This draft report describes the results of the Organization Ontology Linked Government Data Pilot for the Greek Ministry of  Administrative Reform and eGovernance, which was carried out in the context of Action 1.1 of the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) Programme of the European Commission in the period January 2013 – March 2013.

 The pilot can be accessed online at http://org.testproject.eu/MAREG/.

Pilot participants: Greek Ministry of Administrative Reform and eGovernance (MAREG), Agenzia Per L’Italia Digitale, ISA Programme

National legislation in Greece, the UK and other EU Member States makes it mandatory for all public administration agencies to create and open-up their organisation charts (a.k.a) organograms, thus making openly available the organizational structure of an agency, the posts within that agency and the person per post (including also contact information).

In Greece, up to now, this information is published in html pages, in textual format (e.g. in pdf files) or as pictures (e.g. in jpg or png format), which hampers its reuse. Good practice from the UK government show the way towards publishing the organongrams of public agencies in machine readable formats, thus enabling their reuse and allowing for flexible visualisations of the information.

There are two reasons for wanting to model government structure:

1. transparency – so that citizens can see how their government is organised and how responsibility is divided;
2. government efficiency – organisation charts help people within government find the individual or organisation they need to deal with.

The latter point holds at all levels of government from local to international. Someone in a role in one EU Member State, for example, can quickly identify their opposite number in another Member State thus facilitating greater cooperation and sharing of solutions to common problems.

The pilot demonstrates that:

• the use of common vocabularies and URIs as common identifiers make fragmented and heterogeneous organisational data interoperable and linkable, within the same country but also across borders;
• how the use of standard Web interfaces (such as HTTP(S) and SPARQL) can greatly simplify the use of data representing the internal structure of public administration and public posts;
• an increased use of this data leading to improved quality of address data, e.g. by crowd-sourcing improvements to data quality;
• opening the possibility of developing new data-driven services and applications, thus creating value  and ROI from the data.

 Find more practical information and examples about Linked Data

• Organization Ontology
• Registered Organization Vocabulary
• Case study on how Linked Data is transforming eGovernment
• 10 Rules for persistent URIs
• How to describe organizations in RDF using the Registered Organization vocabulary
• SEMIC webpage on Joinup

Nature of documentation: Technical report