Tetherless World Constellation Open Government Data Jim Hendler Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science Assistant Dean of Information Technology and Web Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (twitter)

Tetherless World Constellation Government Data on the Web

Tetherless World Constellation Current state (academic) Lots of data is being opened But much of it is opaque and contains (sometime) significant errors Smart mark-up (including annotation) is needed But also needed are information and visual presentation capabilities to really put people in the loop Technical approaches are helping but curation (by people and computers) is sorely needed

Tetherless World Constellation Linked Data + Semantics "Linked Data" approach finds its use cases in Web Applications (at Web scales) –A lot of data, a little semantics –Finding anything in the mess can be a win! Example –Declare simple inferable relationships and apply, at scale, to large, heterogeneous data collections eg. Use InverseFunctional triangulation to find the entities that can be inferred to be the same –These are "heuristics" not every answer must be right (qua Google) –But remember time = money!

Tetherless World Constellation RDF Triple Store Dynamic Content Engine HTTP RDF Web App (w SPARQL) RDF Triple Store Fits Web Architecture ~2006: Web app developers discover the Semantic Web … HTML 2008 examples include sites from "regular" Web players such as Dow Jones, Reuters and Yahoo!

Tetherless World Constellation Government Data on the Web

Tetherless World Constellation What’s promising Linked open data (data-gov.tw.rpi.edu, data.gov.uk) Open (access) commons and data publishing (and citation) Markup languages and semantics and tools to enable transparency Web 2.0 to put people in the loop and use and contribute to annotations Lower barriers to internet visualization, e.g. Google graphics

Tetherless World Constellation Moving data.gov to linked data (UK) Built around linked data with top- down push from “Number 10”

Tetherless World Constellation Moving data.gov to linked data (US) Third parties (like RPI) translate the govt data into Sem Web forms and link to sources Plans for a semantic.data.gov in OGD implementation plans,, but unfunded

Tetherless World Constellation Pump through to Google Viz for demos

Tetherless World Constellation Data.gov + epa.gov

Tetherless World Constellation Adding some Web magic Web Analytics Social Data Networks External Links

Tetherless World Constellation Identifying cross cuts in the data

Tetherless World Constellation NTIA internet study vs. libraries

Tetherless World Constellation NTIA internet funding vs. tweets about #haiti

Tetherless World Constellation Visualization can help identify data errors Correlates fires, acres burned, and agency budgets

Tetherless World Constellation Visualization can help identify data errors Were there really no fires in 1985?

Tetherless World Constellation Combining data from different sites

Tetherless World Constellation Presents a challenge – different ontologies

Tetherless World Constellation Presents a challenge – different ontologies

Tetherless World Constellation Presents a challenge – different ontologies Same or different?

Tetherless World Constellation And many other interesting issues Trust –Government data is controversial, and potentially biased How do we confirm or dispute? Combination –When we combine data we need to keep the provenance of information (see trust) How can we show and use? Scaling –Data-gov Wiki has already converted 5,448,693,510 triples Versioning and updating Archiving Searching …

Tetherless World Constellation Summary The Open Govt data is a great play ground –Government data released as RDF (UK) –Government data converted to RDF (US) –Government data that can be found in many forms and used or converted (WWW) Great showcase for the web nature of the Semantic Web –Mashups But many challenges remain –Scaling, Trust, Provenance, Archiving, Curation, …