Linked Open Data - A Means for Public Sector Information Management

Johann Höchtl, Danube University Krems
http://www.donau-uni.ac.at
Peter Reichstädter, Austrian Chancellery
http://www.bka.gv.at

Linked Open Data
A Means for Public Sector
Information Management

http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/en/department/gpa/telematik/index.php
http://digitalgovernment.wordpress.com/

Agenda
 Role of Open Data as an Integral Part of
Public Sector Information Management
 Components of an Open Data
Infrastructure
 State of Affairs of OGD in Austria

DEXA
August 29 - September 2, 2011
Toulouse


 Transparency
 Participation
 Collaboration

“My Administration is committed to creating an
Unprecedented level of openness in Government.“
Barack Obama, “Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies - DEXA
Transparency and Open Government,” Jan. 2009. Toulouse


DEXA
Toulouse

Neelie Kroes

Vice-President of the European Commission
responsible for the Digital Agenda

“Take the example of public sector information – possibly a
€30 billion market in Europe. I have said it before, and I say
it again: yes to open data!”
“Lift-Off towards Open Government" conference, Brussels, 15 December 2010 DEXA
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/10/752Toulouse


Open Government Data

Open Government Data are data sets
released by the government on public
interest. Usage is unconstrained with
the right to re-share and re-purpose
without further notice.

DEXA
Toulouse


Open Data Principles
 Complete
 Primary
 Timely
 Easily Accessible
 Machine Processable
 Non-Discriminating
 Using Open Standards
 Liberal Licensing
 Reliable
 Free of Charge OR Non-Discriminating fees
Source: Sunlight Foundation http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/ten-open-data-principles/ DEXA
Toulouse


 Generation, acquisition, collection and
management of information [1]
 Planning, organisation and supply of the
necessary organisational infrastructure to
accomplish these goals in the most effective
and efficient manner [1]
 Information is a critical resource, availability
and generation rate treated as a KPI [2]

[1] Stahlknecht & Hasenkamp: Einführung in die Wirtschaftsinformatik. 11 Th Edt. Springer, Berlin - Heidelberg -
New York 2005
[2] Mertens, Wieczorrek (in Reference to Krcmar), Management Von IT-Projekten: Von Der Planung Zur
Realisierung. Springer, 2006.
DEXA
Toulouse


Literature Research

[1] J. White, Managing information in the public sector, Armonk N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007.
[2] C.M. Shea and G.D. Garson, Handbook of public information systems, Taylor & Francis Group, 2010.
[3] B. Rocheleau, Public management information systems, Hershey PA: Idea Group Pub., 2006.
DEXA
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Peculiarities of Public Sector
 Functional discrepancies
● Private: maximizing shareholder value
● Public: political influence; supply of goods without a
market
 Conflicting targets, perceptions and interests in
public & private sector information management [1]
● Risk, Authority, Accountability, Representativeness,
Stakeholders
 Information management performance measure
models complex due to conflicting targets

[1] B. Bozeman, Public values and public interest: counterbalancing economic individualism. Georgetown University Press,
2007.
DEXA
Toulouse


Peculiarities of Public Sector
 States are special: From Weber's bureaucratic model [1],
Porter's economic rooting [2] to Friedmans “Do we need a
government?” [3]
● Monopolist; executive and legal power;
● “The benevolent state”: Taking care for social equilibrium
 A state (and it's administrative bodies) are not mere
productive entities (Witness discrepancy to NPM?)
 Conclusion: Information out-flow must be treated as a
core element of public sector information management

[1] M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. Mohr Siebeck, 1980.
[2] M. E. Porter, The competitive advantage of nations: with a new introduction. Free Press, 1990.
[3] D. D. Friedman, “Do We Need a Government?,” 2005. [Online]. Available: DEXA
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/mps_iceland_talk/Iceland%20MP%20talk.htm. [Accessed: 01-Jul-2011]. - September 2, 2011
August 29
Toulouse


 Role of Open Data as an Integral Part of
Public Sector Information Management
 Components of an Open Data
Infrastructure
 State of Affairs of OGD in Austria

DEXA
Toulouse


Architecture Model
 Five level saturation model by Tim
Berners-Lee presented at Gov2.0 Expo 2010@WDC
★ Available on the web (whatever format), but with an open licence
★★ Available as machine-readable structured data (e.g. excel instead
of image scan of a table)
★★★ as (2) plus non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of excel)
★★★★ All the above plus, Use open standards from W3C (RDF and SPARQL)
to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff
★★★★★ All the above, plus: Link your data to other people’s data
to provide context

The 5 stars of open linked data http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/06/04/the-5-stars-of-open-linked-data/
Linked Open Data star scheme by example http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/star-scheme-by-example/
DEXA
Toulouse


Prerequisites
 Everything gets an URI
 Data is encoded in RDF
 URIs are kept persistent by policies and PURLs
 Ontologies describe NON-Information Resources
● Data entities are self-described by these government
ontologies
 RESTFul APIs for data access
 Data gets federated to meta data register
 Data searchable à la swoogle

