Removing barriers to transparency: A case study on the use of semantic technologies to tackle procurement data inconsistency

Abstract

Public Procurement (PP) information, made available as Open Government Data (OGD), leads to tangible benefits to identify government spending for goods and services. Nevertheless, making data freely available is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for improving transparency. Fragmentation of OGD due to diverse processes adopted by different administrations and inconsistency within data affect opportunities to obtain valuable information. In this article, we propose a solution based on linked data to integrate existing datasets and to enhance information coherence. We present an application of such principles through a semantic layer built on Italian PP information available as OGD. As result, we overcame the fragmentation of datasources and increased the consistency of information, enabling new opportunities for analyzing data to fight corruption and for raising competition between companies in the market.