An automatic approach for adapting open government data to linked OD with enhanced visualization and user-friendly query composer

Purpose This study aims to introduce a fully automatic process for publishing and leveraging open government data (OGD) as linked OD (LOD), called the LOD-GePEx for LOD generation, publication and exploitation. It empowers developers to harness open-source data, creating practical and beneficial citizen applications. Design/methodology/approach The LOD-GePEx approach is a three-step process. First, it transforms OGD into LOD, adhering to the four LD principles. Second, it publishes the generated LOD in the OGD portal, following accessibility best practices. Third, it exploits the published LOD through an interface that offers multiple services. In addition, this paper carried out functional and performance tests to prove the proposed approach’s effectiveness and performance. Findings The evaluation phase demonstrated that the LOD-GePEx approach is effective and efficient. It transforms OGD into LOD with exploitation services to enable insightful data analysis for stakeholders without intensive human workloads. Besides, it is generic; it can be used for several data sets and any case study. Research limitations/implications The approach struggles with speed index and interactivity time in resource description framework and LOD publication generation, particularly with large government data sets. However, this work has prioritized the comprehensive exploration of the end-to-end process and handling of diverse data domains. This work implies that adopting this approach will facilitate the publication and exploitation of OGD. Originality/value The proposed approach surpasses the limitations of related works, mainly focusing on particular use cases and manual data linking, which require intensive human workloads and few or no data insights. Besides, the proposed approach is the only approach that addresses the end-to-end process of transforming, publishing and exploiting OGDs as LODs.