Piveau: A Large-scale Open Data Management Platform based on Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract

The publication and (re)utilization of Open Data is still facing multiple barriers on technical, organizational and legal levels. This includes limitations in interfaces, search capabilities, provision of quality information and the lack of definite standards and implementation guidelines. Many Semantic Web specifications and technologies are specifically designed to address the publication of data on the web. In addition, many official publication bodies encourage and foster the development of Open Data standards based on Semantic Web principles. However, no existing solution for managing Open Data takes full advantage of these possibilities and benfits. In this paper, we present our solution "Piveau", a fully-fledged Open Data management solution, based on Semantic Web technologies. It harnesses a variety of standards, like RDF, DCAT, DQV, and SKOS, to overcome the barriers in Open Data publication. The solution puts a strong focus on assuring data quality and scalability. We give a detailed description of the underlying, highly scalable, service-oriented architecture, how we integrated the aforementioned standards, and used a triplestore as our primary database. We have evaluated our work in a comprehensive feature comparison to established solutions and through a practical application in a production environment, the European Data Portal. Our solution is available as Open Source.