Map4Scrutiny – A Linked Open Data Solution for Politicians Interest Registers

Abstract

This paper describes the process and results of providing data from the members of Portuguese Parliament interest registers and the Public Procurement database as Linked Open Data. The two resources are linked by the organizations mentioned in both. The paper focuses on two areas: design, and implementation. The first describes the process of designing an application profile, structuring, and describing the data, and creating shapes in ShEx for validation. The implementation describes the use of OpenRefine to clean and uniformize data, reconcile values into links, map triples from tabular to RDF, and export in RDF Turtle. The exported data is validated against the defined ShEx shapes, published in a Triplestore, and queried with SPARQL. The queries are used to showcase the difference between the sourced data and the resulting linked dataset.