DEXA
Toulouse


URIs for everything
 Naming scheme respects federal
principle of subsidiarity and autonomy
● Mostly UK:
http://{sector}.data.gov.uk/{concept}/<ID>
http://education.data.gov.uk/school/4711/

vs.
● Tentatively Austria:
http://data.{federallevel}.gv.at/{sector}/{concept}/<ID>
http://data.bmf.gv.at/education/school/4711/
 Spot a difference?
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Toulouse


Trust by Reliability
 Internet Addresses come and go
 URIs shall be reliable by organizational
consensus. UK: 10 years [1], Austria: 5 years
 Fancy URIs remain invariant by means
of permanent Urls (PURL) [2]
 PURLs interpretation of HTTP-Header
response values harmonize with
Semantic Web Interpretation
[1] [1] Chief Technology Officer Council, “Designing URI Sets for the UK Public Sector.” Chief Technology Officer Council,
Oct-2009.
[2] http://purl.oclc.org/docs/index.html
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Toulouse


Functional requirements
 Data provider
● Data upload
● Metadata handling
● Search & browse facility
● Managing restrictions concerning dowload limits / API access
 Metadata provider
● Powerful search service
● Discovery service
● Harmonized ontology of resources
● Generation of new information

DEXA
Toulouse


Data provider – metadata provider

Search Search Search

Content ## ## Content

Metadata
DB DB DB

# Interest to get content into metadata-DB DEXA
Toulouse


Data provider
RESTFul JSON-Interface
Web Interface
SPARQL

Search Service
broadcast
RDF-Browser Javascript Libraries Publish/Subscribe
data.gv.at/admin
api.data.gv.at data.gv.at data.gv.at/rss
External View
Internal Database

Open DB1
Data
Store DB2
Internal View Filtering stage

data.<organisation>gv.at/katalog
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Toulouse


Metadata provider

RESTFul JSON-Interface
Web Interface
SPARQL

Publish/Subscribe get announcement
RDF-Browser Search Service Endpoint
retrieve metadata
Ontology Modelling
Javascript Libraries Tool Discovery Service

Ontology
Database

data.<organisation>gv.at/katalog

DEXA
Toulouse


Ontologies for Non-
Information Resources (NIR)
 Ontologies about NIRs classify Open
Linked Data about Information
Resources (IR)
 Enable computer systems to reason
about reality
 Automated service discovery
 Optimal resource allocation for
processes
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Austria is no more a white spot oin the map!

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Status Quo Austria
 OGD prepared by competence center for internet society (“KIG”)
and approved by Counsel of Ministers on February 25 2011
 Part of government programme of red/green coalition Vienna
 1 Official Site
● http://data.wien.gv.at/
 2 Initiatives of “Civil Society”
● http://gov.opendata.at
● http://www.open3.at
 3 “Scraping sites”
● http://offenedaten.at/
● http://www.open3.at
● http://at.ckan.net/

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Status Quo Austria ctd.
 There is no single politician or political party pushing the “movement”
 First: pushed by “civil society”
● Technology Center Vienna (ZIT) funded project OGD Austria
● Individuals & enthusiasts
● Public administration service providers & suppliers
 Later: Endorsed by (parts of) public administration
● Vienna, Linz, Salzburg?, Graz?
● Municipal (city) level!
 Organisational setting: Cooperation OGD Austria, members of
administration (municipalities, provinces & federal level), academia,
economy & specific topic members (eg. INSPIRE)
 Target: Jointly agreed conventions on Metadata, Naming & Design
Rules (URIs) & best practices on how to publish Open Government Data
on all federal levels

DEXA
Toulouse


Status Quo Austria
Tentative Principles
 10 sunlight-principles with more attention to data protection and data
persistence
 License: CC-BY 3.0 AT
● With PPDL under consideration for cases not applicable to CC-BY eg. Law
 Use CKAN for Metadata-Repository
● Use CKAN for Data Repository?
 Naming schemas:
● data.<body>.gv.at/katalog/<sector>
● data.<body>.gv.at/nutzungsbedingungen gives License
● data.<body>.gv.at/formate – Which data formats are supported and their
meaning
 Metadata is required subset of Dublic Core with some attributes
extended from INSPIRE
● Strong connex to INSPIRE

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Toulouse


In the Future ...
 Semantically parseable thesaurus of administrative
domains seen from a user perspective (“Lebenslagen”)
 Open Data Apps challenge
 Meta-data portal Austria
● Harvesting all officially available OGD under a coherent, accessible and
intuitively navigable UI
 Publish to European Data Portal
 Harmonized ontology of Public Administration services
● With links to external knowledge resources like DBPedia, etc. for
international comparability
 Incorporate elements of OGD infrastructure into national
government data exchange framework

DEXA
Toulouse


Thank you!

Questions

? Johann Höchtl, Danube University Krems
http://www.donau-uni.ac.at
johann.hoechtl@donau-uni.ac.at

Peter Reichstädter, Austrian Chancellery
http://www.bka.gv.at
peter.reichstaedter@bka.gv.at

DEXA
Toulouse

Linked Open Data - A Means for Public Sector Information Management

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