SPCData: The Italian Public Administration Data Cloud - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 259

12.2.1.1 Sparql Protocol and RDF Query Language
To fulfill the need of querying RDF data, in literature, query languages have been
designed and proposed. Among them is W3C standardized Sparql Protocol and
RDF Query Language (SPARQL; SPARQL protocol, 2012), an SQL-like language
that allows querying graph-modeled data. SPARQL provides most of the SQL con-
structs such as select , where , and count .
12.2.2 Linked Open Data
To fully benefit from open data, citizens and the market in general must be able to
access data that are structured, flexible, and easy to read and use because only in
this way they can be effectively (re)used in mash-ups, crowdsourcing, and services
in general. To this end, in 2006, the LOD initiative inspired practitioners and
organizations to start publishing, and building from scratch, data sets derived
from data that had previously been stored and exposed using traditional models.
The LOD initiative relies on the following principles (Berners-Lee, 2012): (a) use
URIs to identify things; (b) use http URIs so people can look things up; (c) provide
useful data in standard RDF (preferably reusing ontologies); and (d) use RDF to
link to other things.
Upon these principles, W3C defined an open data rating system (Berners-Lee,
2012) used to assess the quality of published open data. If open data are fully
compliant with the above principles, they are evaluated at the top level, that is,
five. The LOD initiative appears to be particularly successful: In September 2011,
295 different LOD data sets of Level 5 have been counted, containing an overall of
31 billions of triples (State of the LOD Cloud, 2012).
12.3 the italian e-Government
interoperability Framework
Last year, the Italian government applied significant changes to a Law Decree
(n. 82/05) named Digital Administration Code (CAD), whose aim is to define the
entire Italian legal interoperability framework. The applied changes were necessary
to align the rules regarding the digitalization of PAs to the new trends in information
and communication technology and to simplify further the complex administrative
processes of PAs by promoting a wider cooperation among their information systems.
The legal framework is enforced by the development of the Italian information and
communication technology interoperability framework SPC (Sistema Pubblico di
Connettività e Cooperazione; Public Connectivity and Cooperation System), which
CAD itself regulates. The SPC is the actual means through which interoperability
and cooperation between PAs can be guaranteed. It consists of two principal build-
ing blocks: the application services and national interoperability infrastructures.