Implementing Automatic Ontology Generation for the New Zealand Open Government Data: An Evaluative Approach

Open Government Initiatives are increasingly gaining momentum and becoming important among developed and developing countries. Open government initiatives purpose is to provide transparency and data reuse. Governments around the globe are increasingly releasing data for public consumption, however, the drawback is that these data are disparate and in heterogeneous formats which makes it challenging to consume the data. This has given rise to a need for a framework that can transform these data into a form that is easily consumable and accessible to stakeholders as well as the general public. This paper introduces the design, implementation and usage of an approach driven by an ontology that captures the knowledge on a subset of data released by the government of New Zealand (NZ). This approach uses datasets from agriculture, and land use to generate ontologies where SPARQL queries are imposed to get the desired results. The implementation and evaluation outcomes demonstrated that the proposed approach is realistic to generate an Ontology Web Language (OWL) triple ontology from the given Comma Separated Value (CSV) datasets. In the future, this approach will further ease the semantic linking process of the multiple ontologies of different domains.