SPCData: The Italian Public Administration Data Cloud - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 255

government data (Data.gov, 2012; Governo Italiano, 2012; Opening up Government,
2012), where a variety of heterogeneous data sets, which were previously hidden in
applications or in databases exclusively managed by public administrations (PAs),
showed up online. As a consequence, citizens, enterprises, and also PAs can now eas-
ily access these data and have the opportunities to build crowdsourcing, advanced
mash up, and services in general. This aspect is fostered if data are provided in a stan-
dard format and using well-known schemas (Archer et al., 2013; Lodi et al., 2014).
However, despite these evident advantages of open government data (OGD), in
the majority of current initiatives, data sets are not properly clean and up-to-date
and are still published in heterogeneous, typically proprietary and nonstandard for-
mats. This causes interoperability and usability issues and requires significant efforts
by end-users to use and integrate them in the construction of services. To facilitate
the large-scale integration and sharing of distributed data government sources and
thus foster a wider usage of those data, it is crucial that PAs start becoming aware
that data must be provided in a standard , human, and machine-readable form, where
possibly interlinks among data are directly exposed on the Web (Ding et al., 2011).
In the specific Italian public sector scenario, heterogeneous PA systems are able
to interoperate with each other by means of the Sistema Pubblico di Connettività
e Cooperazione-Public Connectivity and Cooperation System (SPC).* The SPC
can be defined as the Italian e-government interoperability framework; it consists
of the set of technologies and services used by all Italian PAs to cooperate and
exchange data for their everyday administrative procedures. Within this system, a
large volume of public data are generated; these data can be made available online
and contribute to the creation of a “web of data” within SPC and for the Italian PA.
12.1.2 Contributions
This chapter presents our experience in creating the linked data portal SPCData,
belonging to the Italian Interoperability Framework SPC. Specifically, we will show
how we generated the first interlinked data set. This data set is built from the
National Public Administration Registry, named IPA; we consider the IPA as the
nucleus of SPC's open data because it includes all the contact information of Italian
PAs (e.g., tax codes, e-mail and postal addresses, and e-payment references).
SPCData appeared online in February 2012 and is one of the first linked gov-
ernment data clouds in the world. It was useful to show to citizens and enterprises
the benefits of 5-star data and to apply the best practices in data management,
which, too often, remain on paper and are intentions only. The results obtained by
SPCData (i.e., the creation of different mobile applications) make it suitable to be
presented as a best practice in the public sector information.
Additionally, it is worth mentioning that SPCData was mentioned as a case study
in the recent study of the European Commission on the business models on Linked
* http://www.agid.gov.it/cad/sistema-pubblico-connettivita-spc.