Raising interoperability among base registries: The evolution of the Linked Base Registry for addresses in Flanders

Abstract

The transformation of society towards a digital economy and government austerity creates a new context leading to changing roles for both government and private sector. Boundaries between public and private services are blurring, enabling government and private sector to collaborate and share responsibilities. In Belgium, the regional Government of Flanders embedded the re-use of public sector information in its legislation and published a data portal containing well over 4000 Open Datasets. Due to a lack of interoperability, interconnecting and interpreting these sources of information remain challenges for public administrations, businesses and citizens. To dissolve the boundaries between the data silos, the Flemish government applied Linked Data design principles in an operational public sector context. This paper discusses the trends we have identified while 'rewiring' the Authentic Source for addresses to a Linked Base Registry. We observed the impact on multiple interoperability levels; namely on the legal, organisational, semantic and technical level. In conclusion Linked Data can increase semantic and technical interoperability and lead to a better adoption of government information in the public and private sector. We strongly believe that the insights from the past thirteen years in the region of Flanders could speed up processes in other countries that are facing the complexity of raising technical and semantic interoperability.

Building Semantic Knowledge Graphs from (Semi-)Structured Data: A Review

“…This discrepancy could be due to the nature of the problem and solution and the extent of the work undertaken. For example, the work by Buyle et al [75] (#6) uses a virtualisation-based approach; hence, there is no need for RDF transformation; this could apply to other tasks such as ontology modelling, data cleaning, and enrichment. A lack of tasks such as evaluation, versioning, and validation, however, is largely connected to the focus and completeness of the work.…”

Digital Archiving of Archaeological Resources in Flanders (Belgium): a brief review

“…The metadata are somewhat interoperable since they are available as JSON at a dereferenceable URI (I1). They feature links to other metadata such as the Flemish Central Address Database (Buyle et al 2019) and ISO country codes (I3). The controlled vocabularies used in Archaeoportal, like most vocabularies used by Flanders Heritage, are published as SKOS-data (Mortier et al 2017) at the Flanders Heritage Thesaurus (I2).…”

A Sustainable Method for Publishing Interoperable Open Data on the Web

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“…This amounts to €740 million in labour costs" [9]. For this reason, and motivated to foster safe and efficient railway transportation operations, the European Agency for Railways (ERA) manages and publishes different base registries (some of them as open data) [12,26,27] containing valuable information related to the European railway infrastructure. These data may be re-used by the different stakeholders of the railway domain to improve their services through innovative data powered applications.…”