Towards the Development of Interoperable Open Data Ecosystems: Harnessing the Technical, Semantic, Legal, and Organizational (TSLO) Interoperability Framework

The development of ecosystems around open government data in order to generate social and economic value from them requires on one hand the existence of a critical mass of them and on the other hand some level of homogeneity and interoperability among the numerous portals and websites providing them which enables their combined exploitation. This paper presents the Technical, Semantic, Legal, and Organizational (TSLO) Interoperability Framework, a conceptual tool designed to provide a structured evaluation of the interoperability capabilities of open government data infrastructures. It incorporates the technical, semantic, legal, and organizational aspects of open government data provision, which are crucial for developing interoperability between open data portals and websites, which enables the generation of high levels of social and economic value from them, so it can pave the way for creating open data ecosystems for this purpose. We are then applying this TSLO framework to examine from this perspective the open data infrastructures of the Greek local government administration institutions of all three layers of it (decentralized, regional, and municipal). In particular, we examine the open government data portals and websites of the local Greek governments and provide a detailed analysis of them concerning the fore aspects of the framework. This first application of TSLO reveals not only the low participation of Greek local government institutions in the open data movement, and especially of the municipalities, where only 8 out of 332 municipalities provide open data on their portals or websites but also the inconsistent implementation of this, especially with respect to the use of semantic technologies as well as the legal frameworks under which the open data provided. Finally, we propose the automation of the TSLO framework to facilitate the evaluation and standardization of open local government data infrastructure and expand the study to identify and address barriers to open data provision.