Several open government initiatives have been launched to make
available online data enhancing accountability of public officials towards
ordinary citizens. However, these initiatives raise several questions, namely:
Which data should be disclosed? How to bring together dispersed (fragmented)
data? How to improve its understandability by ordinary citizens? Literature
shows that, in general, the data selection process does not take into account
ordinary citizens’ expectations and information needs. This paper presents the
development process of a transparency ontology, which aims to provide an
answer to the above questions, in what concerns public sector entities’ use of
resources. The process started by creating a list of relevant expressions/terms
discussed in national and local newspapers, considering the role of journalists
as ‘information brokers’ acting on behalf of ordinary citizens. This list was
externally validated for relevance, comprehensiveness and improvements by
interviewing journalists, and the resulting transparency ontology was
formalised using OWL and Protégé.