This is the poster for SemStat at ISWC 2014 in Riva del Garda. SemStat 2014 was the "Second International Workshop on Semantic Statistics". Our poster is about a use case on fact-checking using the potential of Linked Statistics.

1. News Fact-checking:
One Practical Application of Linked Statistics
33.
“Poverty, Trentino remains a happy island” l'Adige.it, 17 Luglio 2012
LinkedSTAT Tatiana Tarasova tarasova@spaziodati.eu SpazioDati, Trento, Italy
NEWS FACT-CHECKING is the process of verifying accuracy of facts in publications
MANUAL FACT-CHECKING – review of the citations' content
● dedicated fact-checking departments
- only major infrequent periodicals can afford them (Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Esquire, Forbes);
http://linkedstat.spaziodati.eu
ISTAT SDMX SOAP Web Service
http://sdmx.istat.it/WS_T/NsiStdV20Service.asmx SDMX-ML SDMX-to-RDF XSL transformations
https://github.com/csarven/linked-sdmx
Virtuoso
Quad Store
http://www.ladige.it/articoli/2012/07/17/poverta-trentino-resta-isola-felice
Fact-checking is a tedious, time-, resource-consuming and error-prone process
* The original text is:
“Nel 2011, secondo i dati Istat, ...
la provincia di Trento (3,4%), la Lombardia (4,2%),
la Valle d'Aosta e il Veneto (4,3%)
presentano i valori più bassi
dell'incidenza di povertà [relativa].”
“In 2011, according to Istat, ...
the province of Trento (3.4%),
Lombardy (4.2%), Valle d'Aosta and
Veneto (4.3%) have the lowest value
of the incidence of [relative] poverty.” *
RDF/XML
RDF Data Cube Vocabulary
PROV-O Ontology
SKOS and XKOS
SDMX-RDF, ...
“In 2011, according to Istat, ... the province of Trento
(3.4%) ... value of the incidence of [relative] poverty.”
Dimension Value
territory
linked-istat-property:REF_AREA
“Provincia Autonoma Trento”
http://linkedstat.spaziodati.eu/code/1.1/
CL_REFAREA/ITD2
reference time period
linked-istat-property:TIME_PERIOD
“2011”
<http://reference.data.gov.uk/id/year/2011>
statistical indicator
linked-istat-property:IND_TYPE
“incidenza di povertà relativa familiare”
<http://linkedstat.spaziodati.eu/code/1.1/
CL_AGGREG_FAMIGLIE/INCID_POVREL_
FAM>
 Fact-checking: How to find a right set of dimension/value
pairs for a given fact to construct queries for it?
 ISTAT: new possibilities to disseminate statistics and
facilitate data certification.
● DBpedia/Wikipedia: automatic updates of statistical data
http://linkedstat.spaziodati.eu/sparql
no budget in small publishing organisations
- impractical for frequent publications
● nonprofit fact-checking organisations (FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com)
● crowd-checking platforms (FactCheckEU.org)
What if the facts would be linked to the underlying data sources?
publishing ISTAT http://dati.istat.it/ as Linked Data
http://dati.istat.it/
All the queries and scripts produced during the LinkedSTAT project are available at
https: //www.assembla.com/spaces/linked-istat/
Fact-checking with LinkedSTAT
Step1: retrieve the structure of the relevant dataset
SELECT DISTINCT ?dataset ?title ?structure
WHERE {
?dataset a qb:DataSet .
?dataset dcterms:title ?title .
FILTER(contains(str(?title), "Incidenza di povertà relativa"))
?dataset qb:structure ?structure .}
Step2: retrieve code lists that provide values
SELECT DISTINCT ?codeList ?p ?o
WHERE {
<http://linkedstat.spaziodati.eu/property/REF_AREA> qb:codeList ?
codeList .
?codeList ?p ?o}
Step3: retrieve the value of the required observation
SELECT DISTINCT ?obs ?value
WHERE {
?obs rdf:type qb:Observation .
?obs linked-istat-property:REF_AREA
<http://linkedstat.spaziodati.eu/code/1.2/CL_REFAREA/ITD2> .
?obs linked-istat-property:TIME_PERIOD
<http://reference.data.gov.uk/id/year/2011> .
?obs linked-istat-property:IND_TYPE
<http://linkedstat.spaziodati.eu/code/1.1/CL_AGGREG_FAMIGLIE/INCID_POVREL_FAM> .
?obs linked-istat-property:OBS_VALUE ?value .}
Future