Really Opened Government Data: A Collaborative Transparency at Sight

Transparency initiatives are increasingly present at all levels of government, making volume and variety of data grow as governmental institutions wish to make their administration more open. In this context, transparency portals appear as large silos of documents with heterogeneous and often unstructured data, in which the information provided is mainly through PDF, HTML, Excel spreadsheets or other print-like format. Although they allow comfortable reading to humans, these documents fail to provide a deep, integrated and multidimensional data analysis, which would allow citizens the effective use of transparency. We hence present a work in progress to structure this information and to allocate them into repositories that comply with Open Government Data principles to provide citizens with the power of machine analysis, indiscriminate and independent technology data access. We describe a collaborative framework that engages users in capturing and transforming unstructured information into machine-readable datasets.