This document summarizes a presentation on linked open government data. It discusses how government data is being opened through initiatives like Data.gov and how linked data approaches can help address challenges in making open government data more interoperable, scalable, and able to maintain provenance. Key points discussed include the growth of open government data, challenges in working with raw open data, benefits of converting data to linked open formats, and open questions around improving interoperability, addressing scalability issues, and maintaining provenance as open government data continues to expand.

1. Linked Open Government Data: What’s Next?
Li Ding, James A. Hendler, and Deborah L. McGuinness
With thanks to the entire RPI Tetherless World LOGD team: logd.tw.rpi.edu
particularly John Erickson, Tim Lebo, Dominic DiFranzo;, Alvaro Graves;
Gregory Williams; Xian Li; James Michaelis; Jin Zheng; Zhenning Shangguan; Johanna Flores, Evan Patton
Tetherless World Constellation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
SemTech 2011 San Francisco June 7, 2011

2. Outline
•Open Government Data
•Linked Open Government Data
•Challenges and Opportunities
•Future Directions

3. Open Government Data:
Government data is already available and open on the Web and is growing.
Let’s create mash ups to expose more value.
?

4. Opening Government Data
“Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” --- President Obama (Jan 2009)
“if people put data onto the web -- government data, scientific data, community data, whatever it is -- it will be used by other people to do wonderful things, in ways that they never could have imagined.” -- Tim Berners-Lee (Feb 2010)
Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/open, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html
Linked Data and Semantic Tech are key enabler!

5. International Open Government Data: A Great Opportunity
•13 Other nations establishing open data
•24 States now offering data sites
•11 Cities in America with open data
•236 New applications from Data.gov datasets
•258 Data contacts in Federal Agencies
•308,650 Datasets available on Data.gov
•Open Government Data (OGD)
–A public asset (collected by government) with a large amount of high value data and wide domain coverage
–An international mandate for government transparency, business applications, citizen participation, and etc.
Deployment Status (source: Data.gov)
Source: http://www.data.gov/

6. Challenges from Raw Open Government Data
Data in proprietary formats
Independent curators
Distributed and unlinked Data
Smoke rate (Impacteen.org)
Policy coverage (NCI)
Limited Participation

7. Linked Open Government Data
TWC: Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute logd.tw.rpi.edu LOGD: Linked Open Government Data

8. Linked Data is Large and is Growing
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9. The Tetherless World Constellation
Linked Open Govt Data Portal
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Create
TWC LOGD
Convert
Query/
Access
LOGD
SPARQL
Endpoint
Enhance
• RDF
• RSS
• JSON
• XML
• HTML
• CSV
• …
Community Portal
Data.gov deployment

10. Linked Open Government Data
A Linked Open Government Data (LOGD) ecosystem is a Linked Data-based system where stakeholders of different sizes and roles find, manage, archive, publish, reuse, integrate, mash-up, and consume open government data in connection with online tools, services and societies.

11. Moving data.gov to linked data (US)
•Third parties (like RPI) translate the government datasets into linked data formats
• US Data.gov hosts 6.4B RDF triples 5/21/2010
•acknowledges Semantic Web as a key technology for open government data

12. Government Data within the LD Cloud
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http://linkeddata.org/
Government Data is currently over ½ the cloud in size (~17B triples), 10s of thousands of links to other data (within and without)

13. TWC LOGD: 50+ Demos in Many Domains using Various Technologies
Technology
•Semantic Web
•Semantic CMS
•Semantic Search
•Social network
•NLP
•Mobile
•Visualization
•Provenance
•…
Domain
•Health
•Finance
•Politics
•Society
•Economy
•…

14. Selected TWC Mashups

15. Trends in Smoking Prevalence, Tobacco Policy Coverage and Tobacco Prices (1991-2007)
PopSciGrid with NIH/NCI & Northwestern
Aimed at conveying complex health-related information to consumers and health decision makers
 Diverse datasets from NIH
 Uses lightweight semantic technologies to produce mashups that make data accessible that would be otherwise difficult to view in perspective
 Maintains provenance about data and manipulations
 Two-way communication: Feedback users’ comments to gov contacts (e.g. %)

16. PopSciGrid Workflow
Convert
Enhance
Visualize
derive derive
Integrate
Ban coverage
Publish

17. The Abstract LOGD Workflow
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Visualize
End User
Gov
Agency
Mashed Data
LOGD
RAW OGD
Enhance
Integrate
Publish
Convert
Developer
Usability of LOGD
•Interoperability
•Scalability
•Provenance
Mashup Workflow (Conventional OGD)
1.Publish
2.Mashup
3.Visualize

18. Challenge: Interoperability
★
make your stuff available on the Web (whatever format) under an open license
★★
make it available as structured data (e.g., Excel instead of image scan of a table)
★★★
use non-proprietary formats (e.g., CSV instead of Excel)
★★★★
use URIs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff
★★★★★
link your data to other data to provide context
Syntactic
• Extract entities from HTML tables
• Parse Excel tables
Semantic
• Does “Georgia” refer to a US state or a country?
• Is “2000” calendar year, fiscal year or dollar amount?
TBL’s 5-star Deployment Scheme for Linked Data

