Open Government Data

Dominic DiFranzoPhD Student/Research AssistantRensselaer Polytechnic InstituteTetherless World Constellation

from http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/iogds_data_analytics

Taking Notice

•Some 40% of adult internet users have gone online for raw data about government spending and activities

• According to Government Online, a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Government-Online.aspx)

Why not?

•Health (hospital scores, diet/food)

•Economics (unemployment, CPI)

•Crime (rates, geo/temporal)

•Environment (air quality, weather)

•Education (rates, school districts)

•So much more....

Who?

•Citizens,

•NGOs

•Academics,

•Entrepreneurs,

•Activists

•Everyone!!!

Challenges?

•machine-readability

•Metadata

•Provenance

•Discovery

•Mashing/linking

Current Web Tech?

•Sunlight Foundation’s National Data Catalog, Socrata, Open311 API, and Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative, etc

•Store in some backend, release data through an API.

Still have Challenges!

•Only ask what its built to answer

•Opaque - no way for consumers to see, reuse or improve the data model

•Silos of Data - no linking at the data level

•Non-standard - Knowing one doesn’t mean you know another.

What we have

Semantic Web?

•Adding the meaning or semantics of information to web content and services so people and machines can use and understand it better

•In other words allow machines to understand the web like we can.

The Stack

Linked Open Data

Linked Data•decentralized - sources may be spread

out and referenced across the Web

•modular - linked without advance planning or coordination

•scalable - once store in place, it’s easy to extend

•advantages hold even when definitions and structure of the data changes over time.

web 3.0

Enhancements

LOGD

Data.gov

Discovery•Publishing open government data as

Linked Data is not enough

•For OGD to be useful, datasets must be published using metadata, markup standards and presentation that aid discovery and use

IOGDS•Recent work at TWC RPI demonstrates

the value of applying emerging standards for uniformly describing government datasets and catalogs

•TWC's IOGDS application is an aggregated catalog of more than 1M datasets from over 192 dataset catalogs from governments at every level around the world

IOGDS•Anticipates W3C DCAT RDF vocabulary

•Demos what a comprehensive federated catalog based on DCAT and aggregation API might look like

•IOGDS is a multi-year effort based on downloading, scraping or accessing APIs, converting metadata to a proto-DCAT model, and publishing via endpoint and download

•See at logd.tw.rpi.edu

• Leaders

• Jim Hendler

• Deborah L. McGuinness

• Li Ding

• Members

• Dominic DiFranzo

• Sarah Magidson

• James Michaelis

• Alvaro Graves

• Jin Guang Zheng

• Xian Li

• Gregory Todd Williams

• Tim Lebo

• Zhenning Shangguan

• Devin Gaffney

• Peter Coons

• Adam Bell

• William Cooper

• Brian Zaik

• Johanna Flores

Government Sponsors

DARPANSF

NASAIARPA

NIH/NCI…

Questions?