Introduction of publicspending.gr!

Greetings all,

As a new member of this nice group, I would initially like to thank you for
inviting me as it is really important for our team and our recent
initiative [1].
Secondly I would like to introduce in brief what we are doing in the
National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in respect to Greek Spending
Data, so that I do not take  much time of the "Preliminary items" Agenda in
today's meeting.

Back in November 2009, the Greek Government took a rather radical and
innovative (for our country) decision to setup an open API through which
all Greek Public Sector transactions were collected and processed. This
initiative was called "Diavgia", the Greek word for Clarity.

Among other transactions Diavgia collects (almost) every decision that has
to do with Greek Public Spending. It is an API, with REST-like
functionality, unfortunately sort of "loosely coupled", with minimum
validation, data consistency and so forth.

During late 2011 our team in NTUA took the decision to extract all these
Spending Decisions and "RDFize" them. We initially had 3 main objectives.
First we wanted to produce the first Greek Government Open Spending Data,
secondly to setup a public SPARQL endpoint and last but not least to
provide simple visualizations to the Greek Citizens in order for them to
see "Where Their Taxes Go", through intuitive charts (including the "famous
bubble charts" which really made the difference...).
All initial 3 objectives, as you will see in our website, have been to a
great extent fulfilled and we are now in the process of developing more
functionality and finalizing some tasks like CKAN dataset upload, linking
with similar datasets (through owl:sameAs constructs mainly on the CPV -
Common Procurement Vocabulary - level) and uploading a chunk of our
"Business Registry" in Opencorporates.com.

During the last few weeks we are in the process of modeling our 2nd
ontology (the first one being what we call the "Spending Ontology", an
extension of the data.gov.uk "Payments Ontology"). This 2nd ontology has to
do with the modeling of the Organizations (practically Payers and Payees)
in our Business Registry (which fortunately has gone quite large).

One very interesting issue, that we are actually quite happy about, is the
fact that trying to catch up these days with all the work of the GLD WG, I
saw in the last week's Minutes (among others things), Phil asking:
Phil Archer <http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/wiki/Phil_Archer>: Do we know of an
implementation of ORG other than UK government organograms?

So after some discussions with the team, this morning we took the decision
to model this new ontology as an extension of the ORG not only in order to
see "how things work" but also in order to try to provide another ORG
implementation on Open Data and test it.

That's all for now, I will be with you in today's teleconference -
hopefully Zakim won't pick me as a Scribe, since I haven't done it before
:-)

I do hope this initial information was interesting for you - see you soon.

Best,

Agis

[1] http://publicspending.medialab.ntua.gr/en/about.php