Linked data for Open Government: The case of Bologna

Open Data initiatives push public administrations to publish an increasing number of raw datasets, achieving a more transparent and open governance. The availability of new data raises opportunities for the development of new services, but also open new challenging issues such as the increasing volume of datasets publication available and their integration in large-scale public data ecosystems. The last decade has witnessed the spreading and the consolidation of the Semantic Web technologies that have been proposed as an opportunity to ease data integration through new semantic representation and interrogation languages. By using these technologies, we propose an analysis of the different phases that bring from raw data to mashups over these data through a deployment of standard Linked Data inside a triplestore and by exploiting a Geografic Information System tool for creating mashups with cartographic data, focusing on the real case of Bologna Open Data. We also report experimental results that point out the performances of different triplestores with the goal of supporting informed choices in this emerging new area.