[open-development] Linked Data for IATI accepted for publication in JODS

Wed Dec 17 08:57:29 UTC 2014

Hi all,

A year and four months after finishing ít, we are very happy to
announce that Kasper Brandt's MSc. thesis was accepted for publication
in the Journal of Data Semantics. Kasper did some great work on
designing and implementing a linked data model for the Aid
Transparency Initiative data format. He also showed the added value
through a number of applications that use the linked data.

I wrote a short blog post here:
http://videbo.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/linked-data-for-international-aid-transparency-initiative,
there you can find the draft and pointers to the data and
applications. The abstract is copied below

best regards,
--Victor de Boer and Kasper Brandt

Thanks to Siem Vaessen, Tim Davies, Rolf Kleef and Sarven Capadisli
for their invaluable assistance and feedback!

It is widely recognised that the effectiveness of aid can be improved
by providing transparent insight into aid activities. The
International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), a multi-stakeholder
initiative that seeks to improve the transparency of aid, has
developed an open standard for the publication of aid information. As
of 2013, over 150 donors, NGOs and governments have registered to the
IATI registry by publishing their aid activities in this XML standard.
Taking the IATI model as an input, we have created a Linked Data model
based on requirements elicitated from qualitative interviews using an
iterative requirements engineering methodology. We have converted the
IATI open data from a central registry to Linked Data and linked it to
various other datasets such as World Bank indicators and DBpedia
information. This dataset is made available for re-use at
http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/iati/. To demonstrate the added value of
this Linked Data approach, we have created several applications which
combine the information from the IATI dataset and the datasets it was
linked to. As a result, we have shown that creating Linked Data for
the IATI dataset and linking it to other datasets give new valuable
insights in aid transparency. Based on actual information needs of
IATI users, we were able to show that linking IATI data adds
significant value to the data and enables fulfilling the needs of IATI
users.