Abstract
The public sector provides open data to create new opportunities, sti-mulate innovation, and implement new solutions that benefit academia and society. However, open data is usually available in large quantities and often lacks quality, accuracy, and completeness. It may be difficult to find the right data to analyze a target. There are many rich open data repositories, but they are difficult to understand and use because these data can only be used with a complex set of keyword search options, and even then, irrelevant or insufficient data may even-tually be retrieved. To alleviate this situation, ontology-based semantic search has been proven to be an effective way to improve the quality of related content queries in such repositories. In this paper, we propose a new method of semantic linking and storing open government datasets of New Zealand's agriculture, land and rainfall sectors based on the use of ontology. The generated ontology can con-struct integrated data, in which a unified query can be applied to extract richer and more useful information. To validate our model, we showed how to link ontology manually and automatically. Manual linking requires domain experts, and auto-matic linking reduces the overhead of relying on domain experts to manually link concepts. The results of this method are promising in terms of improving data quality and search efficiency. In future, the proposed model can be integrated with other domain ontologies.