National Budget as Linked Open Data: New Tools for Supporting the Sustainability of Public Finances

Abstract

This paper presents the visualization of national budget, a tool based on Semantic Web technologies that shows by graphic representations the Chilean budget law published annually, and their execution by each state agency. We describe the processes for consuming open data from the Budget National Agency, and how this data is transformed and published to linked open data, based on a National Budget Ontology. Although similar initiatives have been developed on transparency and public budget around the world, we consider that there is no previous experience showing optimized access mechanisms both for human and machine readable, providing in each case the highest level of aggregation, granularity and interoperability, making it understandable and easy to process complex data and legislation. As part of our analysis, we describe a recent scenario of usage in the context of the socio-political crisis in Chile, where we discuss the possible impact of the linked open dataset and data visualizations for distribution and control of funds, on the premise that this type of tools can support the decision making and sustainability of public finances. Finally, we present the results of our budget knowledge graph and the lessons learned during the development, allowing to replicate the process and enabling potential uses of the published data in other contexts.