Developing a goal matching service using linked open data of social issues and their solutions as public goals: Towards facilitating inter-organizational collaboration in public sphere

To address social issues about the sustainability of local societies, inter-organizational collaboration in public sphere is important. Although conventional social networking services (SNSs) have recently been used for public collaboration, the SNSs are not suitable to look for potential collaborators because the conventional SNSs emphasize recency of information and lack a function for sharing information about “who are trying to address what kind of social issues”. We designed a data model for structuring public issues and goals and built a linked open dataset (LOD) based on the above data model. Moreover, we developed a method for calculating similarities of public goals and implemented a Web service for matching public goals for finding potential collaborators. Our method for similarity calculation incorporates surficial features, semantic features, and contextual features. We conducted an experiment to investigate an optimal balance of parameters of the contextual features, which is suitable for facilitating public collaboration. Furthermore, we held a participatory event for trial use by citizens and observed positive feedbacks from the participants.