In August 2013, VU Msc. student Kasper Brandt finished his thesis on developing, implementing and testing a Linked Data model for the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Now, more than a year later, that work was accepted for publication in the Journal on Data Semantics. We are very happy with this excellent result.

IATI is a multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to improve the transparecy of development aid and to that end developed an open standard for the publication of aid information. Hundreds of NGOs and governments have registered to the IATI registry by publishing their aid activities in this XML standard. Taking the IATI model as an input, we have created a Linked Data model based on requirements elicitated from qualitative interviews using an iterative requirements engineering methodology. We have converted the IATI open data from a central registry to Linked Data and linked it to various other datasets such as World Bank indicators and DBPedia information. This dataset is made available for re-use at http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/iati .

To demonstrate the added value of this Linked Data approach, we have created several applications which combine the information from the IATI dataset and the datasets it was linked to. As a result, we have shown that creating Linked Data for the IATI dataset and linking it to other datasets give new valuable insights in aid transparency. Based on actual information needs of IATI users, we were able to show that linking IATI data adds significant value to the data and is able to fulfill the needs of IATI users.

The applications and documentation are found at http://iati2lod.appspot.com/

The Web interface to the ClioPatria triple store is found at http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/iati

SPARQL endpoint: http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/iati/sparql/

A draft of the paper can be found here.