A new approach for Open Data publishing and management
Open Data are data that some organizations, in particular, government offices, make available to others. Even though the term Open Data is actually not new, it is currently a very important topic since its potential in modifying the relationship between citizens and government and improve the public services. Moreover, according to a number of studies, it may also generate significant economic value.
Although there are several works on platforms and architectures for publishing Open Data, there is still no formal and comprehensive methodology supporting an organization in deciding which data to publish, and carrying out precise procedures for publishing and documenting high-quality data.
We propose the recent paradigm of Ontology-based Data Access (OBDA) as a means of providing a formal basis for a practical approach to publishing high-quality and semantically annotated Open Data
An OBDA system is constituted by an ontology, the data sources forming the information system, and the mapping between the ontology and the sources. The ontology is a formal representation of the domain underlying the information system and the mapping is a precise and semantic specification of the relationship between the data at the sources and the concepts in the ontology.
Current practices for publishing Open Data focus essentially on providing extensional information (often in very simple forms, such as CSV files), and they carry out the task of documenting data mostly by using metadata expressed in natural languages, or in terms of record structures. As a consequence, the semantics of datasets is not formally expressed in a machine-readable form. Conversely, OBDA opens up the possibility of a new way of publishing data, with the idea of annotating data items with the ontology elements that describe them in terms of the concepts in the domain of the organization.