National Budget as Linked Open Data: New Tools for Supporting the Sustainability of Public Finances

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper is meaningful as a visualization of complex public data.

Major Reviews

The research topic and conclusion are not clear. Therefore, the following must be added.

1) This paper is like a report explaining the tools to visualize data released by the country. therefore

   - Research topics, methodologies, and conclusions should be clearly presented.

   - The research frame should be presented so that it is possible to grasp at a glance what this paper is pursuing.

2) It should be clear how the results of usage statistics presented in Section 4 Results relate to this paper.

3) The meaning of Figure 5 presented in Section 5 Discussion is unclear.

4) Section 6 'Related work' is difficult to know how it relates to this paper.

5) The conclusion of Section 7 should be based on the contents discussed in Chapters 3-6.

Minor Reviews

See the following paper.

1) Port Digitalization with Open Data: Challenges, Opportunities, and Integrations

  by Tommi Inkinen , Reima Helminen and Janne Saarikoski

  J. Open Innov. Technol. Mark. Complex. 2019, 5(2), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc5020030 - 16 May 2019

2) Problem-Solving Design-Platform Model Based on the Methodological Distinctiveness of Service Design

  by Youngok Jeon

  J. Open Innov. Technol. Mark. Complex. 2019, 5(4), 78; https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc5040078 - 05 Oct 2019

3) About relationship between business text patterns and financial performance in corporate data

  by BangRae Lee, Jun-Hwan Park, Leenam Kwon, Young-Ho Moon, YoungHo Shin, GyuSeok Kim and Han-joon Kim

  J. Open Innov. Technol. Mark. Complex. 2018, 4(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.1186/s40852-018-0080-9 (registering DOI) - 02 Feb 2018

4) Improved Differential Evolution Algorithm to Solve the Advertising Method Selection Problem

  by Malichan Thongkham and Tassin Srivarapongse

  J. Open Innov. Technol. Mark. Complex. 2019, 5(3), 61; https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc5030061 - 22 Aug 2019

5) Stability Analysis of Company Co-Mention Network and Market Graph Over Time Using Graph Similarity Measures

  by Alexey Faizliev , Vladimir Balash , Vladimir Petrov , Alexey Grigoriev , Dmitriy Melnichuk and Sergei Sidorov

  J. Open Innov. Technol. Mark. Complex. 2019, 5(3), 55; https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc5030055 - 10 Aug 2019

Author Response

First all, thank you very much for your revision. We appreciate each comment and suggestion for improving the article. Below we respond to your revision.

Major Reviews

The research topic and conclusion are not clear. Therefore, the following must be added.

1) This paper is like a report explaining the tools to visualize data released by the country. therefore

   - Research topics, methodologies, and conclusions should be clearly presented.

   - The research frame should be presented so that it is possible to grasp at a glance what this paper is pursuing.

The paper tries to demonstrate the utility of using both semantic web technologies and visualizations for supporting the sustainability of public finances, when a crisis scenario is the context of the nation. Even though we endorse points of criticism, mainly because our hypothesis is loosely demonstrate, we consider that our proposal is a first step in a pathless approach for analysis of tools that support sustainable public finances.

In terms of research frame, we try to adjust our approach trough design science research method, which is based on design and construct the reality, instead of explain it.

2) It should be clear how the results of usage statistics presented in Section 4 Results relate to this paper.

The goal is to put in perspective statistics about the common usage of the tool, in comparison with the period when there was the social outbreak. 

3) The meaning of Figure 5 presented in Section 5 Discussion is unclear.

We try to explain a hypothetical cycle of budget redistribution, under the hypothesis of the usage of visualization tools, supporting the legislation process in an agile way

4) Section 6 'Related work' is difficult to know how it relates to this paper.

There are similar tools or projects in the world, mainly because it’s not altogether a novel tool 

5) The conclusion of Section 7 should be based on the contents discussed in Chapters 3-6.

We have adapted the content for improving the coherence between the conclusions and the rest of the article.

Minor Reviews

We appreciate the referenced papers, and obviously we are going to take in consideration the suggestions for improving the article. Indeed, to date we have included at least 4 new papers from mdpi journals.

