The Tetherless World Weblog

A few days ago I (Alvaro Graves) participated in the Open Government Data Camp 2011 in Warsaw, Poland, where people from different groups, organizations and governments met to discuss issues related to Open Data at government level. Here are some of the most important issues found in theese talk, in my opinion.

The current state of OGD

David Eaves, an activist who advises the city of Vancouver, Canada in issues about Open Data, gave a keynote in which he described his views on the current state of Open Data movement. First, it is striking that the success stories are not just a few anymore (as Data.gov or Data.gov.uk) but there are dozens (perhaps hundreds), both at national, regional and local levels. Similarly, the term Open Government Data is becoming increasingly popular, which is good because it is easier to stop explaining the ‘what’ and start focusing in the ‘how’.

Another interesting point is how the movement of Open Government Data already passed an inflection point, where it is no longer seen as people demanding from the outside, but being increasingly being invited to help working on these initiatives from within the government. For many, this change in perspective can be confusing and may create some concerns of Open Data being absorbed in a bureaucratic system that makes impossible to implement Open Data initiatives. However, it is clear that in order for these changes to occur, the movement can not reject to collaborate with governments.

Local initiatives, by locals

A talk that I really liked was by Ton Zylstra, who lives in the city of Enschede, the Netherlands. This city has only 150,000 inhabitants. He wanted an Open Data initiative there, however, it was difficult to convince the authorities, so he with a group of people decided to start working on their own. Inviting a handful of hackers to a bar, they created their first application that used data from Twitter, Foursquare, and the venues of a local festival. Eventually they convinced the municipal government that the default option for local data ought to be open.

From this experience, Ton showed several important lessons: You have to create something concrete, no matter if it is small: This implies something that requires little funding (the first beers at the bar were free) and short-term (no more than a couple of weeks). It does not matter if it is something original or not, there are some great ideas out there that deserve to be copied and are very useful for the local community.

How the Open Data died

Another very interesting keynote was by Chris Taggart, founder of OpenCorporates, who warned of the risks that the Open Data movement is facing today. His main concern is the lack of relevance in terms of impact Open Data has on society. For example, he mentioned that so far no one’s business depends on Open Data (although this is not true, there are a few out there, but I have to concede they are rare examples). In general, making data available is not enough, it is necessary for it to be used either in applications, by data journalists, etc. Also, it is fundamental to link different sites with Open Data (something quite uncommon in the movement), so that people can find out more information. Finally, I liked his idea that if the Open Data does not cause problems to its incumbents, then it is not working.

Redefining what is public

Finally another talk that I found interesting was the idea of ​​Dave Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy, and Nigel Shaldbolt, professor at University of Southampton, to redefine “the public” in terms of data that “is available on the Web in machine-processable formats.” That is, uploading a bunch of PDFs with scanned tables does not make that information public, because it is not easily accessible. This initiative raises the bar of what public data is, especially when compared to the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) that allows you to request information from government. Note that this applies to all information, as Rasiej so vehemently described it.

So… what did you talked about at OGDCamp?

In my case, I presented a system for publishing Linked Data called LODSPeaKr, which can be used for the rapid publication of government data and to create applications based on Linked Data. In the near future I will be writing more about this framework, but for now you can see my presentation here.

I had a bizarre dream last night, one of those surreal shockers. The details aren’t important, but I realized on waking up that the dream’s theme was all about unanticipated consequences.  I realized I needed to write this post.

To set some context: I went to bed upset last night.  I was upset at two things, one is an article on techcrunch entitled “Five Open Questions For Data.gov Before We #SaveTheData,” the other was my response to the article.  I hope I can respond to the first and apologize for the second.  I want to make one thing clear, however, before I start – I am a strong supporter of http://data.gov, I think it is a great experiment in democracy resulting from bold leadership, and if it dies in the current budget cutting it will be an enduring embarrassment for the USA and a major loss to government transparency.

The article I was upset about was written by Kate Ray (@kraykray), an amazingly bright and articulate young woman who has made several very impressive videos and online articles that I am a fan of.  She recently was one of the co-founders of “NerdCollider,” a website designed to bring intelligent discussion to interesting issues — an idea I support.  I was proud to be an early contributor to one of their discussions, which asked “What would you change about Data.gov to get more people to care?”

