A SoA for Open Government Data: a case study of COVID impacts on SMEs

The efficient utilization of Open Government Data (OGD) is one of the current major challenges for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). OGD helps SMEs to find new business opportunities, offer high quality services and generate economic value. Current OGD platforms address issues such as data classifications and synchronization. Despite the extensive efforts to develop OGD platforms, there are still limitations. Existing platforms do not provide the ability for SME users to run complex queries which are based on data analytics techniques and algorithms. Also, they do not provide a smooth integration of data from different data sources. This paper introduces a Service-Oriented Architecture called the Data Analytics Framework (DAF) to design OGD platforms that provide functionality through provision of these services. The proposed framework is evaluated through a real life case study of COVID-19 impacts on SMEs, with specific reference to the use of sentiment analysis as an example data analysis technique applied to OGD.