PUBLICATION AND REUSE OF OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA

A Practical Approach

T.Cerdeña Hernández, F. Fumero Batista, L. M. Moreno de Antonio

D. Pérez Barbudo and J. L. Roda García

Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Informática, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

Keywords: Open government data, Gov 2.0. Transparency, Linked data, Innovative applications.

Abstract: Web 2.0 has changed the way that information is presented to people. Public administrations have an

important role to play in this new era. Global institutions, central, regional and local governments gather and

produce a wide variety of information that is potentially reusable by citizens and the digital content

industry. Gov 2.0 follows the approach of giving access to open public data to citizens. Open Government

Data (OGD) establishes the principles for providing public data to the public. The development of

innovative applications by companies or individuals from these public records, will meet the demand of

information from citizens, as well as developing the basic principles of transparency, publication and

reutilization. We present a local administration experience showing the steps to implement the OGD

strategy. Benefits and responsibilities of those involved in the full process are presented. We have

developed a real case of publicly available data from the population census of the municipality.

Authors are listed in alphabetical order. This work has been partially supported by the FEDER and the Agencia Canaria de Investigación,

Innovación y Sociedad de la Información (ACIISI), Gobierno de Canarias (ProID20100252).

1 MOTIVATION

Public administrations gather and produce a wide

variety of information that is potentially reusable by

citizens and the digital content industry. Public

Sector Information (PSI) is a valuable resource for

the society (European Directive 2003/98/EC, 2003).

Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2005) has meant a significant

change in terms of individual and joint contributions

of the users: blogs, wikis, social networks, etc. We

can say that Government 2.0 or Gov 2.0 is the use of

technologies used in Web 2.0 to solve problems

collaboratively among citizens and institutions

(Lathrop and Ruma, 2010).

Every day, more websites offer OGD. Among

the most representative we can mention countries

like UK (data.gov.uk), USA (data.gov), or

institutions like the United Nations (data.un.org) or

the World Bank (data.worldbank.org). On the

website of the U.S. government (http://www.data.

gov/community) and the CTIC of Asturias, Spain

(http://datos.fundacionctic.org/sandbox/catalog/facet

ed/) we can find information from the various

institutions that offer catalogues of public datasets. It

is important to consider that the institutions must

provide reliable, actual and robust data, so

companies and individuals can develop innovative

applications for the web or the mobiles.

In section 2, OGD is presented. The developing

experiences, the architectural structure and

technologies of the publication and reusable systems

are presented in Section 3. We finish with the

conclusions and the references.

2 OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA

(OGD)

In December 2007, different people and groups

interested in OGD met and postulated eight basic

principles for OGD (Open Government, 2007). The

data must be complete, primary, timely, accessible,

machine process, non-discriminatory, non-

proprietary and license-free.

OGD (Berners-Lee, 2010) is a strategy that

enables publicly available government information

to be easily accessible in order to develop new

innovative applications for the interest of citizens.

547

Cerdeña Hernández T., M. Moreno de Antonio L., Fumero Batista F., Pérez Barbudo D. and L. Roda García J..

PUBLICATION AND REUSE OF OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA - A Practical Approach.

DOI: 10.5220/0003353105470550

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2011), pages 547-550

ISBN: 978-989-8425-51-5

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

This strategy must offer information in open and

free formats and with the security and trust needed.

The benefits and responsibilities of OGD

strategy can be seen from three role viewpoints:

citizens, administrations and infomediaries. Citizens

can obtain free and open access to information

collected and generated by the public sector, no

proprietary formats. Citizens can see institutions

more transparent, and therefore some control of

them. For the application developers (infomediaries)

they can develop new products and services,

promote new innovative solutions, and improve their

business. Public administrations can obtain citizens

feedback on the information they published, and

reduce time, costs and efforts to provide information

to the citizens.

Not only benefits but also responsibilities are

achieved for all the participants. Citizens primarily

must collaborate and offer feedback to

administrations. Infomediaries must use new

technologies that improve the way administration

workers and citizens’ access to data. The public

administration must provide transparency, must

provide a broad spectrum of data and must offer a

stable and robust platform for present and future.

Currently, one of the most important aspects in

OGD is the format of public data. There are two

main trends at least. On one side, public

administrations web sites offer great unlinked data

files in proprietary formats or open (Excel or

CSV). The principal problem is that integration with

other data and systems is no easy. On the other hand,

some institutions seek to use data linked through to

linked data-based formats such as RDF (RDF, 2010)

or ontologies (OWL, 2010).

There are several works that provide a set of

steps to develop OGD strategy (O’Reilly, 2010):

1. Develop the policy directive ((www.sfmayor.org/

wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ED-09-06-Open-Data.

pdf)).

2. Create a simple infrastructure, reliable and offer

publicly accessible public data.

3. Try to use open standards that allow

interoperability with other systems.

4. Create web sites that present the catalogue of

data and develop some applications.

5. Share API developed with citizens to gain access

to data without the direct intervention of the

institution.

6. Share work developed with institutions in other

countries, regions and Municipalities.

7. Create a list of applications that can be reused by

employees of the institution.

8. Create an app-store to accommodate all public or

private applications.

9. Encourage citizens and businesses to develop

applications.

10. Create communication channels that allow

citizens to make proposals for new applications from

the data shown publicly.

11. Instruct both employees of the institution and

citizens.

There are different technical specifications related to

the Semantic Web that are used in OGD. The

Resource Description Framework specification,

RDF (www.w3.org/RDF/) is a standard for

exchanging data on the Web. RDF allows the unique

resource description in the web space and establishes

relationships with other objects. You can execute

queries on these data through the SPARQL language

(www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/). We can find

different tools to convert from various formats to

RDF in (esw.w3.org/ConverterToRdf).

