Insights in Global Public Spending

Abstract

Governments around the globe are opening up public spending data in order to promote transparency and citizen awareness. However, data openness by itself is not enough to guarantee that the data is consumed efficiently and in meaningful ways. In this work public spending data from seven governments, both local and national, with total value almost 1,5 trillion euro, are processed, cleansed and converted to Linked Open Data, following best practices. Namely, the cases of Greece, the UK, the US federal government, Australia, the city of Chicago and the states of Alaska and Massachusetts are considered. Furthermore, the resulting Linked Data are interlinked with external resources and made accessible on a public SPARQL endpoint. A web portal application with several functionalities is deployed in order to make the data mashups understandable and easily consumable.

Keywords: Linked Open Data, government spending, network analysis

JEL Classification: L86, H50, H72, H83