The document discusses the challenges of making open data accessible and usable for non-technical citizens and small communities. While large amounts of data are available from governments, it is often inconsistent, boring, or unusable for most people. Better tools are needed to empower citizens to use open data, similar to how tools like blogs and wikis simplified publishing on the web. Visualizations could be an easy way for non-experts to consume and understand large datasets, but current tools are still difficult to use. The document calls for the development of better tools to serve the "long tail" of open data users.

1. 1
Democratizing
Open Data
Alvaro Graves
Tetherless World Constellation
Department of Cognitive Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
gravea3@rpi.edu
@alvarograves

2. 2
Good news first
• More than 1 million datasets available from
many national and local governments over the
world
• Billions of triples in the LOD cloud
• There is information available about people,
budgets, education, transportation, geography,
etc.

3. 3
OK, now the bad news....
• “Bad” data being published
• No use of standards, inconsistent, hard to consume
and automatize
• “Boring” data, not useful for many people
• Budget of 1994 is not as exciting as you may think
• “Unusable” data: There is no app for that
• Apps and hackathons don’t scale to cover the
needs of the long tail

4. 4
Small-scale activism/journalism
• How can a small community benefit from Open
Data (even from national repositories)?
• How can non-geeks make use of OpenData
without someone building an app for them?
• How the promises of transparency, accountability,
etc. can be enforced by common citizens?

5. 5
Looking back at the Web
• Web 1.0
• You needed to learn HTML, CGI-BIN, FTP, or...
• Have a Webmaster
• Web 2.0
• Better tools (e.g., MediaWiki,Wordpress, Drupal)
simplified the process of publishing and creating
content on the Web

6. 6
Challenges are similar,
but not the same
• Creating and reading a webpage is “easy”
• Writers and readers have been doing it for
centuries in books and newspapers
• Managing (semi-)structured data is relatively new for
many people
• Different metaphors are needed

7. 7
Easy win:Visualizations
• Allowing people to create custom
visualizations based on Open Data easily
• Nice way to consume and communicate
large amounts of data
• Nice way to identify trends and detect
outliers

8. 8
Visualbox
• Tool for creating
visualizations based on
Linked Data
• Presented a session at
the Mozilla Festival 2012
• Great feedback, but still
hard to use by non-
SemWeb geeks
• SPARQL is hard!
• Quality of Linked Data
is an issue

9. 9
Conclusions
• A call to arms:We need better tools to empower
citizens to use Open Data
• The needs of the LongTail are important and can’t
be dismissed
• Visualizations can be an easy start
Thanks!
Alvaro Graves - @alvarograves

10. 9
Conclusions
• A call to arms:We need better tools to empower
citizens to use Open Data
• The needs of the LongTail are important and can’t
be dismissed
• Visualizations can be an easy start
Thanks!
Alvaro Graves - @alvarograves