Payments ontology

In 2010 the UK government, as part of its transparency drive, requested that all UK local authorities should publish detailed information on their spending with suppliers (for amounts over £500). The Local eGovernment Standards Body (LeGSB), working with the Local Government Group, developed a recommendation for how that publication should be done and wanted the recommendation to support publication in linked data format. Their vision is that linked data publication would enable the data to be joined to other information about local authorities and about suppliers - supporting normalized comparisons and benchmarking.

Working with Paul Davidson of LeGSB, and sponsored by The National Archive, Epimorphics helped to develop a payments ontology to represent this data together with associated guidelines.

Since payments data is essentially a multi-dimensional table, the ontology is built on the Data Cube vocabulary. However, rather than just apply Data Cube directly we created an extension ontology so that the terminology for the entities and relationships would better match the domain, for example using Payment and ExpenditureLine in place of the generic Slice and Observation. This approach worked extremely well - resulting in something accessible to people familiar with the domain yet compatible with Data Cube tooling.

One of the challenges in modelling payments information is that every publisher has a different way of organizing their expenditure analysis. Typically there is some notion of subjective analysis (what was purchased) and objective analysis (why was it bought, what facility was it spent on) but there might also be budget analysis (which, possibly ring-fenced, budget was used) and multiple-parallel schemes in each category. A great feature of linked data and the open world modelling technique it is based on is that such questions can be left somewhat open. The ontology allows for an open ended set of analysis schemes, each self-describing and organized using the SKOS approach to knowledge organization. This allows the flexibility for councils to publish their analysis as it is meaningful to them but then they or others can map this to shared analysis schemes allowing for benchmarking and cross-council comparisons.

Payments information is only the start. There are great opportunities to use linked data as a flexible, and cost effective route to reporting and aggregation of financial information. To find out more, contact us.