Semantic Integration & Single-Site Opening of Multiple Governmental Data Sources
This addresses the challenge of data silos in public organizations, enabling more efficient open government data access, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Semantic Web technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating and querying multiple governmental data sources from a single site by proposing S3-AI, a semantic application integration approach using Semantic Web technology, which successfully enables unified, ontology-mediated, federated queries while preserving data ownership and autonomy.
In many cases, government data is still "locked" in several "data silos", even within the boundaries of a single (inter-)national public organization with disparate and distributed organizational units and departments spread across multiple sites. Opening data and enabling its unified querying from a single site in an efficient and effective way is a semantic application integration and open government data challenge. This paper describes how NARA is using Semantic Web technology to implement an application integration approach within the boundaries of its organization via opening and querying multiple governmental data sources from a single site. The generic approach proposed, namely S3-AI, provides support to answering unified, ontology-mediated, federated queries to data produced and exploited by disparate applications, while these are being located in different organizational sites. S3-AI preserves ownership, autonomy and independency of applications and data. The paper extensively demonstrates S3-AI, using the D2RQ and Fuseki technologies, for addressing the needs of a governmental "IT helpdesk support" case.