Publishing Official Classifications in Linked Open Data

Data interoperability is well recognized as a basic step for developing integrated services supporting inter-organizations communication. The issue of ensuring data interoperability has been tackled by many different communities in order to address various problems. In particular, the (over-)national institutes of statistics deeply concern the issuing of official and wide-recognized classifications (i.e., taxonomies, schemes, code-lists) to be used in the jurisdiction of reference. On a different perspective, there has been much work from the Web data management community to publish data on the Web in an interoperable way. The efforts have converged on a series of standards and practices gathered under the Semantic Web stack. Clearly, the two mentioned scenarios are complementary as they can benefit one to another. To this concern, the Italian Institute of Statistics (Istat) and the Agency for Digital Italy (AgID) have launched an initiative aiming at producing official classifications under the form of Linked Open Data to be published in the Web of data using standard ontologies. The paper describes and motivates this initiative.