In the TechCrunch blog post I mentioned above, Kate takes several quotes from this discussion and reflects on their import — is data.gov taking some of the key issues into account?  As a good reporter, Kate’s OpEd is actually quite objective – she reports on several comments made by people, including me, as to issues the site has in terms of its effort to share government data.   TechCrunch is a very influential site, the article title has been tweeted and retweeted hundreds of times to hundreds of thousands of potential readers (congrats to Kate on this viral takeup), raising awareness of Congress’ narrow-minded goal of killing the project, which I guess is a good thing.  Unfortunately, the choice of the word “Before” in “… Before we #savethedata” has a negative implication, and I’m hoping that doesn’t kill off the positive efforts that the #savethedata meme was designed to promote.

In her article, Kate brings up important issues, but what she doesn’t make clear is that most of the people she quotes are indeed strong supporters of the Open Government movement and fans of Data.gov.  The seeming criticisms were actually constructive responses to the question of how we could get more people to care (a positive), and not meant to say what was wrong with the site that must be fixed before the site was useful.  It’s already very useful, but like any new effort, there’s always room for improvement. However, those changes will never happen if the site is forced to go dark!

As I said, Kate’s article has been phenomenally well tweeted, in fact, if you look at #savethedata the stream is so filled with pointers to this article that one can no longer easily find the link to the Petition created by the Sunlight Foundation to help stop the budget cuts — that petition is where the #savethedata meme started (thanks @EllnMiller).  Kate also doesn’t point to the great HuffPost article by @bethnoveck explaining why cutting the funding to this and other egovernment sites will threaten American jobs which was also retweeting around the #savethedata meme.

So I hope one unanticipated consequence of this article is that it doesn’t help cause the death of data.gov by killing off the awareness of its importance or losing the momentum on the petition that could save it.

But, as Arlo Guthrie used to say, “that’s not what I came here to talk about tonight…”

In my response to Kate’s article, I referred to her making factual errors.  This is a horrible thing to accuse a young journalist of, and I was being unfair.  The errors I wanted to point out were not in Kate’s piece, but in the chart chosen to go along.  It appears to show a flatline in the interest in data.gov, using figures from (as Kate told me later in a separate tweet) compete.com on “unique visits.”  I don’t know where compete.com gets the data, but the tracking of the  number of visitors on the data.gov site — which are reported on the site on a daily basis seems to show a much larger number with a more positive trend (over 180,000 visits in March).  It’s unclear why there is this discrepancy (I suspect it’s in how compete.com figures uniqueness for sites they don’t control), but it is clear it isn’t Kate’s fault.   She also cites the number of downloads in her article as 1.5M since Oct 2010, which is the number reported on data.gov, but as of last week, the site broke 2M downloads, and the number is trending up.

Anyway, I’m digressing again (occupational hazard of a college professor) — the key point is the errors are not Kate’s and that she was reflecting on what she found.

I also was upset that she quoted me out of context – in my nerdcollider response I made it clear I was supporting data.gov, and offering some constructive solutions to the question of how we could make the site better.  As the quote appears in her piece, it looks like I’m saying the data is poorly organized on the site — but what I was actually saying is that in the incredible richness of  data sets available (data.gov hosted over 300,000 datasets at last count!) we have to explore new ways to search for data  — it’s a wonderful problem to have!  But I did say what she quoted, and as she pointed out to me, correctly, one of the good things about nerdcollider is that the full context of the quotes are there to be cited.  She’s right.

So just as I hope Kate’s piece doesn’t have the unanticipated consequence of hurting data.gov, I hope my admittedly intemperate response doesn’t have the unanticipated consequence of hurting the reputation of this young potential online media star.

@kraykray – I apologize.

The “Nerd Collider” Web site invited me to be a “power nerd” and respond to the question “What would you change about Data.gov to get more people to care?”  The whole discussion including my response can be found here.  However, I hope people won’t mind my reprinting my response here, as the TWC blog gets aggregated to some important Linked Data/Semantic Web sites.

My response:

I was puzzling over how I wanted to respond until I saw the blog in the Guardian – http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/apr/05/data-gov-crisis-obama – which also reflects this flat line as a failure, and poses, by contrast, the number of hits the Guardian.com website gets. This is such a massive apples vs. oranges error that I figure I should start there.

So, primarily, let’s think about what visits to a web page are about — for the Guardian, they are lots of people coming to read the different articles each day. However, for data.gov, there isn’t lot of repeat traffic – the data feeds are updated on a relatively slow basis, and once you’ve downloaded some, you don’t have to go back for weeks or months until the next update. Further, for some of the rapidly changing data, like the earthquake data, there are RSS feeds so once setup, one doesn’t return to the site. So my question is, are we looking at the right number?

In fact, the answer is no — if you want to see the real use of data.gov, take a look at the chart at http://www.data.gov/metric/visitorstats/monthlyredirecttrend — the number of total downloads of dataset since 2009 is well over 1,000,000 and in February of this year (the most recent data available) there were over 100,000 downloads — so the 10k number appears to be tracking the wrong thing – the data is being downloaded and that implies it is being used!!

