MODENA, ITALY–(Marketwired – April 24, 2013) - Expert System, the semantic technology company, today introduces its newest solution, the Cogito Intelligence API, bringing advanced semantic functions to enable Government and Corporate Security analysts to access and exploit their most strategic sources of information.

Cogito Intelligence API is available for free proof of concept testing, with volume pricing and annual subscription levels. The API enables Government, Intelligence, Law Enforcement Agencies and enterprise Corporate Security functions to add semantic processing, text mining, categorization and tagging features to their analysis platforms and applications for faster evaluation of intelligence data. Read more

The University of Leeds is conducting a survey to determine the barriers to realizing the value of open government data. According to the survey website, “The University of Leeds, Socio-technical Centre and Centre for Integrated Energy Research, are conducting a research project on realising the value of open government data. This survey plays a key role in the project and focuses on developing understanding of: the potential barriers to improving the supply of open government data; the potential barriers to increasing the use of open data; and approaches to overcoming these potential barriers. By participating in this survey and providing your viewpoint you will be helping to shape policy, research and the wider dialogue on open data.” Read more

Michael Bauer of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently wrote, “I am on the Road in Tanzania and Ghana to spread the data love. Last week Tanzania’s first data journalism event happened. The Data Bootcamp, organized by the World Bank Institute and the African Media Initiative, brought together international experts, journalists, civil society organizations and technologists to work on data related projects. In 2010 Tanzania committed to release open government data as part of the open government partnership. Nevertheless, the Tanzanian government has only released two datasets so far. One goal of the data bootcamp was to spur demand by implementing small data projects.”

He goes on, “The format was tested before in South Africa, Kenya and Moldovia and helped to raise awareness of Open Data. In preparation and during the workshop four more datasets were scraped and liberated. Further data was collected by the participants to work on their specific projects. Of the 40 participants only 7 were able to code – the majority were journalists and activists who never handled data before. Through the three days they received an intensive training in how to use spreadsheets and tools like Google Refine or Fusion Tables to tell stories with data. The data bootcamps not only consist of intense hands-on learning experience, they also are a small competition, where $2000 are awarded to the winner.”

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Image: Courtesy OKF

Derrick Harris of GigaOM reports that NASA has launched a series of Big Data challenges aimed at finding innovative solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing Big Data problems. He writes, “Some of the U.S. government’s most research-intensive agencies want your help to come up with better ways to analyze their expansive data sets. NASA, along with the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, launched a competition on TopCoder called the Big Data Challenge series. Essentially, it’s a competition to crowdsource a solution to the very big problem of fragmented and incompatible federal data.” Read more

“What we have found with this project is… the capacity to take value out of open data is very limited.”

With the abatement of the media buzz surrounding open data since the first International Open Government Data Conference (IOGDC) was held in November 2011, it would be easy to believe that the task of opening up government data for public consumption is a fait accompli.  Most of the discussion at this year’s IOGDC conference, held July 10-12, centered on the advantages and roadblocks to creating an open data ecosystem within government, and the need to establish the right mix of policies to promote a culture of openness and sharing both within and between government agencies and externally with journalists, civil society, and the public at large.   According to these metrics the open government data movement has much to celebrate:  1,022,787 datasets from 192 catalogs in 24 languages representing 43 countries and international organizations.

The looming questions about the utility of open government data make it clear, however, that the movement is still in its early stages.    Much remains to be done to to provide usable, reliable, machine-readable and valuable government data to the public.

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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 Open Knowledge Foundation has launched a new contest, Apps 4 Germany. According to the article, “The Contest is organised by three civil society organisations (The Open Data Network, the Gov2.0 Network and the German Chapter of the OKFN) in cooperation with BITKOM (Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media) under the auspices of of the Ministry of the Interior (BMI). The launch was celebrated at the Modern State fair with a speech by the Minister of the Interior, Hans Peter Friedrich. The best Apps will be presented and rewarded at CEBit 2012.” Read more

The Open Government Partnership has launched with the hope of making government data more transparent. According to the article, “The idea is to encourage governments to make concrete promises to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. Eight nations (Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the US) have formally endorsed a broadly-worded Open Government Declaration, all of them openly asserting that their goal is to achieve ‘greater prosperity, well-being, and human dignity in our own countries and in an increasingly interconnected world.’” Read more

A new article reports that the Cabinet Office “has chosen a proprietary software system to implement the keystone of its policy to create a level playing field for open source. Under pressure to fulfill the government’s election promise to eradicate systemic bias against open source software, the Cabinet Office rushed through a procurement for an asset register last month. But it raised hackles among open source suppliers it invited to bid. They discovered the same problems that inspired Cabinet Office open source policy hindered their bidding for its own work.” Read more

A recent article discusses some of the ways in which open data is being utilized by higher education institutions (HEIs) in the United Kingdom. The writer begins, “One of the Good Things about open data is that with the data being open, there’s less pressure to lock down or restrict access to any of the apps that might build on top it. Whilst some open data initiatives are based around dumping partial, broken or unmaintained datasets ‘just because’, other open data initiatives are actually using open data as part of a workflow, where the publication of the open data can be seen as opening up a window onto, and tap into, a working data pipeline… A couple of recent announcements show how universities are start to actually put their open data to work through location based services. Yesterday saw the appearance of the Southampton OpenData map, as developed by postgrad Colin William et al.” Read more