Linked Open Data in the Italian e-Governement Interoperability Framework

Recently governments have started sharing a large volume of public datasets on the Web. As a consequence, citizens, enterprises and also public administrations can now easily access to them and have the opportunities to build crowdsourcing, advanced mash up, and services in general. However, in order to enable a fully reuse of the data and meet semantic interoperability requirements it is crucial to provide them in a standard and machine-readable form, with possible interlinks directly exposed. This paper presents our experience in creating the first interlinked dataset within the context of the Italian Interoperability Framework SPC. The dataset is built from the National Public Administration Registry named IPA; we consider IPA as the nucleus of the SPC’s open data since it includes all the contact information of Italian PAs (e.g., tax codes, e-mail and postal addresses, e-payment references, etc.). The paper describes the Linked Open Data methodology we adopted in building the dataset and that can be in the general Public Administration context in order to guarantee semantic interoperability. The paper also introduces our web portal SPCData; the portal has been designed so as to: (i) publish the dataset and its ontology, (ii) provide a freely accessible environment for querying the data, and (ii) offer a set of demonstrative public services that exploit the IPA dataset and created interlinks.