D2kg: An integrated ontology for knowledge graph-based representation of government decisions and acts

Abstract

To implement Open Governance a crucial element is the efficient use of the big amounts of open data produced in the public domain. Public administration is a rich source of data and potentially new knowledge. It is a data intensive sector producing vast amounts of information encoded in government decisions and acts, published nowadays on the World Wide Web. The knowledge shared on the Web is mostly made available via semi-structured documents written in natural language. To exploit this knowledge, technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction, Data mining and the Semantic Web could be used, embedding into documents explicit semantics based on formal knowledge representations such as ontologies. Knowledge representation can be made possible by the deployment of Knowledge Graphs, collections of interlinked representations of entities, events or concepts, based on underlying ontologies. This can assist data analysts to achieve a higher level of situational awareness, facilitating automated reasoning towards different objectives, such as for knowledge management, data maintenance, transparency and cybersecurity. This paper presents a new ontology d2kg [d(iavgeia) 2(to) k(nowledge) g(raph)] integrating in a unique way standard EU ontologies, core and controlled vocabularies to enable exploitation of publicly available data from government decisions and acts published on the Greek platform Diavgeia with the aim to facilitate data sharing, re-usability and interoperability. It demonstrates a characteristic example of a Knowledge Graph based representation of government decisions and acts, highlighting its added value to respond to real practical use cases for the promotion of transparency, accountability and public awareness. The developed d2kg ontology in owl is accessible at: http://w3id.org/d2kg, as well as documented at: http://w3id.org/d2kg/documentation.