LinkedData.Center supports the Copernican revolution

The Smart Data Management Platform developed by LinkedData.Center is at the heart of the Copernicani’s new initiative, budget.g0v.it: an application born to offer every Italian a simple and immediate tool to understand how their money is used, and to give a fair perspective on what is being invested to address our country’s different challenges.

Copernicani is an independent association of students, workers, entrepreneurs, teachers, researchers and politicians who have decided to turn their ideas into action, to stimulate a culture of innovation and to prod the parties across the board.

With the g0v.it project (pronounced “gov zero dot it”) the Copernicani association intends to help catalyse the birth of an open community of civic developers who share support for the transparency of information and who build technological solutions to improve citizens’ participation and information.

Figure: the g0v.it project.

The application is available at budget.g0v.it and is the first practical realisation of this intention.

With this application we want to offer every Italian the possibility of answering fundamental questions:

• how is their money used by the state?
• in which missions and challenges is it invested?
• how are these choices changing over time?

All of it using public data (open data) and making them usable knowledge for everyone.

Figure: the budget.g0v.it application — open it online.

budget.g0v.it can be used to analyse the newly published Budget Law, to compare its items with previous editions, to assess the weight of the various ministries and to analyse the details of individual spending items.

A valuable tool for journalists, bloggers and for anyone who wants to master and understand the complexity of the Italian State Budget directly from the source.

But also a tool that has become valuable for the parliamentarians themselves, engaged in discussing amendments and changes to budget bills before their approval.

budget.g0v.it is built entirely with open-source code; the data are released as Linked Open Data in accordance with the latest standards designed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.

All of the data are freely reusable by other applications through LinkedData.Center’s Smart Data Management Platform, which is an integral part of the system.

Budgets (data) in the drawer

Like every company, the Ministry of Economy and Finance also produces a multitude of data. These data are public — that is, they belong to the citizens, as do all the data of public administrations. This is what is called Open Data.

They are already published and made available as the heritage of the community on sites such as www.bdap.tesoro.it, www.dati.gov.it, dati.istat.it; but without suitable tools they stay in the drawer, used and understandable by only a few technicians.

Freeing the data: from data to knowledge

Data without a meaning remain nothing but sterile sequences of numbers.

By giving data a meaning and linking them together — that is, by creating links — they are transformed into knowledge.

Knowledge can be queried to answer questions and to solve problems: that is exactly what LinkedData.Center does.

What was done

budget.g0v.it relies on the community edition of the Smart Data Management platform (SDaaS) developed by LinkedData.Center.

LinkedData.Center started from the Open Data published by the website of the Ministry of Economy and Finance to analyse the financial years from 2013 up to the latest available edition of the Budget Law.

These data were “fed” to LinkedData.Center’s SDaaS platform, which gave them meaning, built a knowledge base and resolved inconsistencies. They were then analysed and analytical indicators were created. The platform is able to process all of the data relating to all of the Italian State’s budgets from 2013 onwards in less than 40 seconds.

The knowledge acquired was then “exposed” as a service with tools for visualising and exploring the data, using the Lodmap2D product.

The same thing can be done by any company on any data set or set of data sets, internal or external.

Why Linked Data

The power of Linked Data makes it possible to:

• give data a meaning and link data together;
• add databases progressively and at any time;
• handle data errors and inconsistencies simply;
• apply analytical algorithms, such as machine learning, to extract value from the data.

LinkedData.Center is an innovative startup offering a global service to create knowledge bases using Linked Data simply, as a service — as a service.

Companies of any size can literally “pull their data out of the drawers” and turn it into knowledge to answer business questions.

How it works in practice

This is what LinkedData.Center does:

• you choose the data you want to use, including Open or external or web data;
• you connect the databases and give them a meaning;
• you decide the questions or analyses you want to run.

LinkedData.Center takes on all of the complexity, while the user is left with the task of indicating the data, explaining the meaning of their data and deciding the questions.

For deeper reading

• LinkedData.Center
• budget.g0v.it
• copernicani.it