Danny Palmer of Computing.co.uk reports, “US President Barack Obama has signed an executive order that requires government agencies to make publicly accessible data open and machine readable. ‘Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable,’ reads the Open Data Policy order. In 2009, Obama pledged to make his administration the most open in the history of US government. The administration hopes that innovators, including researchers and entrepreneurs, will be able to examine and use the data to benefit the country.” 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

Photo Courtesy: Flickr/Lars Plougmann

In recent blogs we’ve discussed where semantic technologies have gone in 2012, and a bit about where they will go this year (see here, here and here).

Here are some final thoughts from our panel of semantic web experts on what to expect to see as the New Year rings in:

John Breslin,lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider

Broader deployment of the schema.org terms is likely. In the study by Muehlisen and Bizer in July this year, we saw Open Graph Protocol, DC, FOAF, RSS, SIOC and Creative Commons still topping the ranks of top semantic vocabularies being used. In 2013 and beyond, I expect to see schema.org jump to the top of that list.

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

I think we will see an uptick in the job market for semantic technologists in the enterprise; primarily in the Fortune 2000. I expect to see some M&A activity as well from systems providers and integrators who recognize the desire to have a semantic component in their product suite. (No, I have no direct knowledge; it is my hunch!)

We will see increased competition from data analytics vendors who try to add RDF, OWL or graphstores to their existing platforms. I anticipate saying, at the end of 2013, that many of these immature deployments will leave some project teams disappointed. The mature vendors will need to put resources into sales and business development, with the right partners for consulting and systems integration, to be ready to respond to calls for proposals and assistance.

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Francis Maude, Minister of the United Kingdom’s Cabinet Office, recently shared his vision for Open Government. Maude writes, “The movement for transparency and openness in government took decisive steps forward last week. As lead co-chair of the Open Government Partnership, the UK hosted the first ministerial level meeting in Britain of this growing international initiative. But this meeting wasn’t just symbolically significant. We put in place key measures that will help move the OGP from fine words to accountable actions.”

Maude continues, “At the same time, the Open Data Institute, based in London’s Tech City, and the first organisation of its kind anywhere in the world, officially opened for business. Read more

Derek du Preez of Computer World UK reports, “Prime Minister David Cameron’s special envoy on the UN’s post-2015 development goals has said that he is ‘disappointed’ by how much the government’s open datasets have been used so far. Speaking at a Reform event in London this week on open government and data transparency, [Michael] Anderson said he recognises that the public sector needs to improve the way it pushes out the data so that it is easier to use. ‘I am going to be really honest with you. As an official in a government department that has worked really hard to get a lot of data out in the last two years, I have been pretty disappointed by how much it has been used,’ he said.” Read more

Guillermo Moncecchi of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently shared his argument as to why governments have a responsibility to go open. He writes, “The most common argument in favor of open data is that it enhances transparency, and while the link may not always be causal, it is certainly true that both tend to go hand-in-hand. But there is another, more expansive perspective on open government data: that it is part of an effort to build public infrastructure.” Read more

On Friday, October 12, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about various approaches to building semantic systems, and “the Linkers” were joined by two special guests: Hadley Beeman, expert in Government Linked Data and Open Data; and Joel Natividad, CEO & Co-Founder, Ontodia.
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David Meyer of GigaOM reports that Finland is going to use crowdsourcing to create new laws. He writes, “Who makes laws? In most of the democratic world, that’s the sole preserve of elected governments. But in Finland, technology is about to make democracy significantly more direct. Earlier this year, the Finnish government enabled something called a “citizens’ initiative”, through which registered voters can come up with new laws – if they can get 50,000 of their fellow citizens to back them up within six months, then the Eduskunta (the Finnish parliament) is forced to vote on the proposal.” Read more

OpenSpending.org has posted an article about improving the quality of government financial reporting in the UK. The article states, “Spending data is juicy for journalists – why does it get neglected? Many reasons. One key one is that the shelf-life of a spending dataset is pretty short from a journalist’s point of view, if they have to wait 6 months or even a year for spending data they need for a story to be released, then chances are – the sniff of the story they were wanting to write will probably have gone stale.” Read more

Andrea Di Maio has written an interesting response to Alexander Howard’s recent article, Here Comes the Data Economy. Di Maio writes, “In his relentless campaign for the importance of open data, Alex Howard published an interesting article where he mentions a recent press release by Gartner that highlights the ‘big data makes organization smarter, but open data makes the richer.’ The press release is based on a research note by my colleague David Newman (subscription required), which looks at the role of open data across industry sectors and rightly points to some of the great examples from the public sector. As I have always sounded like a skeptic on open data, and certainly so in my conversations with Alex, I think it is important to make a clarification.” Read more