shareOGD: An Approach for Integrating Semantic Information in Open Government Data

Open Government Data are data that are published in digital format by administrative bodies. The Open Government Data Guidelines should cover how data have to be published to fulfil the requirements of the linked open data approach. The idea of open linked data is that resources published on the Internet can be interlinked and this combination leads to new information by utilizing semantic web technologies (BIZER et al. 2009). One essential premise to cover linked open data requirements is that the semantics of the data must be published in order to define the meaning of the objects of events represented by the data. At the moment these requirements are not covered within the existing Open Government Data guidelines. Hence, Open Government Data are published in a digital format but they do not follow a certain data specification, nor share a semantic model. Hence, the published data of various administrative bodies can hardly be compared, due to the lack of a standardized data model and missing semantic description. This paper attempts to list current shortcomings of Open Governmental Data and presents data modelling and presentation concepts for Open Governmental Data in order to follow linked data rules (BERNERS-LEE 2006).