Open data

James Stevenson has shared his insights regarding the humanization of computing. He writes, “When Nicolaus Copernicus established that the earth moves around the sun he transformed our understanding of the solar system. The rise in digital devices such as PCs, laptops and smartphones, that we use to access personal and corporate information on a daily basis is having a similar impact on our expectations of computing, and has revolutionised the way we live our lives. We are now at a stage when IT is beginning to blend into the background and technology is everywhere.”

He continues, “The availability of omniscient network connections means that we are ‘always online’ and constantly connected to knowledge, people and things… We now live in a networked economy where we revolve around data that is accessed through a variety of digital devices held together by the web and available on demand. 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

Mo McRoberts of BBC recently shared a few data guides that have emerged as part of the Digital Public Space project, a project “which uses Semantic Web technology as a way to help unlock the value in the archives of the BBC and other publicly-funded institutions.” McRoberts writes, “When we spoke with project partners – and others – about publishing data in a form which makes it possible to have journeys through machine-readable catalogue data similar to the journeys through human-oriented documents that we normally experience on the Web, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, but organisations weren’t necessarily sure about the nuts and bolts of actually doing it.” Read more

Remember the days before Wikipedia had all the answers? We looked things up in libraries, referring to shelf-filling encyclopaedias. We bought CD-ROMs (remember them?) full of facts and pictures and video clips. We asked people. Sometimes, school home work actually required some work more strenuous than a cut and paste. We went about our business without remembering that New Coke briefly entered our lives on this day in 1985.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, and some of the concern around its role in a wider dumbing down of thought and argument may be justified. But, despite that, it’s a remarkable achievement and a wonderful resource. Those who argued that it would never work have clearly been proven wrong. Carefully maintained processes and the core principle of the neutral point of view mostly serve contributors well.

With Wikimedia Deutschland‘s recent announcement of Wikidata, many of the early concerns about Wikipedia itself have resurfaced once again. 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

This year was the 5th version of the Linked Data on the Web Workshop co-located at the World Wide Web Conference going on in Lyon, France.

At this workshop, seven issues caught my attention:

1) Media: Yunja Li presented on Synote: Weaving Media Fragments and Linked Data. This is interesting for those who not only want to link to an entire video, but want to link to a part of a video at a specific interval of time, and also add metadata information about that.

2) NLP to Linked Data: How can we relate the results of different named entity extraction tools to Linked Data. Giuseppe Rizzo introduced their project, NERD, which is working on this area.

Read more

Simon Rogers reports that the National Audit Office has released its report on the United Kingdom’s open government data project. Rogers writes, “This should be a good week for open government data in the UK. The British government is one of the key drivers in the Open Government Partnership, presently meeting in Brasilia, where it is being lauded for the way it has released a ‘tsunami of data’. And yet, according to the National Audit Office, all is not entirely rosy. Read between the lines of its report out today, Implementing Transparency, and you will see a government which has been chucking out tonnes of data, that no-one looks at and without a complete strategy. Oh and it’s cost an awful lot of money.” Read more

Jeni Tennison recently discussed the United Kingdom’s current open standards consultation, calling UK citizens to action. She writes, “Over the last few months, the UK Government has been running a consultation on its Open Standards policy. The outcome of this consultation is incredibly important not only for organisations and individuals who want to work with government but also because of its potential knock-on effects on the publication of Open Data and the use of Open Source software within public sector organisations. Read more