Linked Open Economy: Take Full Advantage of Economic Data

Abstract

For decades, information related to public finances was out of reach for most of the people. Gradually, public budgets and tenders are becoming openly available and global initiatives promote fiscal transparency and open product and price data. But, the poor quality of economic open data undermines their potential to answer interesting questions (e.g. efficiency of public funds and market processes). Linked Open Economy (LOE) has been developed 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. LOE approach is extensively used to enrich open economic data ranging from budgets and spending to prices. Developers, professionals, public administrations and any other interested party use and customize LOE model 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.

Keywords: Open Government Data (OGD), economic data, Linked Open Data (LOD),procurement, public spending,open budgets, open prices, publicspending.net (PSNET), YourDataStories project, BigDataEurope project

JEL Classification: C89,E69,L15,L86,C81