---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/07/Greece-3/
title: Athens to Berlin - PROFILE - Linked Data and Public Spending
---

From the hot, dusty streets of Athens, I trundle in to breezy but baking Thessaloniki on a late-night train... 

<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8005/7581121498_91fd055495_z.jpg" title="Train Athens - Thessaloniki" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />

In the apparent absence of any budget-monitoring or advocacy groups in Greece, a group of programmers are working directly with the Diavgeia data to present it in interesting ways to make it easy for anyone to understand, rehashing the data with data from new sources (criminality rates, population numbers) and archiving it. 

I'm here to meet the team from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki WebScience Master Programme, which aims to monitor in real time all Greek public expenditure.

The team have taken a [Linked Data](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data) approach to combining datasets. New to linked data? Fear not, Professor Ioannis Antoniou from the WebScience Master Program explains, with the aid of some Greek Philosophy what it is:  

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/45789248" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/45789248">Ioannis Antoniou explains Linked Data</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

The whole effort around visualising and working with the data here revolves around Linked Data. The team extract structured information from Wikipedia using [DBPedia](http://dbpedia.org/About) and mix it up with information from [Diavgeia](http://diavgeia.gov.gr/) to produce their new graphs. 

## Meet the team

For a quick overview of who is who in the team and what they have been working on, I've put together this rough introductory video: 

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/46543472" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/46543472">Linked Data and Public Spending at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.

### Use the data

The team behind the project is small, but they are interested to hear from anyone interested in using the data. What questions would you like to ask? What datasets could be combined next?

You can get in touch via the mail above, or the [OKFN Greece mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-gr).

The team are also planning a hackday on budget visualisations in the beginning of October! There will be more details on this soon via the [OKFN Greece blog](http://gr.okfn.org/blog/).

## More visualisations

For more visualisations of Greek finances see: 

* [GreekSpending](http://greekspending.com/).
* [PublicSpending.gr](http://publicspending.medialab.ntua.gr/) - an initiative conceptualized, analyzed, implemented, hosted and operated at the Multimedia Technology Laboratory (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens). 

