Michalis Vafopoulos

Public Spending as LOD: The Case of Greece

The PSGR project is the first attempt to generate, curate, interlink and distribute daily updated public spending data in LOD formats that can be useful to both expert (i.e. scientists and professionals) and naive users. The PSGR ontology is based on the UK payments ontology and reuses, among others, the W3C Registered Organization Vocabulary and the Core Business Vocabulary. RDFized data are linked to product classifications, Geonames and DBpedia resources. Online services contain advanced search features and domain level information (e.g. local government), simple and complex visualizations based on network analysis, linked information about payment entities and SPARQL endpoints. During February 2013, the growing dataset consists of approximately 2 mil. payment decisions valued 44.5 bil. euros forming 65 mil. triples.

Information Society: the two faces of Janus

Knowledge could be considered as the most critical dual factor — input and output — in production and scientific processes. Strategic and influential use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) - the so called Information Society (IS) — reveals vast potential in knowledge production and economic development. In our point of view, two are the key issues in effective ICTs exploitation: (a) social consensus about quantity, quality and processing mechanisms of public information and (b) transformation process path between the general e-work model and the g-work paradigm. In this context, the knowledge-based development codifies the positive face of IS, in contrast to personal data abuse. The concept of the “new democratic deficit” is introduced in order to move into the foreground the significant dialectic relationship between ICTs and society.

A roadmap to the grid e-workspace

The GRID e-workspace provides a web-based integrated and collaborative hardware and software resources for an individual or an enterprise. Concentrates all services in a single domain for all citizens and companies in a specific geographical region in a collaborative working environment where it is possible to produce, post, search and exchange structured information. The GRID e-workspace is defined to have four interconnected aspects (a) digital storage, (b) network traffic, (c) processing power and (d) web services. Implementation issues involve organizational, social, economical and technological aspects. General principles driving our analysis could be summarized in the following: Co-operation culture and technological level characterizing societies under consideration determine: (i) business model (public-private funding mixture) and (ii) technology (centrality of entities).

Linked Open Economy: Take Full Advantage of Economic Data

For decades, information related to public finances was out of reach for most of the people. Gradually, public budgets and tenders are becoming openly available and global initiatives promote fiscal transparency and open product and price data. But, the poor quality of economic open data undermines their potential to answer interesting questions (e.g. efficiency of public funds and market processes). Linked Open Economy (LOE) has been developed as a top-level conceptualization that interlinks the publicly available economic open data by modelling the flows incorporated in public procurement together with the market process to address complex policy issues. LOE approach is extensively used to enrich open economic data ranging from budgets and spending to prices. Developers, professionals, public administrations and any other interested party use and customize LOE model to develop new systems, to enable information exchange between systems, to integrate data from heterogeneous sources and to publish open data related to economic activities.

Semantic social analytics and linked open data cloud

In this paper, we propose an ontology schema towards linking semantified Twitter social analytics with the Linked Open Data cloud. The ontology is deployed over a publicly available service that measures how influential a Twitter account is by combining its social activity in Twitter. According to our knowledge this is the first work that combines social analytics with the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud.

Mining and Linking Open Economic Data from Governmental Communities

In this paper, we propose a model conceptualization (Linked Open Economy - LOE) capable of exploiting the massive amount and variety of open economic data that are gradually becoming available by governments and open source communities. The main aim is to unleash the power of open data and open source systems and create a common ground to serve as a catalyst in providing more efficient answers in important economic activities.

A Data-Driven Model for Linking Open Economic Information

While public finance data are becoming openly available as part of the broader promotion of fiscal transparency, there is little effort towards maximizing their potential value by interlinking them under a concrete framework and establishing the means to extract interesting insights. The Linked Open Economy model (LOE) aims to act as a top-level conceptualization that connects economic flows with open economic data and as an adaptable and extensible underlying model for modelling different scenarios. The paper presents the LOE model, emphasizing its theoretical foundations. Furthermore, it presents the usage of the model in realistic settings, showcasing its extensibility and its ability to address interesting questions.

The eLOD Ontology: Modeling Economic Open Data

For decades, valuable economic data was out of reach for most of the people. Gradually, public budgets and tenders are becoming openly available and global initiatives promote financial transparency and data innovation. But, yet the poor quality of open data undermines their potential to answer interesting questions (e.g. efficiency of public funds and market processes). The eLOD ontology has been initiated as a top-level conceptualization that interlinks the publicly available economic open data by modelling the flows incorporated in public procurement together with the market process to address complex policy issues. This paper presents the basic aspects of eLOD ontology in interlinking and querying diverse open data ranging from budget execution to prices. Already, eLOD ontology is used by two EU projects in order to to develop new systems, to enable information exchange between systems, to integrate data from heterogeneous sources and to publish open data related to economic activities.

Big Data for a Linked Open Economy

As the volume data grows exponentially, more and more big data handling approaches are also applied in the linked data cloud. Thus, semantic triplets which are nucleus of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) must be harmonized to the demanding needs of the 4 Vs. This paper presents the architecture and the main components of a big linked data repository named LinkedEconomy. The scope of the platform is to collect, process, interlink and publish unprecedented high-detailed economic data in machine-readable format, in order to (a) provide a new data corpus for enriching research efforts in Economic, Statistics and Business studies, and (b) contribute to Big data analytics for corporate decision making.