Practical Use Cases for Linked Open Data in eGovernment Demonstrated on the Czech Republic

Abstract

The motivation for publishing data as Open Data and its benefits are already clear to many public authorities. However, most of open data is published as 3* data classified using the 5-star deployment scheme. When it comes to publishing data as 5* data, i.e. as Linked Open Data (LOD), for many authorities the benefits and motivation become abstract and unclear. In this paper, we introduce a playground which clarifies these benefits to public authorities in the Czech Republic using their own datasets. The playground consists of 73 real datasets transformed to LOD and two mature tools for LOD processing, visualization and analysis. We demonstrate the benefits on two concrete datasets provided by the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic. We show how other public authorities may perform a similar demonstration on their own datasets. The paper is by no means limited to public authorities of the Czech Republic, as the same principles and processes are applicable everywhere else. Our example can be used to demonstrate the benefits of publishing 5* data on real datasets, and as a motivation and guidelines for building a similar playground for other countries.

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR), grant number 16-09713S.