Several public services in Malta operate under the stewardship of different governmental bodies, ministries, or departments. This results in data silos that are not interoperable in an agile manner. Therefore, any efforts that require the use of multiple registries, such as integrated public services (IPS), require a considerable logistical operation to obtain the relevant information.

In the Malta Government Budget 2020, the Government required the identification of household units in Malta, i.e., an address-based household made up of one or more members having a familial relationship, to issue a one-time payment to compensate for the increase of bread and milk prices registered in 2019. To deliver this public service, the public administration required the gathering, processing, and merging of the relevant identity and address data on eligible residents and citizens of Malta. Unfortunately, this data exists in multiple siloed and non-interoperable datasets owned by different entities, containing data spanning different domains. An ad-hoc task was therefore undertaken to generate a household unit dataset by integrating social security, citizen identity, and utility retail and supply records. Whilst the above-mentioned ad-hoc task served its purpose, and the public service was delivered, there were a number of shortcomings in this approach, namely:

• The data integration task was a considerable administrative burden to carry out;
• The timeliness of the delivery of this public service was impacted;
• The interchangeable use of data written in Maltese, English, and a mix of Maltese and English, and the use of different schemas for each dataset resulted in this task requiring a considerable logistical operation; and
• Given that the integrated data existed in non-interoperable data silos, the data had quality issues in terms of completeness, correctness, consistency, and accuracy, stemming from inaccuracies across the different sources.

The described use case has highlighted the urgent necessity to tackle non-interoperable data silos and interoperability issues within the public administration. Through a specific pilot for Malta, the goal is to implement a Digital Common Household Unit IPS that shall be used to identify unique household units, which are currently relevant to the provision of a number of public services.

For this pilot, knowledge graphs are being used as an approach towards the integration of the data silos through introducing standardization and making the data interoperable. Knowledge graphs further provide several benefits, such as flexible representation of heterogeneous data, enablement of advanced visualizations of the various household unit definitions that can be available within the data, high analytical capabilities, and provide a deep insight into implicit and explicit relationships between the data, therefore allowing for data-driven decision-making and policy-making.

This IPS will enable public service users, which include public officers and policy makers, to exploit the relevant data as required, with the citizens and residents of Malta being the end-beneficiaries e.g., receivers of social benefits. The delivery of this more efficient and effective IPS will therefore foster trust and satisfaction between the Government and end-beneficiaries.