=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1690/paper71
|storemode=property
|title=Local Council Decisions as Linked Data: a Proof of Concept
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1690/paper71.pdf
|volume=Vol-1690
|authors=Raf Buyle,Pieter Colpaert,Mathias Van Compernolle,Peter Mechant,Veronique Volders,Ruben Verborgh,Erik Mannens
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/BuyleCCMVVM16
}}
==Local Council Decisions as Linked Data: a Proof of Concept==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1690/paper71.pdf
Local Council Decisions as Linked Data: a proof
of concept
Raf Buyle1, Pieter Colpaert1, Mathias Van Compernolle2, Peter
Mechant2, Veronique Volders3, Ruben Verborgh1, Erik Mannens1
1
Data Science Lab iMinds Ghent University
2
MICT iMinds Ghent University
3
Flemish Agency for Domestic Governance
raf.buyle@ugent.be, pieter.colpaert@ugent.be, mathias.vancompernolle@ugent.be,
peter.mechant@ugent.be, veronique.volders@kb.vlaanderen.be, ruben.verborgh@ugent.be,
erik.mannens@ugent.be
Abstract. Base registries are trusted authentic information sources controlled by
an appointed public administration or organization appointed by the government.
Maintaining a base registry comes with extra maintenance costs to create the
dataset and keep it up to date. In this paper, we study the possibility to entangle
the maintenance of base registries at the core of existing administrative processes
and to reduce the cost of maintaining a new data source. We demonstrate a
ff
method to manage Local Council Decisions as Linked Data, which creates a new
base registry for mandates. We found that no extra e ort was needed in the
process by local administrations. We show that an endtoend approach for Local
Council Decisions as Linked Data is feasible. Furthermore, using this proof of
concept, we established a momentum to roll out these ideas for the region of
Flanders in Belgium.
ff
Keywords: Linked Data, Digital Publishing, Local A airs, Public Administration
1 Introduction
Local councils are empowered by law, to make decisions on matters of
importance to local communities. Decisions are made in formally constituted
council meetings. In Flanders, local governments provide the decisions, or
minutes, from these meetings to the Flemish Agency for Domestic Governance
(ADG) as unstructured data. These Council Decisions contain authentic and
one or the installation of a new tra ffi
timely facts on e.g., resignation of a local counselor, the installation of a new
c situation and their road signs. Local
governments are the authoritative source for information, also available in
authoritative registries, such as the registry of local counselors or the Road
Sign Database (RSD). In order to keep these registries up to date, local
governments are obliged to update the information on local counselors or road
signs manually into a separate application provided the Flemish Government,
fi
yet the quality of the resulting register is suboptimal.
The European Commission de nes a base registry (BR) as a trusted
authentic source of information under the control of an appointed public
administration or organization appointed by the government. Maintaining a
base registry comes with support and aligned processes at the level of the data
providers, in this case, the local government. The RSD, which contains all
road signs, their characteristics and road positions, alike the registry of local
counselors, did not live up to the expectations [5]. The Flemish Department
for Mobility and Public Works created the database and inventoried the road
signs. It then asked its 308 municipalities (for the municipal roads) to keep the
database uptodate. The municipalities, however, did not keep the the
database up to date, as evidenced by a.o. written question nr. 813 to minister
Hilde Crevits in the Flemish Parliament (2013). The evaluation of RSD shows
fi ff
low scores on information, service and system quality. The absence of net
bene ts will a ect user satisfaction and the intention to use [1]. Local Council
Decisions could provide valuable information however to such registries.
In this paper, we study applying Linked Data technologies to harvest the
data from the local council, as close as possible to the core processes, and
publish it as linked data. The resulting dataset can provide information to the
Base Registries. A subset of this information can also be reused inline with
the Decree on the reuse of public sector information. Imagine a smart city
where public decisionmaking is easy for all to follow using any digital
channel.
2 Related work
OpenRaadsInformatie publishes information from 5 local councils in the
Netherlands as Open Data, as well as the OParl project for local councils in
Germany. Each of these projects use their own style of JSON API. The data
from the municipalities is collected through APIs and by scraping websites
and transformed to Linked Open Data. According to the Dutch project's
ff
evaluation [4], the lack of metadata at the source causes a direct impact on
the the cohesion between the di erent assets because they can't be interlinked.
In this Proof of Concept, the data is linked at the source which allows
enriching the data at an earlier stage. Next, the W3C Open Gov community g
roup is discussing and preparing an RDF ontology to describe, among others,
people, organizations, events and proposals.
Finally, in Flanders, the interoperability program of the Flemish
Government, “Open Standards for Linked Organizations” also referred to as
“OSLO²”, focuses on the semantic level and extends the ISA CORE
Vocabularies to facilitate the integration of the Flemish base registries with on
e another and their implementation in business processes of both the public an
d private sector [6].
