The Project

Linked ISPRA is a project for development and use of the methods aimed at the production and publication of Linked Open Data in accordance with the standards indicated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Following the development of the “Open Data” at an international level and the transposition into Italian legislation of the relevant EU directives, all Public Administrations (PAs), and therefore ISPRA as well, should comply with the new regulatory obligations. To this end, the Italian Digital Agenda, a provision issued by the Italian Government aiming at fostering economic recovery in our country, envisaged its open data initiative for the PAs and assigned to AGID – Agency for Digital Italy – the task of coordinating a National Working Group to draw up a “draft” to which all PAs should refer for the publication of their data by virtue of article 52 of Legislative Decree, no. 82 of 7 March 2005 as amended by article 9 of Decree Law no. 179/2012.

The draft is described in the document “Italian National Guidelines for the Valorization of Public Sector Information” made by the already mentioned Working Group (to which ISPRA has, however, made its own contribution)

Linked ISPRA project was set up taking into consideration ISPRA’s relevant digital data heritage and consistently with the spirit and contents of the Agency for Digital Italy. Its goal is to develop a production process for Linked Open Data (LOD) starting from a significant series of datasets and aiming at creating internal competence on the method of publication according to Resource Description Framework (RDF).

The datasets taken into consideration concern for example the following topics:

– Data buoy network and its associated meteorological data (real time)
– Tide gauge network and its associated meteorological data (real time)
– Repertory of mitigation measures for national soil protection
– Land consumption indicators
– Urban area indicators

Finally, it must be highlighted that Linked ISPRA project uses only open source software architecture.
In the future, it is envisaged that datasets published as cartographic web services will be integrated into the Linked ISPRA platform.