3 A CASE STUDY

3.1 Municipality Population Census

San Cristóbal de La Laguna is the third most

populated municipality in Canary Islands, Spain

(http://www.aytolalaguna.com). The Gerencia de

Urbanismo is an autonomous institution that

depends from the town hall and takes care of many

different services related to urbanistic issues. The

Population Census is one of the most important

sources of citizen’s information.

3.2 Requirements

The release of public information of interest for the

citizens is becoming a major concern for the IT

responsible at La Laguna local government. The

purpose of this experience is to prove the feasibility

of OGD implantation in this administration. Later

on, and based on the experience acquired while

developing this example, we would develop a well-

defined protocol to follow in order to extend the

release to other datasets. Besides this, there were

other ideas to take into account:

- Data to work with: use existing real data to face

real issues, and work with a small but representative

dataset.

- Integration with existing systems: keep current

data stores isolated from the publication system for

safety and integraty, allow to publish from

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heterogeneous data sources, and minimize the

impact on current data stores

- Reutilization: publish data in a format easy to use

for reutilization, and develop a sample application of

reutilization for the published data.

It is important to remark that the data provided was

clean of privacy personal information even before

we started working on it. The data consists on a list

of properties within the municipality boundaries.

Each property in the list has an address (in the street

system of the municipality), a location (latitude,

longitude) and the quantity of inhabitants (only those

registered in the census).

3.3 Proposed Architecture

Our proposal was to develop a system that fulfilled

the requirements of the administrators while

following the steps suggested in section 2.

Administrations store a huge amount of

information in many heterogeneous formats, such as

relational and non-relational databases from

different vendors, spreadsheets, documents, texts,

etc. Linked Data is the chosen solution in this

example to represent this information in a common

format.

The designed architecture is showed in Figure 1

and Figure 2. It is composed of two main systems;

each of one is explained in the following sections.

Figure 1: The Publication System.

3.3.1 Publication System

The main component of the publication system

developed for this example is an instance of a D2R

server (www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/d2r-server/).

The D2R server allows publishing data from

relational databases as RDF. In this example the

source data from the census is stored in two tables in

a MySQL server instance, one for the properties and

one for the streets. The main task here is to define a

vocabulary to properly represent this data in RDF

and then create the corresponding mapping in the

D2R server. This way the data is immediately

exposed in an open reusable format.

D2R server also allows making SPARQL queries

to the database which improves the reutilization

possibilities.

3.3.2 Reutilization System

The reutilization system is built as a separate

instance to expose an example of reutilization of the

information published in RDF. This example is a

web application which displays census data

geolocalized as a layer on a map. It can display

population by property, by street and by selecting an

area.

The application is composed by the core tier and

the frontend tier. The core tier consists of a servlet

written in Java which loads data from the

Publication System. To load the data it queries the

SPARQL API and retrieves the data using the Jena

library, transforming it into Java Objects. The

frontend tier is built with Google Web Toolkit and it

just composes the data on the web page that the user

can see. The Figure 3 shows an example of the web

application.

Figure 2: The Reutilization System.

4 CONCLUSIONS

In this work we have presented a real case of OGD

with the collaboration of a municipal institution.

This example shows that the application not only

must have attractive user interfaces but data

analytics to transform data to valuable knowledge.

Open Government Data involves a diverse group

of technical and non-technical people to be thinking

around the strategy. It will take some time before

this new interaction of the OGD becomes a wide

reality, meanwhile citizens will demand public data

to be accessible in different formats and

applications.

The key to success of the OGD is that the three

stakeholders (citizens, administrations and

developers) will complement each other. Citizens

must collaborate and offer feedback to

administrations and developers to improve the

quality of the data and the applications. This impro-

PUBLICATION AND REUSE OF OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA - A Practical Approach

549

Figure 3: Web application using reutilization of public data.

vement will return to citizens in the form of better

web or mobile applications. The public

administrations can benefit of the new applications

for their decision making at low or non-costs.

Governments are responsible for providing the

data in open formats such as RDF, and companies or

individual citizens will develop web and mobile

applications. However, it is not easy at all to share

data to the people because some concerns must be

considered (security, private information, trust).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thanks to Roberto Martín, Luis

López, Vicente Quilis and Javier Cabrera from the

Gerencia de Urbanismo, Ayuntamiento de La

Laguna, Canary Islands, Tenerife, Spain. Their

interest and support have made this project viable.

REFERENCES

Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of

the Council, of 17 November 2003. On the re-use of

public sector information. http://www.epsiplus.net/

content/download/3234/34944/file/English_l_ 345200

31231en00900096.pdf.

O'Reilly, Tim. 2005. What Is Web 2.0. http://oreilly.com/

web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html.

Lathrop, D., Ruma, L.. 2010. Open Government.

Collaboration, transparency and participation in

practice. ISBN 978-0-596-80435-0. O'Reilly Media.

Open Government Working Group. 2007. Open

Government 8 principles http://resource.org/8_

principles.html.

Berners-Lee, Tim. 2010. Putting Government Data Online

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/GovData.html

RDF. 2010. Resource Description Framework (RDF)

Model and Syntax Specification. http://www.w3.org/

TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/.

OWL. 2010. Web Ontology Language. http://

www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/

O'Reilly, Tim. 2010. Government as a Platform. http://

opengovernment.labs.oreilly.com/ch01.html.

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