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Linked Data for the International Aid Transparency Initiative

  • Original Article
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Journal on Data Semantics

Abstract

It is widely recognized 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.

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Notes

  1. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ACCRAEXT/Resources/4700790-1217425866038/AAA-4-SEPTEMBER-FINAL-16h00.

  2. http://www.aidtransparency.net/.

  3. http://iatistandard.org/schema/.

  4. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=TABLE1.

  5. A full example of an IATI activity element can be found in an online appendix to this paper at https://github.com/KasperBrandt/IATI2LOD/raw/master/PaperAppendix/online_appendix.

  6. In Sect.4.2, we show how free text elements such as these are processed in the IATI Linked Data model.

  7. An example XML file for the “DFID” organisation can be found in the online Appendix https://github.com/KasperBrandt/IATI2LOD/raw/master/PaperAppendix/online_appendix.

  8. http://iatistandard.org/103/codelists/. An example of the XML file for the “Aid Type" codelist is shown in the online appendix.

  9. http://iatiregistry.org/registry-api.

  10. http://5stardata.info/.

  11. http://iatiregistry.org/.

  12. http://www.govtrack.us.

  13. http://wiki.iatistandard.org/tools/linked_data/start.

  14. http://dublincore.org.

  15. http://semantic-mediawiki.org.

  16. http://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu/demo/stable/supremeCourt/demo-10016-portal.html.

  17. http://www.guardian.co.uk/data/series/google-data-visualisation-competition.

  18. http://iatistandard.org/.

  19. http://oipa.openaidsearch.org/.

  20. The namespace ‘iati:’ will be used in this document. In practice, we have used the http://purl.org/collections/iati/ as a namespace for the Linked Data model. Also, in this case, ‘iati-’ is stripped from the element.

  21. We here use Turtle notation listing subject, predicate and object: http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/.

  22. http://www.aidinfolabs.org/category/tools/people

  23. ‘iati-’ is stripped from this element.

  24. We did not further model datetimes as xsd literals or model them as resources. Although they could be used for further linking, the user needs did not call for these types of date-time resources, nor did we find them in the linked datasets. At a later stage these could be further enriched.

  25. See online appendix

  26. http://www.iatiregistry.org/api/rest/dataset/[dataset].

  27. The VoID file is found at http://tinyurl.com/l8hvd97.

  28. http://www.w3.org/TR/void/.

  29. http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-primer/.

  30. The PROV namespace is http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#.

  31. http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos.

  32. http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/.

  33. http://www.foaf-project.org/.

  34. http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-regorg/.

  35. www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/.

  36. http://creativecommons.org/ns.

  37. http://semanticweb.org/wiki/DOAP.

  38. http://fadyart.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=121&Itemid=68.

  39. http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/CR-vocab-data-cube-20130625/.

  40. http://www.iatiregistry.org/api/.

  41. http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/.

  42. http://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html.

  43. https://github.com/RDFLib.

  44. http://cliopatria.swi-prolog.org.

  45. https://gist.github.com/practicalparticipation/5684302.

  46. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-international-development.

  47. http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/country_names_and_code_elements.htm.

  48. http://wifo5-03.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/factbook/sparql.

  49. The SPARQL query itself is specified at https://gist.github.com/KasperBrandt/6106898.

  50. http://dbpedia.org/sparql.

  51. This SPARQL query is available at https://gist.github.com/KasperBrandt/6106928.

  52. http://api.geonames.org/search?.

  53. http://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html.

  54. http://worldbank.270a.info/sparql.

  55. http://oecd.270a.info/.

  56. http://datahub.io/dataset/bfs-linked-data.

  57. http://ecb.publicdata.eu/.

  58. http://data.fao.org/.

  59. http://transparency.270a.info/sparql.

  60. The ‘AN’ code has since been added.

  61. http://iati2lod.appspot.com/applications.

  62. https://developers.google.com/appengine/.

  63. http://jinja.pocoo.org/.

  64. https://developers.google.com/chart/.

  65. Available at https://gist.github.com/KasperBrandt/6107184.

  66. See http://iati2lod.appspot.com/applications/general?graph=country-hdi.

  67. http://worldbank.270a.info/sparql.

  68. http://api.worldbank.org/countries/[country_code]/indicators/[indicator].

  69. https://gist.github.com/KasperBrandt/6107120.

  70. https://gist.github.com/KasperBrandt/6107282.

  71. http://support.iatistandard.org/entries/21431418-Budgets-and-Planned-Disbursements

  72. A landing page is available at http://datahub.io/dataset/activity/iati-as-linked-data.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Tim Davies for his help on the Linked Data model and general explanations of the IATI model. We thank Christophe Guéret and Paul Groth for their feedback on the model. Finally, we thank Siem Vaessen and Vincent van ’t Westende for their thoughts on and explanations of the IATI model.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Karel S. Brandt

  2. Faculty of Sciences, The Network Institute, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Victor de Boer

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  1. Karel S. Brandt
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Correspondence to Victor de Boer.

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Brandt, K.S., de Boer, V. Linked Data for the International Aid Transparency Initiative. J Data Semant 4, 187–211 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13740-014-0048-2

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