d2kg: An Integrated Ontology for Knowledge Graph-based Representation of Government Decisions and Acts

Tracking #: 3455-4669

Authors: 
Konstantinos Serderidis
Ioannis Konstantinidis
Nick Bassiliades
Georgios Meditskos
Vassilios Peristeras

Responsible editor: 
Karl Hammar

Submission type: 
Ontology Description
Abstract: 
To implement Open Governance a crucial element is the efficient use of the big amounts of open data produced in the public domain. Public administration is a rich source of data and potentially new knowledge. It is a data intensive sector producing vast amounts of information encoded in government decisions and acts, published nowadays on the World Wide Web. The knowledge shared on the Web is mostly made available via semi-structured documents written in natural language. To exploit this knowledge, technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction, Data mining and the Semantic Web could be used, embedding into documents explicit semantics based on formal knowledge representations such as ontologies. Knowledge representation can be made possible by the deployment of Knowledge Graphs, collections of interlinked representations of entities, events or concepts, based on underlying ontologies. This paper presents a new ontology d2kg [d(iavgeia) 2(to) k(nowledge) g(raph)] integrating in a unique way standard EU ontologies, core and controlled vocabularies to enable exploitation of publicly available data from government decisions and acts published on the Greek platform Diavgeia with the aim to facilitate data sharing, re-usability and interoperability. It demonstrates a characteristic example of a Knowledge Graph based representation of government decisions and acts, highlighting its added value to respond to real practical use cases for the promotion of transparency, accountability and public awareness. The developed d2kg ontology in owl is accessible at: http://w3id.org/d2kg, as well as documented in html at: http://w3id.org/d2kg/documentation.
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Tags: 
Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Minor Revision

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
By Harshvardhan J. Pandit submitted on 17/May/2023
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

I am satisfied with the changes made to the article (information on reasoner used) and resource (human-readable documentation) and recommend it be accepted subject to other reviewers agreeing their issues have been addressed.

Review #2
By Eva Blomqvist submitted on 05/Jul/2023
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

Thank you for submitting a revision of this paper. Many of the issues in the previous version have indeed been clarified now, the documentation has been improved (including licensing etc.), and the ontology is available online at a permanent URI (it seems there was some temporary unavailability of the previous link when I tried it, apologies for not checkin it again at another time). In this sense, the ontology submission and description is now clear, and fulfils the requirements of an ontology paper.

However, I am still a bit in doubt regarding the underlying assumptions and motivation behind creating this ontology. It is clear that none of the existing ontologies covers all these things, but one of the arguments of the authors is also that existing ontologies are large and monolithic, while I find also this submission to be exactly that. In fact, the documentation page of the ontology is hardly even readable, since it contains a huge number of “included” external classes (see also comment below), properties, and individuals. In what sense is this ontology less monolithic and more usable and reusable than the ones referenced in the paper? I am not sure. In fact, my guess would be that the impact and reuse of this ontology will be very low, exactly because it is huge and not easy to understand.

In addition, some of the design decisions are still a bit unclear. I do see the point of not importing all these other ontologies, which would make the issue mentioned above even worse, i.e. making the ontology even bigger. However, the way the authors have reused parts of the ontologies, i.e. by simply replicating some parts of a specific version of the ontology, is not very coherent with respect to the idea of semantic web ontologies. Classes and other elements, and the ontologies themselves, have URIs that can be looked up for a reason - so that more information about them can be found there. Now that parts of that information is replicated inside this ontology, there is an obvious risk of inconsistencies and incoherence. What happens when the other ontology is updated, and the replicated information inside d2kg is no longer the same a the one in the referenced ontology?

Some minor issues still in the paper:
I would suggest to write “documented at: …” rather than “documented in html at:…” in the last sentence of the abstract. You would not normally mention that a web page uses html, since that is obvious, it is the language for representing human readable web pages.

Table 3 - column headings don’t actually reflect the variable names in the query.

I would suggest to put the “Ontology assessment” section before the use case section, since the assessment seems to be more a step in the ontology building process, while the use cases shows the usage after the ontology is finished.