# National Budget as Linked Open Data: New Tools for Supporting the Sustainability of Public Finances
## 1 Introduction  
We consider the concept of transparency as the information opening from the government about public resources management. In this way, transparency is negatively correlated with corruption and positively correlated with economic development [1], and at the same time, existing published research of the relationship between budget transparency and fiscal performance, confirms the expectations that higher budget transparency is associated with smaller budget deficits and lower public debt [2], which is also known as fiscal sustainability. Although not without challenges [3], for a number of years governments are adopting the use of open data in the public administration, as a mechanism of transparency, making it a practice increasingly adopted by institutions of different spheres [4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10], and being of greater citizen interest those related to the expenditure of public funds, mainly because these are financed by taxes. In fact, the open data publishing can reduce corruption by increasing accountability and strengthening democracy, allowing voters to make better informed decisions [11].  
In Chile, the National Budget Agency--Direccion de Presupuestos (DIPRES) ([[https://www.dipres.gob.cl](https://www.dipres.gob.cl)]([https://www.dipres.gob.cl](https://www.dipres.gob.cl)))--publishes yearly a set of countable processable XML files with the national budget description, and it publishes monthly an update of the execution in detail for each public body. The content of these files is defined by the budget law [12] (a long and complex document withhundreds of pages), where it is detailed how the public funds are distributed during the year in Chile. The budget law, unlike other laws, is discussed annually in the National Congress, and attracts great media interest, since it determines in practice the government priorities, detailing the distribution of expenses and income that are required by the organisms and programs of the state. This complexity of government structure is transferred to budget law, what makes the legislative discussion laborious, and at the same time, makes it difficult for citizens to understand.  
In this scenario, the Chilean Library of Congress (BCN) (BCN comes from Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional in Spanish) has developed a tool for making the law understandable, both for legislators and general community, publishing jointly the budget law, a visualization tool ([[https://www.bcn.cl/presupesto](https://www.bcn.cl/presupesto)]([https://www.bcn.cl/presupesto](https://www.bcn.cl/presupesto))) and the data used for their construction as linked open data following the principles exposed by [PERSON] [13], which are based on Resource Description Framework (RDF) [14], the de facto standard in the semantic web.  
In this way, we pretend to provide the next level of transparency for citizens, to offer a useful tool for legislators and to enable new actors such as non-governmental organizations or universities, the empowerment and reuse of public data for control or research studies. That being said, the main goal of this article is to present the technical solution for developing a tool that allows to facilitate the decision making and contributes the implementation of sustainable policies in terms of public finances. For validating our approach, in a first step, similar projects in the world are compared regarding key aspects for promoting transparency usage, then the technical solution is presented with emphasis in linked open data and user interface of the tool, next we describe and compare with previous years the scenario of usage during a political crisis period in Chile, which partially concludes with a set of budgetary reforms that affect the public purse.