A Linked Open Data-Oriented Sustainable System for Transparency and Open Access to Government Data: A Case Study of the Public’s Response to Women’s Driving in Saudi Arabia

Afnan MuhammadSalh AlSukhayri, Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam, Kawther Saeedi and Muhamad Sheraz Arshed Malik
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Afnan MuhammadSalh AlSukhayri: Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 23443, Saudi Arabia
Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam: Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 23443, Saudi Arabia
Kawther Saeedi: Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 23443, Saudi Arabia
Muhamad Sheraz Arshed Malik: Department of Information Technology, Government College University Faisalabad, Punjab 38000, Pakistan

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 20, 1-26

Abstract: Due to the wide-ranging development of data-oriented sustainable systems in the government and the public sectors, the development of such sustainable systems is replete with potential. The ultimate focus of developing these sustainable systems is to provide citizens with transparency, accountability, awareness as well as a single point of query for asking integrated and smart queries. In view of these benefits, the Saudi government has taken the initiative to publish and develop sustainable open data-oriented information systems. However some major challenges in the Saudi Government Open Data are that the (1) data are published and available in different formats such as Excel sheets, CSV files (Comma Separated Values), images, scanned documents and social media sources such as Twitter, (2) datasets from different government departments are not linked with each other or to existing datasets in Linked Open Data Cloud (even though they have strong links with each other), and (3) there is no SPARQL Endpoint that can be used to pose smart semantic-based queries to Saudi Government Data. This paper is part of an ongoing research project to present a framework that can be used to transfer the government data from different sources to RDF format. The framework can also be used to clean and classify/map the data according to the Saudi Government Ontology. We also describe our approach for semiautomatically linking Saudi Government Datasets with one another as well as with other existing open datasets, thus resulting in the Saudi Linked Open Government Data Cloud (SLOGDC). Finally, taking the topic “Public’s Response to Women’s Driving in Saudi Arabia” as a case study, we demonstrate the SLOGD SPARQL Endpoint as a data-oriented system by executing different queries and analyzing results of these queries. This work also contributes new insights into women’s driving in Saudi Arabia using the SLOGDC, thus suggesting the way forward in shaping policies for decision-making.

Keywords: sustainable systems; linked open data; policy-making; smart queries; machine reasoning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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