Reviewer 2 Report

The budget transparency is one of critical public finance topics and any information on it can be important. However, this article is rather problematic. It lacks methodology part (research goal is not explicitly defined, methods not introduced). It also lacks good quality literature review – moreover, the way of referencing to sources in many cases (web page only) is more than problematic. And it lacks good quality conclusions.

The paper focuses especially on technical description of the system – I am not sure, if such approach suits to the Sustainability Journal (or do not feel so). Really short part of the text deals with results – but only this part is directly related to the Journal focus (“Sustainability provides an advanced forum for studies related to sustainability and sustainable development”).

The title National Budget Law as Linked Open Data is not well formulated – the word “law” should be omitted. The paper is too fragmented.

Author Response

First all, thank you very much for your revision. We appreciate each comment and suggestion for improving the article. Below we respond to your revision.

The budget transparency is one of critical public finance topics and any information on it can be important. However, this article is rather problematic. It lacks methodology part (research goal is not explicitly defined, methods not introduced). It also lacks good quality literature review – moreover, the way of referencing to sources in many cases (web page only) is more than problematic. And it lacks good quality conclusions.

Now we have describe explicitly our research goal in the introduction. We add also that, as method of validation we develop an argument based on a use case in a crisis context, supported by statistics of usage.

We have referenced most journal article works, however, most of similar cases or technologies must be referenced by URI, mainly because these are non academic resources.

The paper focuses especially on technical description of the system – I am not sure, if such approach suits to the Sustainability Journal (or do not feel so). Really short part of the text deals with results – but only this part is directly related to the Journal focus (“Sustainability provides an advanced forum for studies related to sustainability and sustainable development”).

We think that our proposal is in concordance to journal aims. For instance, from instructions for authors we cite:

“...It publishes reviews, regular research papers, communications and short notes, and there is no restriction on the length of the papers.”

The sustainability concept provides a wide variety of topics for development, research and innovation, the fiscal sustainability included.

The title National Budget Law as Linked Open Data is not well formulated – the word “law” should be omitted. The paper is too fragmented.

We think that  is relevant to highlight that we are simplifying the complexity of a large and intricate law, these is the main reason for the “law” word in the title. However, we appreciate your suggestion for improving the paper, so we will remove the word law of title.

Reviewer 3 Report

The submission proposes a Semantic Web tool that visualizes the national budget and provides graphic representations the Chilean budget law published annually and their execution by each state agency. The authors present the processes for consuming open data and how this data is published to Linked Open Data. Before that the data harvesting process is exposed, and also a brief review of the data visualization criteria used.

Below, I list the main issues that I find with the submission.
1. Is there the code of the tool (including harvesting scripts) published?
2. Is there somewhere National Budget Ontology published? There is no information about the ontology, ie. how many classes or properties are there?
3. There is no strict information in which the RDF data shape format is used. I guess that it is ShEx.
4. Does the presented dataset support 5-star deployment scheme for Open Data? Do you provide links to other services? If yes, to which?
5. I am surprised that you do not mention about different representations that are supported in the tool, eg. N-Triples, JSON, Notation 3, RDF/XML, HTML+RDFa, CSV. By the way the content that is in Notation3 actually is in Turtle, because there is no logic rules.

There are also minor problems that I list below.
1. Lack of consistency in referring to W3C recommendations. Sometimes the authors add it to References (eg. [10]), sometimes they add it to footnote (eg. 9). I know that the second group is about ontologies and/or vocabularies but there are W3C Recommendations that describe them.
2. There is a big mess in the spaces next to footnotes and cites.
3. Please update the references, eg. in [7] you use RDF 1.0, and the current version is 1.1.

Author Response

First all, thank you very much for your revision. We appreciate each comment and suggestion for improving the article. Below we respond to your revision.

The submission proposes a Semantic Web tool that visualizes the national budget and provides graphic representations the Chilean budget law published annually and their execution by each state agency. The authors present the processes for consuming open data and how this data is published to Linked Open Data. Before that the data harvesting process is exposed, and also a brief review of the data visualization criteria used.

