Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Last Friday (May 4), the Ministry of Planning in Brazil launched the final version of the Brazilian Open Data Portal. In line with the federal government policy to promote the use of free software in public administration, the portal was made using only free and open source tools. Among them is the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open-source data portal software CKAN. Moreover, the whole process of development of the portal was conducted with the participation of concerned citizens in an open way to promote open data.” Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Velichka Dimitrova of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently discussed the launch of Yourtopia Italia, an open data portal for Italy. She writes, “In countries like Italy stark regional differences have dominated over time. Particularly in times of fiscal austerity when the country attempts to recover from an economic crisis with major social consequences, seeing how and why the South and the North differ is an important step in a consensus-building process to find solutions and realise collaboration with the citizens. The Open Economics Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation released YourTopia Italia – an application which gives the users a chance to input their priorities in eight categories of socio-economic progress: Labour Market, Education, Health, Environment and Energy, Science and Research, Household Income and Inequality, Public Safety, and Social Life.” Read more

Jane Wakefield of the BBC reports that London plans to test a new “smart city” operating system. She writes, “Living Plan IT has developed its Urban OS to provide a platform to connect services and citizens.  With partners including Hitachi, Phillips and Greenwich council, it aims to use the Greenwich peninsula as a testbed for new technologies running on the system. The OS aims to connect key services such as water, transport, and energy. David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, was among the signatories to the partnership. ‘The development of smart cities in future is a crucial commercial opportunity for Britain, and London is the right place to be doing it,’ he said.” Read more

Michael Cooney reports that next month the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is set to detail “the union of advanced technologies from artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, machine learning, natural-language fields it hopes to bring together to build an automated system that will let analysts and others better grasp meanings from large volumes of text documents.”

DARPA stated, “Automated, deep natural-language understanding technology may hold a solution for more efficiently processing text information. Read more

Federal Computer Week reports, “Data.gov has launched a new community for software developers to share ideas, collaborate or compete on projects and request new datasets. Developer.data.gov joins a growing list of communities and portals tapping into Data.gov’s datasets, including those for health, energy, education, law, oceans and the Semantic Web. The developer site is set up to offer access to federal agency datasets, source code, applications and ongoing developer challenges, along with blogs and forums where developers can discuss projects and share ideas.” Read more

Randal Jackson recently reported how New Zealand company SYL Semantics is helping governments tackle Big Data with semantic search. Jackson reports, “SYL has signed up three government departments so far, but [chief executive Sean] Wilson says he is not allowed to name them at this stage. That’s not bad going for a company which was launched less than a year ago… SYL has a New Zealand patent for its technology and is applying for a US patent. Wilson describes SYL Enterprise Search as the next generation of enterprise search applications.” Read more

The US has launched open data standards that were originally developed in Ireland, John Kennedy reports. He writes, “The open data movement is in full swing and tools and standards created in Ireland are to prove pivotal to open data employed by the US government. It emerged today that agencies in the US Government have adopted a set of web tools and standards developed in Ireland by researchers at NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). DERI’s technologies are being utilised by Data.gov, a portal developed to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the US government. DERI’s research, which is funded by Science Foundation Ireland, focuses on enabling networked knowledge, using the latest semantic web and linked data technologies.” Read more

Dan Jellinek reports that, “The open data movement needs to be driven and managed more by what people want to find out, and less by public bodies’ own agendas, the online democracy pioneer Tom Steinberg told last week’s Open-Data Cities Conference in Brighton.” Steinberg stated, “A lot of the attitude around open data is what can we give away, what can we give out?…  Then they say ‘no-one seems to be using it, let’s have a hackday, see if we can create incentives.’ Meanwhile in the freedom of information department there is a pile of requests building up that won’t go away based on real desires – someone really wants to know something.” Read more

The Open Data Cities Conference happened last Friday, and Adam Tinworth was on hand. He has provided informative recaps of several of the presentations on One Man and His Blog. One of the most intriguing is his recap of Emer Coleman’s reflections on her experience building the London Data Store. Tinworth reports that the first lesson Coleman learned was “It was never about the data.” He writes, “The conversations are not about data – they’re about the threat it was to the public sector. It creates a totally different approach to governance, so you gave have mature conversations with the electorate, who have the same data that government does. You move from the tyranny of the experts to the wisdom of the crowds. But that’s uncomfortable for back office statisticians who have not been used to being in the public gaze.” Read more

George Thomas of Data.gov recently called out a number of technologies and products employed by Data.gov projects. Thomas writes, “When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) decided to publish their Clinical Quality Linked Data on Healthdata.gov, we made extensive use of DERI’s RDF extension for Google Refine, helping to design the RDF Schemas we used to define the metadata to capture a controlled vocabulary for Hospital Compare.” Read more