LinkedSpending: OpenSpending becomes Linked Open Data

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Höffner, Konrad^{; *} | Martin, Michael | Lehmann, Jens

Affiliations: University of Leipzig, Institute of Computer Science, AKSW Group Augustusplatz 10, D-04009 Leipzig, Germany. E-mails: hoeffner@informatik.uni-leipzig.de, martin@informatik.uni-leipzig.de, lehmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: konrad.hoeffner@uni-leipzig.de.

Abstract: There is a high public demand to increase transparency in government spending. Open spending data has the power to reduce corruption by increasing accountability and strengthens democracy because voters can make better informed decisions. An informed and trusting public also strengthens the government itself because it is more likely to commit to large projects. OpenSpending.org is a an open platform that provides public finance data from governments around the world. In this article, we present its RDF conversion LinkedSpending which provides more than five million planned and carried out financial transactions in 627 data sets from all over the world from 2005 to 2035 as Linked Open Data. This data is represented in the RDF Data Cube vocabulary and is freely available and openly licensed.

Keywords: Government, transparency, finance, budget, openspending, rdf, public expenditure, Open Data

DOI: 10.3233/SW-150172

Journal: Semantic Web, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 95-104, 2016