Producing and Using Linked Open Government Data in the TWC LOGD Portal

As open government initiatives around the world publish an increasing number of raw datasets, citizens and communities face daunting challenges when organizing, understanding, and associating disparate data related to their interests. Immediate and incremental solutions are needed to integrate, collaboratively manipulate, and transparently consume large-scale distributed data. The Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has developed the TWC LOGD Portal based on Semantic Web principles to support the deployment of Linked Open Government Data. The portal is not only an open source infrastructure supporting Linked Open Government Data production and consumption, but also serves to educate the developers, data curators, managers, and end users that form the growing international open government community. This chapter introduces the informatic challenges faced while developing the portal over the past two years, describes the current design solutions employed by the portal’s LOGD production infrastructure, and concludes with lessons learned and future work.