Towards a methodology for publishing Linked Open Statistical Data

The number of open government initiatives and directives around the globe with focused interest on publishing large amounts of data on the Web as “open” is increasing rapidly in the recent years. Opening up data aims for citizens, scientists and organizations to easily access, discover and exploit the data and consequently to benefit out of them. As a result, there has been an emerging need of integrating and representing those data in transparent and reusable ways, with high degree of interoperability which will further facilitate the discovery of new connections and insights by linking data coming from disperse sources. Statistical data published either by government bodies or by national statistical authorities are used for policy and decision making purposes, as they present important socioeconomic indicators. In this paper, we present a generic methodology describing the basic steps and overall model to publish statistical data coming from tabular data sources or relational databases as Linked Open Data.