Semantic annotation and publication of linked open data

Nowadays, there has been an increment of open data government initiatives promoting the idea that particular data produced by public administrations (such as public spending, health care, education etc.) should be freely published. However, the great majority of these resources is published in an unstructured format (such as spreadsheets or CSV) and is typically accessed only by closed communities. Starting from these considerations, we propose a semi-automatic experimental methodology for facilitating resource providers in publishing public data into the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, and for helping consumers (companies and citizens) in efficiently accessing and querying them. We present a preliminary method for publishing, linking and semantically enriching open data by performing automatic semantic annotation of schema elements. The methodology has been applied on a set of data provided by the Research Project on Youth Precariousness, of the Modena municipality, Italy. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.