Below, I list the main issues that I find with the submission.

1. Is there the code of the tool (including harvesting scripts) published? 

No, lamentably the code of visualization tool is not open mainly by security issues. In addition, a specific development such as this tool, just apply to chilean budget model, which makes hard the reuse..

2. Is there somewhere National Budget Ontology published? There is no information about the ontology, ie. how many classes or properties are there? 

We have published as footnote the current URI of vocabulary, however we are working for publishing soon the ontology under our conventional format, such as: http://datos.bcn.cl/ontologies/bcn-norms/doc/index.es.html

3. There is no strict information in which the RDF data shape format is used. I guess that it is ShEx. 

It’s true. We have done the corrections in the paper, and now we mention explicitly that we use ShEx.

4. Does the presented dataset support 5-star deployment scheme for Open Data? Do you provide links to other services? If yes, to which? 

The wide dataset yes. The budget knowledge graph is a part of the RDF knowledge graph of the Library of Chilean National Congress. This big knowledge graph has among others, information about persons (linked in cases to wikidata), places (linked to dbpedia) and legal norms. Although the main link is through the usage of owl:sameAs, we also use types from dbpedia, wikidata and properties of a lot of vocabularies and standard ontologies. Some examples are:

A person: http://datos.bcn.cl/recurso/persona/404

A country: http://datos.bcn.cl/recurso/pais/argentina

5. I am surprised that you do not mention about different representations that are supported in the tool, eg. N-Triples, JSON, Notation 3, RDF/XML, HTML+RDFa, CSV. By the way the content that is in Notation3 actually is in Turtle, because there is no logic rules. 

We don’t mention all the formats mainly because are technically provided by our RDF triplestore mixed with our linked data frontend. In this way, we think that does not represents a relevant aspect of the development. In addition, we have published the annual dumps of data in n-triples format.

There are also minor problems that I list below.

1. Lack of consistency in referring to W3C recommendations. Sometimes the authors add it to References (eg. [10]), sometimes they add it to footnote (eg. 9). I know that the second group is about ontologies and/or vocabularies but there are W3C Recommendations that describe them. 

It’s true. All this was solved in the current version of paper.

2. There is a big mess in the spaces next to footnotes and cites. Solved.
3. Please update the references, eg. in [7] you use RDF 1.0, and the current version is 1.1. Solved.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

5) The conclusion of Section 7 should be based on the contents discussed in Chapters 3-6.

We have adapted the content for improving the coherence between the conclusions and the rest of the article.

=> I couldn't find the Revised content. There seems to be no modification except for the references.

Author Response

Once again, thank you very much for your revision. We appreciate each comment and suggestion for improving the article, and please apologize if our last response did not meet your expectations. Below we respond to your revision.

We have done the following changes related to your comments and suggestions:

• A major restructuring of the document. Now, the Related Work section is following to Introduction. In the introduction section we bring a more comprehensive connection among the technical solution and the rest of the paper. All these changes are highlighted in green or yellow.
• We improve the Conclusions section, gathering the key points of each developed section.
• We include and use most references related to the paper topic.

Reviewer 2 Report

Now it is much more cleart what authors want to achieve with this paper. Two suggestions:

a/ think about the title of the paper, does it represent the contents well?

b/ I propose to re-structure the text. What authors deliver is close to the case study with focus on technical solutions - the methodology could be adjusted to this method "rules". In any case for example part 6 should be in the beginning of the paper and not in the end. Conclusions should be improved - what is the contribution of this case to the state of knowledge on the topic?

Author Response

Once again, thank you very much for your revision. We appreciate each comment and suggestion for improving the article, and please apologize if our last response did not meet your expectations completely. Below we respond to your revision.

For A suggestion) 

We think that the title describes the proposal of the paper. Can you give us a suggestion for change it?

For B suggestion)

It’s true that the Related Work section is best placed at the beginning, thanks by the suggestion. We have reformulated the conclusions, and articulated in a best form our method, described at the end of Introduction section.

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

As a result of reviewing this paper, I accept it as a case study report.