SPCData: The Italian Public Administration Data Cloud - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 256

Open Government Data. For this study, it was selected among many cases together
with other 13 cases. The portal has been designed to (a) publish the data set and
its ontology, (b) provide a freely accessible environment for querying the data, and
(c) offer a set of demonstrative public services that exploit the IPA data set and created
interlinks. This chapter presents an extended version of the paper by Lodi, Maccioni,
and Tortorelli (2012), and the main contributions can be summarized as follows:

◾

We describe the methodology that has been adopted to construct SPC's web
of data. In our view, the core of that web is represented by the data set that
univocally identifies PAs. In SPC, the IPA* can be the nucleus because it
may be used as the data set from which other SPC data and relevant data sets
owned and managed by PAs are connected (e.g., territorial data). The IPA
contains reference information of PAs such as tax codes, e-mail, and postal
addresses; official websites; electronic payment contacts; and other data, of
Italian PAs, and it is currently used as base registry for other national data-
bases (e.g., the databases owned by Ministry of Economics and Finance).

◾

We describe how to convert SPC raw data in a standard, machine-readable,
and queryable format using Linked Open Data (LOD) technologies to enable
the construction and reuse within SPC of a set of high-quality open data.
Specifically, we discuss how to perform this conversion in the case of IPA,
presenting the main interlinks that have been created within it toward other
public well-known data (e.g., DBpedia; Auer et al., 2007).

◾

We demonstrate the feasibility, effectiveness, and powerfulness of the LOD
approach in the e-government context by introducing the design of the SPC
open data web portal where we (a) publish the IPA data set with a Creative
Commons' unrestricted license, (b) provide a freely accessible environment
for querying the data set and created interlinks, and (c) provide a set of public
demonstrative services over the data set and interlinks to be directly used by
end-users.

12.1.3 Related Work

To the best of our knowledge, just two relevant works can be found (CNR, 2012;
Dati Camera dei Deputati, 2012) in Italy that use standard LOD technologies
when opening data of PAs. In other cases, data are published mostly in proprietary
and nonstandard formats (a catalogue of them is Governo Italiano, 2012). In con-
trast, foreign countries, especially the United Kingdom, † the United States, ‡ and
Ireland (Linked Data Research Centre, 2012), appear to be more active in this field
as they tend to share structured, machine, and human-readable data sets produced

* IPA is the Italian acronym for Indice della Pubblica Amministrazione.
† http://data.gov.uk.
‡ https://www.data.gov.