Could we do better? Yes, very much so. Here’s things I’m interested in seeing (and working with the data.gov team to make available)

1 – Searching for data on the site is tough — keyword search is not a good way to look for data (for lots of reasons) and thus we need better ways – doing this really well is a research task I’ve got some PhD students working on, but doing better than is there requires some better metadata and approach. There is already work afoot at data.gov (assuming funding continues) to improve this significantly.

2 – Tools for using the data, and particularly for mashing it up, need to be more easily used and more widely available. My group makes a lot of info and tools available at http://logd.tw.rpi.edu – but a lot more is needed. This is where the developer community could really help.

3 – Tools to support community efforts (see the comment by Danielle Gould to this effect) are crucial – she says it better than I can so go read that.

4- there are efforts by data.gov to create communities – these are hard to get going, but could be a great value in the long run. I suggest people look to these at the data.gov communities site, and think about how they could be improved to bring more use – I know the data.gov leadership team would love to get some good comments about that.

5 – We need to find ways to turn the data release into a “conversation” between government and users. I have discussed this with Vivek Kundra numerous times and he is a strong proponent (and we have thought about writing a paper on the subject if time ever allows). The British data.gov.uk site has some interesting ideas along this line, based on open streetmap and similar projects, but I think one could do better. This is the real opportunity for “government 2.0″ – a chance for citizens to comment just on legislation, but to help make sure the data that informs the policy decisions is the best it can be.

So, to summarize, there are things we can do to improve things, many of which are getting done. However, the numbers in the graph above are misleading, and don’t really reflect the true usage of data.gov per se, let alone the other sites and sites like the LOGD site I mention above which are powered by data.gov.

On December 4th, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and general food enthusiasts came together at the Food+Tech Hackathon to develop and explore applications to help evolve the food and information technology community. The event, which was part of the International Open Data Hackathon, was in New York City and was organized by Danielle Gould from Food + Tech Connect, Marc Alt from Open Source Cities, and Tian He from Gojee.

Evan Patton and I had a chance to come down and help out with the day’s hacking. I kicked off the event with a lecture on Open Data and the Semantic Web. I gave some background on the Open Data movement in the last few years, discussed some of the current challenges in open data, and talked about how Semantic Web technologies can help address these challenges.

Evan helped explain some of his work on publishing USDA nutrition data on semanticdiet.com and discussed the Wine Agent’s food ontology and recommendation with participants. Semantic Diet uses semantic web technologies to bring together nutrition data, recipes contributed by users and crawled off the web, and personal dietary needs. Having these data organized and encoded using semantic technologies allowed groups to query and reason about food data, and even link it into their own hackathon ideas.

During the hackathon there were thirteen groups work on everything from application to help people eat more sustainably to projects that allowed people to understand price fluctuations in food products over time. We were thrilled to see some of the groups using some semantic data and technologies provided by Semantic Diet and TWC’s LinkedOpen Government Data project. Evan and I spent most of our time educating and assisting teams on using semantic technologies and data. It was great to see so many people enthusiastic about semantics and thinking about how they could use open data to start a project or improve existing projects.

All in all I feel the hackathon was a huge success. At the end of the day we had many applications and projects that have potential to really move forward and make a real impact in the community. Evan and I would like to thank the sponsors and organizers of the first ever Food+Tech Hackathon and hope to help and participate in many more.

Links to other great blog posts on the Food+Tech Hackathon:

• http://www.goodlifer.com/2010/12/hacking-for-social-good/
• http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/will-hack-food
• http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2010/12/initial-data-posting-and-the-foodtech-hackathon/
• http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2010/12/open-data-food-ontology-semantic-web-primer/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodlifer/sets/72157625412227253/

The Linked Open Government Data group has worked hard to make available US Government data as RDF, and over the past year they’ve introduced some really great tools for exploring government data. One of those tools, the White House Visitors app, is now a native app for the iOS product family. The native app provides live querying of the LOGD triple stores, queries DBpedia for more information about important people, uses the New York Times linked open data to find the latest articles, and pulls images using Freebase. For travel, the application caches data so that existing queries can be viewed when Internet connectivity is intermittent.

See the White House Visitors App on iTunes Preview or download it from the App Store.

Screenshots:

White House Visitors app finds the top 25 visitees (configurable) and lists them decreasing order.

Visualize the visitors and visitees in graphical form.

Using linked data, the White House Visitors app can find out more about people listed in the original dataset.