Hack Bulgarian open data with GraphDB about companies and public spending
Ontotext will be challenging the teams that will take part in the #BG10xEU Hackathon ‘10 Years of Bulgaria in the EU’ on 12 and 13 May. The Hackathon will take place at Sofia Tech Park as part of the Sofia Science Festival.
Among the main cases such as Education and Environmental sustainability, participants of all ages will have the chance to reveal hidden links through open data from the Bulgarian Trade Register combined with the Bulgarian Public Procurements and illuminate suspicious relationships in Bulgaria from the last decade.
The Organizers of the Hackathon will reward the winning team with a big prize of 10 000 Bulgarian Lev.
In an age of fake news, censorship and questions about how politicians and others manipulate data to fit their needs, increased transparency in this area has the potential to serve as a powerful antidote, as well as to improve Bulgaria’s corruption rating in both international and domestic plan.
By integrating heterogeneous data from various sources and discovering new relationships with the help of a graph database, information is placed into context and acquires new meaning.
Think of a person sitting on the board of directors of a dozen companies, or the most successful contractors of public tenders – such scenarios are of potential value for investigative journalists, market analysis organizations, and technically-skilled visionaries.
In both cases, GraphDB allows much more analytics than opening the raw data in Excel. For instance, one can easily get statistics about groups of companies that are frequent recipients of publicly funded contracts. This is possible because the data from the Public Procurements is integrated into a single graph with the Trade Register data, which allows grouping companies by ownership, addresses, overlapping directors, etc.
While back in March the brilliant Datathon participants had to convert and integrate the data themselves, with the mentors’ help, at the #BG10xEU Hackathon, Ontotext will be providing data from the Bulgarian Trade Register and the Bulgarian Public Procurement. These data sets will be converted to better ontologies, hosted at better URLs, and loaded in the signature graph database GraphDB with some sample queries to get the teams’ data analysis started. The technology mentors will answer the team’s questions about datasets and models and will help with writing queries.
Apart from the big prize, Ontotext will award vouchers for training in semantic technologies to the Hackathon team whose case we find most beneficial, interesting, and technically savvy.
The data from the public datasets referred above will be officially published as Linked Open Data at http://data.ontotext.com just before the Hackathon. After publishing the Panama Leaks data a year ago, Ontotext will make the next steps towards making it available for analysis data of high social interest.
Anyone interested in exploring the data and preparing for the Hackathon can contact us.
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext