The eLOD Ontology: Modeling Economic Open Data

Abstract

For decades, valuable economic data was out of reach for most of the people. Gradually, public budgets and tenders are becoming openly available and global initiatives promote financial transparency and data innovation. But, yet the poor quality of open data undermines their potential to answer interesting questions (e.g. efficiency of public funds and market processes). The eLOD ontology has been initiated as a top-level conceptualization that interlinks the publicly available economic open data by modelling the flows incorporated in public procurement together with the market process to address complex policy issues. This paper presents the basic aspects of eLOD ontology in interlinking and querying diverse open data ranging from budget execution to prices. Already, eLOD ontology is used by two EU projects in order to to develop new systems, to enable information exchange between systems, to integrate data from heterogeneous sources and to publish open data related to economic activities.