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Ivan Bedini, Feroz Farazi, David Leoni, Juan Pane, Ivan Tankoyeu, Stefano Leucci

takes time, an improvement of the data management methodology, creation of operational tools
and providing a reliable space for sharing. Governments of various countries and administrative
divisions thereof worldwide have nowadays been starting to release a huge quantity of datasets in
the context of the Open Government Data (OGD) movement (Ubaldi, 2013). The movement
became a shared policy after the European Directive no. 2003/98/CE (Public Sector Information
Directive), improved by the Directive no. 2013/37/UE. The first Directive has been transposed in
the Italian regulatory system with the Legislative Decree no. 36/2006 and the second one still
needs to be implemented. The main purpose of the PSI Directive is to enable the so called “data
re-use”, that means “the use by persons or legal entities of documents held by public sector
bodies, for commercial or non-commercial purposes other than the initial purpose within the public
task for which the documents were produced” (Directive 2003/98/EC).
In the context of the Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT), a large, diverse and interesting
collection of datasets are already published as OGD. New datasets are slowly becoming available
and the existing ones are updated whenever needed for the purposes such as correcting mistakes
and adding new data horizontally (as instances) or vertically (as properties). The data catalogue is
2
also linked with the website of the Department of Innovation of the PA . This department governs
the process of opening new data and the dissemination of the so called data culture. This is an
important result to reach both inside and outside of the PAT. People started understanding the
value of publishing high-quality data and the power in the reuse of them. Linking data will highly
foster the value of sharing data. It will also lead to a new kind of data-centric public bodies that will
empower citizens and generate innovative services.
Immense numbers of government datasets could open up new opportunities for application
developers and trigger disruptive business models to come (Ferro & Osella, 2013; Manyika e al.,
2013; Vickery, 2008). While quantity of such datasets is considered as satisfactory enough, quality
(e.g., correctness and vertical completeness) is yet to be improved (Bohm et al., 2012). Moreover,
loosely coupled nature of data is posing challenge in developing applications on top of them.
Therefore, there is a pressing need to leverage this data before putting them in action. To
overcome the issues and fulfil the demand, we made the following contributions in this paper:
I.

The description of the adopted opening procedure as an integral part of the change
management in a public administration.

II.

The implementation of a methodology for generating entity types (Maltese, 2012) out of
published datasets to model data as entities (Giunchiglia, 2012) for facilitating an
integrated, combined and extensible representation.

III.

The implementation of a procedure and the corresponding tool for dealing with
unforeseen data (along with known ones) about an entity, taking into account the
semantics.

IV.

Description of our experience in handling Open Big Data for building life style changing
unprecedented (in the region) applications.

The paper is structured as follows: in Section 2 we present the process that has been put in
place within the PAT and the choices made. In Section 3 we describe the entity type methodology
that we have adopted, helping creating integrated entities. Section 4 shows the automatic creation
of entities matching dataset schemas to the entity types. Section 5 provides a brief description of
open big data approach we are building. In Section 6, we present some applications developed on
top of entities and open big data. Section 7 concludes the paper.

2

http://www.innovazione.provincia.tn.it/opendata (in Italian)

CC: Creative Commons License, 2014.