Smart Company Project:
ABB - LBLOD

(Local Decisions as Linked Open Data)

The Agency for Home Affairs (ABB) helps local governments build a sustainable and democratic society. They do so by connecting and strengthening citizens and governance.

What was needed?

Municipalities want to keep their citizens informed about what is being decided. When those decisions can be made publicly available and searchable for citizens and other administrations, it strengthens democracy. To optimize the data quality of those public decisions, ABB turned to Sirus’ data experts for help.

What did Sirus do?

To publish the decisions of a municipal council properly, ABB created a new ecosystem: LBLOD (Local Decisions as Linked Open Data). By publishing the decisions as a web page with linked data in the background, the content of those decisions becomes clearer for humans and (search) machines.

This ecosystem allows citizens to easily see what each decision entails, what the motivations were, who voted and how they voted. This helps, for example, entrepreneurs quickly understand which obligations they need to meet, and enables organizations to easily find which subsidies they are eligible for. This system increases transparency and encourages civic involvement in local decision-making.

Because several software vendors develop tools to manage and publish these decisions, improving the quality of all those software solutions was essential. That’s why Sirus developed a tool that allows software vendors to test the quality of their published decisions. What data is getting through? What do we see? Where does it go wrong? With this tool, the ecosystem can evolve and users get more qualitative and reliable search results.

Ultimately, all decisions are brought together in the Lokaal Beslist application. There, citizens can look up various items per local authority, including decisions and agenda points. Behind all this information is linked data—data that we continuously monitor for quality.

Technicalities of the project

What does the future hold?

On the one hand, ABB has developed an open-source editor with various plug-ins that make decisions smarter by answering questions such as: What location does this relate to? What topic is being discussed? If software vendors integrate this editor into their own systems, their workflows can be significantly accelerated.

Additionally, ABB is exploring whether it’s possible to create a dedicated data source for each local authority. If municipalities can run ABB’s components locally and “harvest” their own decisions, it will enhance reusability. Authorities would then be able to manage their own decisions and re-publish them to the Flemish level.

What’s more, all decisions are linked to the processes of those authorities via the Open Process House (Open Proces Huis). While these are currently separate applications, the aim is to create a unified data ecosystem in the future. That way, as soon as a decision is drafted, it can already be stored and accessed by other applications.

Eventually, the decision tool could retrieve this data locally and enrich the decision with additional insights or context. Then, the possibilities are truly endless.

What did our Sirus developers think?

"For me personally, it was a challenging project as I usually focus more on research and data modeling, and this gave me the opportunity to dive deeper into development. On top of that, I really enjoy talking with different vendors, cities, and people with deep subject matter expertise. It’s a project where you learn a lot and have to think through countless different scenarios. Contributing to such a project makes you feel like you are making the world a bit better."

Brecht Van De Vyvere

Data Analyst at Sirus

What did the customer think?

"At ABB, we collaborate with several partners, including Sirus, who is actively involved in the LBLOD project. The cooperation runs smoothly: Sirus' consultants are flexible, helpful and proactively think along to find solutions. They support not only our internal team, but also local authorities and suppliers. Their expertise in our data model and Ember.js really stood out during the development of the validation tool. That combination of technical expertise and genuine commitment makes Sirus a real asset in this project."

Daan Zwaenepoel Product manager, Agency for Home Affairs