SPCData: The Italian Public Administration Data Cloud - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 265

In this way, we were able to map correctly around 6872 municipalities out of approx-
imately 8000 that currently exist in Italy. Note that we could not map the remaining
municipalities due to ambiguities of the names; however, as we aim to provide a com-
prehensive information content, we are planning to improve this phase using advanced
record linkage tools such as SILK (Volz, Bizer, Gaedke, & Kobilarov, 2009).
In addition, we found a Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data set (FAO
geopolitical ontology, 2012) that is very rich from a government point of view as it
describes geopolitical information (e.g., countries' borders and affiliations to interna-
tional organizations).
Thus, we added the following two triples related to it in our data set that link
the identical concept of country “ Italy .”
Finally, we manually added from the data set itself some triples to the Linked
Open IPA concerning the description (e.g., licensing, creators, title of the docu-
ment, and updating date).
At the end of this external linking phase, we produced the whole data set of
approximately 717,600 RDF triples.
12.4.5 Ontology Production
Our last phase consisted of extracting the OWL ontology of the Linked Open IPA
using an automatic reasoner on the RDF data. A few observations on this phase
are in order. First, the ontology production is not required to produce and publish
a linked open data set; however, it can be useful for a better understanding of the
data and a better semantic interoperability. Consequently, it is easier to produce
new data (triples). Finally, this activity can be also performed at the beginning of
the conversion process (i.e., during what we called modeling phase) by applying a
top-down approach. Nevertheless, because our experience was more data oriented
than logic oriented, we preferred to use, in contrast, a bottom-up approach.
12.5 SPC open Data Portal and Public Services
This section shows the practical results of our work from an end-user perspective.
It helps the reader to navigate through our portal and understand the effects of the
backend technical work. To make publicly available the linked open IPA, we have
designed the SPC open data web portal. This project started at the beginning of
2012 and is still in production (http://spcdata.digitpa.gov.it). The portal is meant to
be used for the publication of all the data sets of SPC's web of data. SPCData has
often been used as a laboratory for testing the outcomes of European Community