Open Government Data (approaches, concerns and barriers, lessons learned)

Open Government Data (approaches, concerns and barriers, lessons learned) Share-PSI workshop, 10-11 May 2011, Brussels José Manuel Alonso CC-BY 2011 CTIC Centro Tecnológico

Overview
Context and projects in Spain
Variety of approaches
Concerns heard
Importance of OGD Ecosystem
Lessons learned (and food for discussion)
Organizational
Financial
Technical

Context: Projects
Spain (11 projects + 3 more in the works)
2 Local
8 Regional
1 National: National Data Catalogue
International (2 projects + 2 more in the works)
Feasibility (in partnership with Web Foundation)
Chile, Ghana
Standardization: W3C eGovernment

Spain: varied technical approaches Datasets Technology Asturias Few 5-star Linked Data Basque Country Hundreds, much low-hanging fruit All formats, RDF metadata Cataluña Dozens All formats, some RDF/XML, several APIs, some high quality Zaragoza Dozens All formats, some 5-star Linked Data, some APIs Gijón Dozens All formats, some RDF/XML, several APIs, some high quality National Hundreds from XLS to HTML pages to PDF reports

Spain: varied types of information Example Asturias
Hundreds of occupational training courses in Linked Data
Basque Country
Database of Spanish-Basque word and expression translations (700Mb)
Cataluña
25.000 geo-located public equipments in RDF/XML
Zaragoza Water cut offs in real time (GeoRSS) Gijón Public transport in real time (Linked Data) National A little bit of everything

Concerns Heard
Loss of licensing revenue
Loss of control
Legal challenges
Unwelcomed exposure
Procedural changes
Privacy
National security
Complexity
Investment
Capacity building required
Authenticity, quality
Corruption, falsification of data
Customer service
(Positives are outweighing the concerns)

OGD Ecosystem: Context is very important Economical and Business Macroeconomic Stability Financial Markets Markets for Goods and Services Business Environment Social Demographics Labor Market Quality of Life Education and Literacy Infraestructures y Sci-Tech Innovation ICT Usage Infraestructures Open Access Legal Basis Awareness and Support Data and Interoperability Agents Institutional and Political Governance and Democracy Transparency and Corruption Cooperation

Lessons learned: organizational
Raise awareness
Resistance to change is a delicate issue
Government people tend to avoid risks (so keep them low)
(Almost) no performance data available
“ What I ’ m doing already works well enough ”
Start small and grow steadily
Technology represents a small percentage
Much time spent on analyzing state of the (internal) art
Much internal outreach is needed
Identify champions
Examples help
If they tell how to improve lives , even better
Beware of the “ blinded by visualizations ” , aka trivilization for the masses effect

Lessons learned: financial
Perform an informed cost analysis
e.g. the 18K EUR TB
susteinability beyond the hype phase
Beware of the economic growth argument
Re-use is not that high
Monitoring practice so far is not good enough
Downloads? (and what about entrepreneurships?)
Improved Efficiency
Consolidated information
Improved interoperability (by chance?)
Licensing: give the information away for free but be ready to fight for doing so
Promote CC-BY or CC0 like licenses
OGL great step forward

Lessons learned: technical
Raw data now… and better data afterwards
i.e. start with the low hanging fruit
improve over time ( steps )
Do not try to enforce an specific architecture
Chances are you could not deploy it
Try to adapt to existing systems and build on top of them as a start
More standardization is needed
e.g. on vocabularies
What ’ s a dataset? What ’ s a catalogue?
Counting datasets is bad
Linked Data is not easy but a good tactic, needs improvement
It just doesn ’ t work (semantic browsers examples)
Better tooling is needed
Capacity building

Conclusions
The whole ecosystem is very important, don ’ t underestimate
Concerns are still many but there are some arguments to be used
They need to be addressed ASAP anyway
The number of projects is constantly increasing and improving
Let ’ s build on success stories

Thank you
http://datos.fundacionctic.org
http://www.w3.org/ eGov
http://www.webfoundation.org
josema.alonso @fundacionctic.org
josema @w3. org
[email_address]
@ josemalonso

Open Government Data (approaches, concerns and barriers, lessons learned)

by Open Data @ CTIC

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