3 Implementation and demonstration
fi
In the de nition of the European Commission of a base registry, trusted
means that, in this case, the local government is managing the Local Council
Decisions
Frameworkdomains
conformant to
[2],
best
more
practices
speci cfi at
in all
the
European
level of
Interoperability
semantic and
fi
organizational interoperability and conformant to legal requirements in the M
unicipal Decree. On a semantic level we de ned a vocabulary for council
decisions which will be adopted by OSLO². Authentic means that this is
considered to be 'the' source of information which represents the correct
status and which is kept constantly uptodate and is of highest possible
quality. This is achieved by avoiding copying information manually into a
separate form or application. When the registered data is part of the core
processes of the local administrations and used in their information systems,
we expect this will improve the quality. Appointed means that the governing
administration has a legal basis to collect and maintain the respective
information.
We interviewed local governments on how they register and publish Local
Council Decisions. We then organized three workshops which formulated the
input for the Proof of Concept: two workshops were organized for creating a
preliminary domain model, and one workshop was organized to create
wireframes on how Local Council Decisions would be created and searched
through in an ideal scenario. The domain concepts were formalized into two
Linked Data vocabularies: one for the metadata and one for describing public
mandates, formalized in https://lblod.github.io/vocabulary. The proof of
concept consists of these components: an editor for local decisions, an HTML
page publishing service responsible for URI dereferencing, a crawler for local
decisions and two reuse examples on top of the harvested data.
We introduce a virtual local government called VlaVirGem for which we can
publish local decisions. The editor at lblod.github.io/editor is a proof of
to fi
concept of such an editor, which reuses existing base registries. You can choose
ll out a certain template for decisions that often occur, such as the
fi
out the necessary fi
resignation of a local counselor or the installation of a new one. When
elds, the editor will
ffihelp you: for example, it
lling
will
edit the o ffi
autocomplete people that are currently in o ce. You will then still be able to
cial document, which contains more information such as links to
legal background, context and motivation, and metadata. When you click the
publish button, the decision is published as a plain HTML
The URIs are created as hashURIs from the document's URL.
fi le on a fi le host.
fi fi
A harvester is then set up using The DataTank, an opensource project to
(re)publish data over HTTP. By con guring a rich snippets harvester, HTML
les are parsed and some links are followed to discover the next to be parsed
document. The extracted triples are republished for both the raw data as an
vlavirgem.pieter.pm: the fi
overview of the mandates. This data is the start of two reuse demos at http://
rst for generating an automatic list of mandates,
and the second is a list of local decisions.
4 Conclusion
Although Local Council Decisions contain high quality information in the form
of nonstructured data, the information in the authoritative source for local
mandates today does not. In order to reduce the workload to share this
information (e.g., a newly appointed counselor) with other governments or the
private sector, the local decision can be published as a Linked Open Data
document at the source.
The proof of concept shows that (I) an endtoend approach, based on the
making process more e ffi
developed Linked Data method, is feasible and that it can make the decision
cient: less manual work, governments may seek easier
in regulation, the Linked Data allows easy to do an impact analysis when
legislation is amended. (II) We notice a quality gain in editing due to correct
legal references (even referencing to decisions of their municipality) and the
use of qualitative factual data (e.g. addresses linked to the Central Reference
effi
Address Database, a regional base registry) (III) Finally,
ciency gains in the publication of the decisions that are automatically
there are also
ff
published on the website of the local government, in the codex and without
additional e orts suitable for reuse by third parties (Open Data). The insights
created a political basis to build a base registry for Local Council Decisions in
line with the best practices of this study. This project, funded by the Flemish
Agency for Domestic Governance and Flanders Information Agency (Flanders
Radically Digital Programme), is a stepstone in the transition of the Flemish
Government towards an information driven administration with simpli ed
processes and better public services.
fi
References
1. Benbasat, I., Barki, H.: Quo vadis, TAM? Journal of Association for
Information Systems. vol 8. 3. 211218 (2007)
2. European Commission, ISA: European Interoperability Framework (EIF) for
European public services: Annex 2. 21 (2010)
3. European Commission, ISA: ISA handbook for using Core Vocabularies (No
vember 2014)
4. Kunzler,K: , Z.: Pilot Open Raadsinformatie Eindrapportage: 17 (2016)
5. Van Cauter, L.: Governmenttogovernment information system failure in Fl
anders: an indepth study. (2016)
6. Vanlishout, Z.: EU Core Vocabularies in Action: Linked Base Registries as a
key enabler for eGovernment in Flanders. (2016)