On Modeling Linked Open Statistical Data

A major part ofOpen Dataconcerns statistics such aseconomicandsocial indicators.Statistical dataare structured in a multidimensional manner creatingdata cubes. Recently, National Statistical Institutes andpublic authoritiesadopted the Linked Data paradigm to publish their statistical data on the Web. Many vocabularies have been created toenablemodeling data cubes as RDF graphs, and thus creating Linked Open Statistical Data (LOSD). However, the creation of LOSD remains a demanding task mainly because of modelingchallenges relatedeither to the conceptual definition of the cube, or to the way of modeling cubes as linked data. The aim of this paper is to identify and clarify (a) modeling challenges related to the creation of LOSD and (b) approaches to address them. Towards this end, nine LOSD experts were involved in an interactive feedback collection andconsensus-buildingprocess that was based on Delphi method. We anticipate that the results of this paper will contribute towards the formulation of best practices for creating LOSD, and thus facilitate combining and analyzing statistical data from diverse sources on the Web.