Abstract
This paper presents the visualization of national budget, a tool based on Semantic Web technologies that shows by graphic representations the Chilean budget law published annually, and their execution by each state agency. We describe the processes for consuming open data from the Budget National Agency, and how this data is transformed and published to linked open data, based on a National Budget Ontology. Although similar initiatives have been developed on transparency and public budget around the world, we consider that there is no previous experience showing optimized access mechanisms both for human and machine readable, providing in each case the highest level of aggregation, granularity and interoperability, making it understandable and easy to process complex data and legislation. As part of our analysis, we describe a recent scenario of usage in the context of the socio-political crisis in Chile, where we discuss the possible impact of the linked open dataset and data visualizations for distribution and control of funds, on the premise that this type of tools can support the decision making and sustainability of public finances. Finally, we present the results of our budget knowledge graph and the lessons learned during the development, allowing to replicate the process and enabling potential uses of the published data in other contexts.
Highlights
We consider the concept of transparency as the information opening from the government about public resources management
Transparency is negatively correlated with corruption and positively correlated with economic development [1], and at the same time, existing published research of the relationship between budget transparency and fiscal performance, confirms the expectations that higher budget transparency is associated with smaller budget deficits and lower public debt [2], which is known as fiscal sustainability
Not without challenges [3], for a number of years governments are adopting the use of open data in the public administration, as a mechanism of transparency, making it a practice increasingly adopted by institutions of different spheres [4,5,6,7,8,9,10], and being of greater citizen interest those related to the expenditure of public funds, mainly because these are financed by taxes
Summary
We consider the concept of transparency as the information opening from the government about public resources management. Dipres.gob.cl)—publishes yearly a set of countable processable XML files with the national budget description, and it publishes monthly an update of the execution in detail for each public body The content of these files is defined by the budget law [12] (a long and complex document with hundreds of pages), where it is detailed how the public funds are distributed during the year in Chile. The budget law, unlike other laws, is discussed annually in the National Congress, and attracts great media interest, since it determines in practice the government priorities, detailing the distribution of expenses and income that are required by the organisms and programs of the state This complexity of government structure is transferred to budget law, what makes the legislative discussion laborious, and at the same time, makes it difficult for citizens to understand
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