Weaving the economic Linked

Open Data

Michalis Vafopoulos and Marios Meimarisvafopoulos.org

SMAP2012

Multimedia Technology Laboratory, School of ECE, NTUA

medialab.ntua.gr

Economy after the Web

New form of property• Public, Private, Peer (e.g. Wikipedia)

The right to: • Use-modify-benefit-transfer

resources

• Energetic & connected consumption• Pro-sumption

2

Research question

Web economy: from potential to actual

Enable new virtuous cycles in the economy through Linked Open Data

3

Outline ① EU Unification: institutions-technology

② Why Linked Open Data? ③ Economic LOD

o the story so faro how to starto use caseso engineering

④ Government Budget⑤ Tenders ⑥ Spending⑦ Business Information ⑧ Next steps

4

EU Unification: the institutions

Best in theory – poor in practicea (complicated) market example• monetary policy, currency,

eurozone • European Single Market • fiscal policy FORTHCOMING

5

EU Unification: the technology

Linked Data or Web of data• “publish once, use many times”. • different consumers extract

different slices of the data for different purposes

• publish in context: value & “meaning”

6

EU Unification: the technology

• Linked Data (LD) + Open Data =LOD

• Economic LOD as “data currency”

7

Why LOD?

• Transparency & innovation

Network effects: enabling users to • bidirectional & massively processable

interconnections among data • re-using the existing infrastructure in

the government and business spheres

8

Economic LOD: the story so far

• Isolated/fragmented behind technological & institutional barriers

• General statistics: Eurostat etc. • LOD2 case • LOTTED (Linked Open Tenders Electronic Daily)

9

Economic LOD: how to start

A general model

10

Economic LOD: use cases

• Business applications on top• Users: citizens, gov., EU, business• track the life-cycle of every financial

flow: evaluate budget allocation, tenders, spending and their efficiency

• pre-allocate resources on provisional public works

• receive & submit information in real-time

11

Economic LOD: engineering

12

Government Budget• heterogeneous repositories & methods (mainly

PDF)

13

Tenders • Closed data in HTML• Public Contracts Ontology (PCO), e.g. – pco:Contract and pco:AwardCriterion

• Common Procurement Vocubulary• now working on linking our ontology

to:– Payments Ontology – GoodRelations – FOAF

14

Spending • most dynamic & open part• increasing number of countries/cities• raw & structured data• leader: the Greek Clarity project• spending decisions ex-ante to

execution• Actually every decision

15

www.publicspending.gr (*****)

• based on Greek Clarity & Tax information

• semantify, interconnect, clean, visualize, SPARQL endpoint, daily update

• PSGR ontology Links to–WESO products classif. – UK Payments Ontology– DBpedia and Geonames–…more to come

16

Business Information

• Registries: mainly closed• Key standards– Classification of Products by Activity (CPA)– eXtensible Business Reporting Language

(XBRL)

17

Business Information

18

Next steps

• Working on our basic ontology• Real-life examples & apps• Bad news: A long way to go• Good news: we have started

19

Thank you!

• More in vafopoulos.org

References• Weaving the Economic Linked Open Data• The Web Economy: Goods, Users, Models, an

d Policies

• Public Spending: Interconnecting and Visualizing Greek Public Expenditure Following Linked Open Data Directives

• A Framework for Linked Data Business Models

20

appendix

21

www.publicspending.gr (*****)

22