Constructing a Site for Publishing Open Data of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry

Abstract

We describe a procedure for constructing a website for publishing open data by focusing on the case of Open DATA METI, a website of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry of Japan. We developed two sites for publishing open data: a data catalog site and one for searching linked open data (LOD). The former allows users to find relevant data they want to use, and the latter allows them to utilize the found data by connecting them. To implement the data catalog site, we constructed a site tailored to the needs of the organization. Then we extracted a large amount of metadata from the individual open data and put it on the site. These activities would have taken a lot of time if we had used the existing methods, so we devised our own solutions for them. To implement the LOD searching site, we converted the data into LOD in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). We focused on converting statistical data into tables, which are widely used. Regarding the conversion, there were several kinds of missing information that we needed to associate with the data in the tables. We created a template for incorporating the necessary information for LOD in the original table. The conversion into LOD was automatically done using the template.