A collaborative-oriented middleware for structuring information to open government data

Even after the consolidation of the Open Government Data (OGD) movement and the existence of successful initiatives all around the globe, the dissemination of report-like documents as a primary way to information disclosure is still a concern. In this context, transparency web sites appear as distributed silos of documents with heterogeneous and often unstructured data, in which the information provided is mainly through HTML and PDF formats. Although they seem to be the preferred formats to disclose data, they lack the machine-readability feature advocated by OGD. This concern is easily addressed with the use of current OGD portals which provide a straightforward manner to fully implement public openness with data; thus, government work processes should be redesigned to consider the OGD principles from data creation. However, some time will lag until cultural transformations make data really open. This paper proposes an architecture composed of a collaborative-oriented middleware for structuring information in the "as is" format while governments are prepared to fully comply with OGD. We describe all the main components through an implementation point of view. With the likely use of this architecture, we provide society with a way to press for opening data before governments do.