs (over 3000000) to some open document as an input. It then opens the document, reads its content and with using "Open source tools for Estonian natural language processing" (Estnltk), finds names of locations, organizations and people. Using Psython library "RDFlib", these names are added to the Resource Description Framework (RDF) graph, so that the names become linked to the URLs that refer to the documents. In order to archive current state of accessed document, this service downloads all processed documents. The service also enables monthly updates system of the already processed documents in order to generate new RDF relations if some of the documents have changed. Generated RDFs are publicly available and the service includes SPARQL endpoint for userss (graphical user interface) and machines (web services) for cost-effective querying of linked entities from the RDF files. An important challenge of this service is to speed up its performance, because the documents behind these 3+ billion URLs may be large. To achieve that, parallel processes are run where possible: using several virtual machines and all CPUs in a virtual machine. This is tested in Google Compute Engin

An Exploratory Empirical Assessment of Italian Open Government Data Quality With an eye to enabling linked open data

Context The diffusion of Linked Data and Open Data in recent years kept a very fast pace. However evidence from practitioners shows that disclosing data without proper quality control may jeopardize datasets reuse in terms of apps, linking, and other transformations. Objective Our goals are to understand practical problems experienced by open data users in using and integrating them and build a set of concrete metrics to assess the quality of disclosed data and better support the transition towards linked open data. Method We focus on Open Government Data (OGD), collecting problems experienced by developers and mapping them to a data quality model available in literature. Then we derived a set of metrics and applied them to evaluate a few samples of Italian OGD. Result We present empirical evidence concerning the common quality problems experienced by open data users when using and integrating datasets. The measurements effort showed a few acquired good practices and common weaknesses, and a set of discriminant factors among datasets. Conclusion The study represents the first empirical attempt to evaluate the quality of open datasets at an operational level. Our long-term goal is to support the transition towards Linked Open Government Data (LOGD) with a quality improvement process in the wake of the current practices in Software Qualit

Open Government Data (OGD) Publication as Linked Open Data (LOD): A Survey

Open Government Data (OGD) is a movement that has spread worldwide, enabling the publication of thousands of datasets on the Web, aiming to concretize transparency and citizen participatory governance. This initiative can create value by linking data describing the same phenomenon from different perspectives using the traditional Web and semantic web technologies. A framework of these technologies is linked data movement that guides the publication of data and their interconnection in a machine-readable means enabling automatic interpretation and exploitation. Nevertheless, Open Government Data publication as Linked Open Data (LOD) is not a trivial task due to several obstacles, such as data heterogeneity issues. Many works dealing with this transformation process have been published that need to be investigated thoroughly to deduce the general trends and the issues related to this field. The current work proposes a classification of existing methods dealing with OGD-LOD transformation and a synthesis study to highlight their main trends and challenges

Opening cities : open data in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Sao Paulo

The research is part of a broader project on the impact of Open Data policies in Developing Countries (ODDC). Each report seeks to identify how open government data (OGD) policies emerge, and explores the impacts of these policies. This paper provides an overview of the Open Government Data initiative in the City of Buenos Aires. “Buenos Aires Data” is the government data catalogue, which publishes datasets in digital reusable formats, and around which applications are built linking other events and activities such as transportation and culture. However, data types, usability and transparency are found to be limited

Perspectives on Digital Sustainability

This habilitation thesis presents perspectives on digital sustainability, a novel concept connecting digitalization with sustainability. It explains why digital artifacts such as software or data have to meet technical characteristics of quality, transparency, semantics and multiple locations in order to serve society in the long term. However, these requirements are just necessary but not sufficient preconditions to consider digital artifacts sustainable. Their associated ecosystem of businesses, governments, and individuals must also meet the legal and organizational characteristics of open license, shared tacit knowledge, participation, good governance, and diversified funding. And, finally, sustainable digital artifacts must lead to ecological, societal and economical benefits. This thesis statement is discussed in the introductory chapter of the habilitation. It connects and summarizes 13 refereed publications clustered in five perspectives on digital sustainability: In the first perspective, the path of defining the concept of digital sustainability is summarized. This part starts with a publication that introduced an initial set of characteristics for digital sustainability (Stuermer, 2014). The following article connects digital sustainability with digital preservation (Stuermer and Abu-Tayeh, 2016). These studies have eventually led to an extended publication in a sustainability journal elaborating the basic conditions of digital sustainability in detail (Stuermer et al., 2017a). The second perspective includes recent publications on open source software (OSS) research scrutinizing how patterns of digital sustainability are applied within the software development industry. One publication analyzes feature requests within the Eclipse OSS community (Heppler et al., 2016). The following article develops a maturity model of Inner Source, a special form of OSS development practices in an organization (Eckert et al., 2017). And one study in a computer science journal addresses different types of OSS governance by comparing independent and joint communities (Eckert et al., 2019). The next perspective focuses on the procurement of information technology (IT) which involves critical topics of knowledge management and governance related to digital sustainability. Analyzing data crawled from the Swiss public procurement platform Simap.ch exposes lock-in effects, outsourcing decisions as well as multisourcing within the software industry. One article in this perspective introduces the methodology and the dataset pointing out the high level of direct awards within the IT sector (Stuermer et al., 2017b). Another publication tests hypotheses on contract choice in regard to knowledge specificity and task scope (Krancher and Stuermer, 2018a). And one study explains multisourcing decisions using a large dataset on public procurement of IT in Switzerland (Krancher and Stuermer, 2018b). The subsequent perspective highlights open data and linked data as another form of sustainable digital artifacts. One publication proposes a framework permitting the measurement of the impact of open data (Stuermer and Dapp, 2016). Another article introduces linked open government data (LOGD), a kind of graph-structured open data stored in different kinds of platforms (Hitz-Gamper et al., 2019). The final perspective extends the phenomenon of open data into the area of governmental services. By linking the concepts of public governance and open government one article shows how transparency and participation are achieved with digital tools (Stuermer and Ritz, 2014). Another publication includes an empirical analysis of the FixMyStreet open government platform in Zurich called “Züri wie neu” using open data and a user survey to identify the motivation of citizens using this digital tool (Abu-Tayeh et al., 2018)

Is Corruption Influenced by Human Development Index and Transparency? A Global Spatial Assessment Using GIS

The intricacy of the construction practices sometimes causes the vague atmosphere between clients, partners, and providers, is one of the Achilles heels of infrastructure projects; this grounds the industry as the most inefficient, corrupted business in the world. Governments, in recent years, have made a significant positive effort on public transparency. E-government is an effective tool to execute the very subject. Not only e-government helps transparency, but also it provides openness, accountability, the participation of citizens, etc. By giving citizens access to the functionality of public organizations and institutions, and providing open media for public debates, nations can obtain higher levels of transparency and efficiency in activities. In turn, this policy can significantly reduce the instances of corruption too. It is worth to note that eliminating the corrupted officials would not necessarily reduce the instances of corruption. In this research, the effect of the human development index and transparency on the level of corruption in the world is assessed using GIS. Results show that, e-government is a tool for linking the available information and communication technologies together to provide public openness. However, abusing the citizens using their private data, hiding the available corruption in the top levels of the governmental organizations, accessing the businesses bank accounts to extract the transactions, etc. are among the common ways which e-government is exploited in some countries