open.data.al: increasing the utilization of government data in Albania

Open Data practice requires that data are freely available for everyone, laying the foundations for transparency and decision making. Many democratic countries have supported this practice, freeing and facilitating access to their government data. Open Data Albania is a new initiative that embraces the principles of Open Government Data for Albania. This project aims to collect from public offices data on socio-economic indicators, process and publish them based on semantic technologies and Linked Data principles. This work presents the approach we have deployed in publishing governmental data as linked data and the methods implemented to query datasets and visualize the results. In our approach, we aimed for quality of the published open data, designing cases of problems with great interest for the community. Each case is offered in our website as an article accompanied not only with the statistical dataset, but also with graphic visualization and a detailed textual description.