19. Mashing up data from different countries
http://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu/demo/USForeignAid/demo-1554.html

20. Even if not “rationalized” together
Build ontology mapping based on shared terms “Economic”

21. Enhance interoperability using Linked Data: drill down contextual knowledge
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•Identity : URI
•Context
–Description: metadata, esp. type & datatype
–Mapping (linking identities)
•Syntactic
–Common string name
–Common URI
•Semantic
–Complex Object: attributes + context (siblings)
–Ontological Mapping: e.g., owl:sameAs
–Rule-based Mapping: e.g. mapping “Liter” to “Gallon”

22. Scalability factors in LOGD deployment
•Large number of OGD datasets
– 6k+ Data.gov.uk
–200k+ Data.gov
–323k+ International OGD datasets
•Non-trivial human workload: clean-up syntax, enhance semantics, integrate datasets, visualize resulting data …
•Substantial computing workload: running time of complex tasks, memory and disk space, maintenance costs …
22

23. International catalog
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24. Scalability issues in the International Open Government Dataset Catalog
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Crawled 40+ different dataset catalogs from 19 countries “non-trivial customized programming workload”
Searching 323,304 datasets “Complex SPARQL query got timeout”
Social Aspect
Computing Aspect
International Open Government Dataset Catalog

25. Social Aspect: Distribute human workload to the right developers
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Domain Expertise
Application Development Expertise
Joint work with Alvaro Graves, PhD student at RPI
Layman End Users
Software Engineers
Scientists, Experts
Genus
Students
Convert
Enhance
Combine
Knowledge Engineers
Visualize
Publish
1.Decompose workload to fine-granular jobs
2.Leverage a wider range of developers

26. Computing Aspect: fit computing power to LOGD deployment
•Scale up for more government data
–Support collective incremental data processing
–Support large scale data analysis: graph connectivity, complex pattern/hypotheses discovery
–Map repetitive developers’ workload to automated tools
–Reduce service maintenance costs
•Scale down for wider range of end user apps
–Limited computing power, e.g., mobile devices
–End users’ cognitive constraints, e.g., screen-size, executive summary
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27. Provenance
•Provenance-aware frameworks are needed to support transparency, appropriate attribution, and ultimately trust of any kind of open data.
•Versioning and persistence are important factors to sustainable applications
•Workflow provenance can help increase understanding and trust since it can be used to explain behavior and dependencies of intelligent systems
27

28. Attribution in PopSciGrid
demo
person
technology
dataset
agency
version
conversion
logd:uses_technology
dcterms:contributor
Example scenarios
• List direct/indirect contributors
• End users send feedback to curators
• Curators learn usage of datasets
• List demos by technology
void:subset
void:subset
dcterms:publisher
logd:uses_dataset
State-wise Tobacco Policy coverage stats

29. TWC Semantic Water Quality Portal
Aimed at helping people investigate local water quality
 Diverse datasets, regulations, datatypes
 Uses lightweight semantic technologies to produce mashups that make data accessible that would be otherwise difficult to view in perspective
 Maintains provenance about data and manipulations
 Exposes unexpected uses of data (and thus unexpected usage patterns)

30. Detailed View of Pollution

31. Provenance of regulations

32. Challenges Revisited
•Interoperability
–Syntactic: Linked Data, RDF
–Semantic: ontology, evolving
•Scalability (9.9 billion triples on the TWC LOGD)
–Effective Social platform for task dispatching
–More automations, e.g., data cleaning, and linked detection
–Scalable tools, esp. SPARQL endpoint
•Provenance
–Accountability: Privacy, licensing, trust
–Credit / Blame
–Replicate applications and transfer system building knowledge
•More issues
–Persistent data access for changing data
–…
32

33. Summary
•The Open Government data is a key resource
–Many governments releasing data, growing number in structured form
•Government (and general data) transparency comes through in the “mashing up” of data from many sites maintaining (and exposing) provenance
–Key to linked data
•While there has been tremendous progress, many challenges remain
–Trust, Provenance, Scaling, Interoperability, Archiving, Curation, …
•The Research agenda for linked government data is an important driving area for semantic technologies

34. Questions?
The work presented in this talk was primarily conducted at the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Comments / Questions: [ dingl | dlm ] @ cs.rpi.edu. Events: Open Linked Govt. Data Symposium: submission deadline June 15 http://tw.rpi.edu/web/event/AAAI/2011/Fall_Symposium_OGK TWC / Elsevier Hackathon: June 27-28 http://tw.rpi.edu/web/event/TWCElsevierHackathonJune2011 Reference: Li Ding, Timothy Lebo, John S. Erickson, Dominic DiFranzo, Gregory Todd Williams, Xian Li, James Michaelis, Alvaro Graves, Jin Guang Zheng, Zhenning Shangguan, Johanna Flores, Deborah L. McGuinness and Jim Hendler, TWC LOGD: A Portal for Linked Open Government Data Ecosystems, submitted to JWS, special issue on semantic web challenge’10