Abstract
The Italian anti-corruption Act (law n. 190/2012) requires all public administrations to spread procurement information as open data. Each body is obliged to yearly release standardized XML files, on its public website, containing data that describes all issued public contracts. Though this information is currently available on a machine-readable format, the data is fragmented and published in different files on different websites, without a unified and human-readable view of the information. The ContrattiPubblici.org project aims at developing a semantic knowledge graph based on linked data principles in order to overcome the fragmentation of existent datasets, to allow easy analysis, and to enable the reuse of information. The objectives are to increase public awareness about public spending, to improve transparency on the public procurement chain, and to help companies to retrieve useful knowledge for their business activities.
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Notes
- 1.
See the Tracking the state of open government data report available at: http://index.okfn.org/. Last visited July 2016.
- 2.
See national roadmaps and technical guidelines, as well the revised of the EU Directive on Public Sector Information reuse in 2013 guidelines.
- 3.
Public Sector Information includes “any content whatever its medium (written on paper or stored in electronic form or as a sound, visual or audiovisual recording)” when produced by a public sector body within its mandate. See more details on Directive 2003/98/EC: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2003:345:0090:0096:EN:PDF.
- 4.
More details on Public Procurement Ontology PPROC available at: http://contsem.unizar.es/def/sector-publico/pproc.html.
- 5.
Data.gov project website: https://www.data.gov/.
- 6.
RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a standard model for data interchange on the Web. It represents a common format to achieve and create linked data.
- 7.
DataCube vocabulary information: https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-data-cube/.
- 8.
LOTED project website: http://www.loted.eu/.
- 9.
SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is a semantic query language for databases, able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in RDF format.
- 10.
http://www.decretotrasparenza.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/D.Lgs_.-n.-332013.pdf. Last visit on July 2017.
- 11.
XSD is a W3C recommendation that specifies how to formally describe an XML document.
- 12.
- 13.
The index is available at https://dati.anticorruzione.it/#/l190, clicking on the “Esporta” (Export) button.
- 14.
The full representation of the XSD schema is available at http://dati.anticorruzione.it/schema/datasetAppaltiL190.xsd.
- 15.
A more clear representation of the XSD schema is available at http://dati.anticorruzione.it/schema/datasetIndiceAppaltiL190.xsd.
- 16.
Such data quality metrics are defined by the International Organization for Standardization: ISO/IEC 2501.
- 17.
The Public Contracts Ontology is available on GitHub platform at: https://github.com/opendatacz/public-contracts-ontology.
- 18.
In some cases an index points to another index that finally might point to a file, or to another index.
- 19.
More information available at: https://www.w3.org/TR/n-triples/.
- 20.
The differences may be minimal, as in presence of spelling errors, or even considerable.
- 21.
More information available at: http://spcdata.digitpa.gov.it/index.html.
- 22.
More information available at: https://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/.
- 23.
The endpoint to perform the query is available at: https://contrattipubblici.org/sparql.
- 24.
More information on the Italian profile of the DCAT-AP defined in the context of ISA (Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens) program of the European Commission is available at: https://www.dati.gov.it/content/dcat-ap-it-v10-profilo-italiano-dcat-ap-0.
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Futia, G., Morando, F., Melandri, A., Canova, L., Ruggiero, F. (2018). ContrattiPubblici.org, a Semantic Knowledge Graph on Public Procurement Information. In: Pagallo, U., Palmirani, M., Casanovas, P., Sartor, G., Villata, S. (eds) AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems. AICOL AICOL AICOL AICOL AICOL 2015 2016 2016 2017 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10791. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00178-0_26
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