Opening Public Deliberations: Transparency, Privacy, Anonymisation

Abstract

The open data movement is demanding publication of data withheld by public institutions. Wide access to government data improves transparency and also fosters economic growth. Still, careless publication of personal data can easily lead to privacy violations. Due to these concerns, the Italian law states that even public deliberations must be anonymised for long term publication. In the context of the Trentino Open Data Project Italy, we first analyse privacy legislation and anonymisation techniques. Then, we propose a semantic open source stack based on entity and word sense disambiguation techniques for publishing anonymised deliberations edited with Norme in Rete software.