how open data are turned into services?

How open data are turned into services?

Muriel Foulonneau, Sébastien Martin, Slim Turki

IESS 2014 – 5th Int. Conf. onExploring Services Science5-7 February 2014Geneva, Switzerland

Recent Highlights

2009 – USA, Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government

• 1000s of datasets released in multiple sectors.

2013 – EU Commission, new release of Public Sector Information directive

• amending Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector information known as the “PSI Directive”

• include in particular cultural heritage data in the public data that has to be made openly accessible by public institutions in Europe.

2013 – G8 Open Data Charter; Principles are:• Open Data by Default

• Quality and Quantity

• Useable by All

• Releasing Data for Improved Governance

• Releasing Data for Innovation

18/02/2014 2How open data are turned into services?

Observations

Open Data movement mainly a data provision movement.

Release of Open Data motivated by:• government transparency (citizen access to government data)

• development of services by third parties for benefit for citizens and companies (typically smart city approach), or

• development of new services that stimulate the economy

Many platforms are supported by initiatives dedicated to creation of services based on open data

Development of sustainable services based on open data is extremely disappointing

Services delivered through Applications

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Objectives

1. Study development of services based on open data

2. Means to make data opening process more effective

3. Assessment of data opening and RoI


Existing approaches to encourage creation of services based on open data

Intellectual property rights and reuse conditions

Singapore • insists on having well documented IPR on each dataset

Europeana• Data Exchange Agreement, all data providers have to sign in order to have

their data included in the platform.

• Release of all data (metadata in this case) transferred to Europeana with a CC0 license, i.e., the data is in the public domain.

• Lowest possible barrier to reuse; reusers haven’t to address heterogeneous reuse conditions when reusing multiple datasets

• Enforcement of a single and so open license created a number of issues with cultural heritage institutions which have invested large resources in manual creation of these metadata for years.

• French Min. of Culture launched a study to verify if revenues of cultural data selling > revenues in regard with open data release potential.


Dataset discoverability

Open Data portals at regional, national and international level aggregate metadata on datasets, to make datasets accessible.

Vocabularies• Different vocabularies can be used to describe datasets (VoID, POWDER,

Dublin Core Collection application profile or DDI)

• Heterogeneity of metadata is an obstacle to their discovery

• Harmonization of metadata through vocabularies such as DCAT can help datasets discovery.


Support

Release of open data is not sufficient to make them accessible and understandable by reusers

“Reuse requires technical skills and extensive knowledge of the context of data that are beyond the reach of a large part of the population” (Remiti, 2012).

Publishers create APIs to lower technical barrier and time required to develop new services:

• Reusers do not have to address format heterogeneity and less knowledge required

• Singapore / API provides access to the datasets recorded on the portal

• USA / Federal agencies to create public APIs that could be used by government and private developers to tap in to data. Free, open source tools are released to accelerate adoption of open data practices by providing plug-and-play tools and best practices to help agencies improve the management and release of open data.

• In France, API for data.gouv.fr is under study


Training

World Bank platform• Exception, provides various training services, basic knowledge

• Help potential reusers how to get data and to represent data it into maps.

Developers can rely on initiatives from third parties like Open Knowledge Foundation

• For stakeholders who may not have extensive technical knowledge but wish to work on the data (e.g. data journalists), it founded a School of data in 2012.


Publicizing datasets

When data producers publish new datasets, they have to make the datasets known to reusers to optimize the chances that reusers will take advantage of datasets.

• French National Library has established contacts with the semantic community to make new datasets known so as to facilitate the creation of new services. They publicize on virtual community channels the information and reach potential reusers for their data.bnf.fr datasets.


Competitions for service creations

Hackathons• Locking developers, citizens, civil servants, researchers, company

programmers or any other interested party to create services in a short amount of times, typically 1 or 2 days.

• Dev. can be individual or the result of joint code developed on site.

• Europeana for instance organized several hackhatons.

• Paris city, France organized an open data competition in collaboration with companies opening their data

Off-site competitions • Veni, Vidi, Vici competitions organized by the European LinkedUp project

to encourage reuse of educational datasets, accompanied by monetary prizes (39.500€).

Variety of services that can be created based on open datasets.

Effective at raising awareness of developers and service creators on potential for reuse of the open datasets.

Most often services created in these contexts do not lead to the development of actual sustainable services.18/02/2014 How open data are turned into services? 11

Ensuring creation of sustainable services

Singapore government organizes co-funding of services via Calls for contribution

European Commission co-funds development of• services to take advantage of geographic information coming from the

Galileo satellite

• services reusing open datasets (open access to scientific outcomes experimentation calls in ICT-PSP and services based on open geographic data).


Publicizing services to show reuse and encourage service usage

Open data portals include a section to show services and applications that use the datasets

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“Anwendungen”Berlin Open Data portal

“Apps” section data.gov.uk

“Application Showcase” data.gov.sg

“Application showcase”World Bank data portal

Selection of datasets to open

In order to identify the datasets to open:• investigate which datasets are already available, which IPR conditions

would allow a publication under an open licence, and whose quality is sufficient, or

• investigate what citizens and potential reusers are interested in.

• In 2013 the French ministry of culture launched a survey for the selection of priority datasets for open data release.


Typology of created services

Monitoring

Difficult to monitor services created based on open data sets.

Easier to monitor actual reuse of data, datasets available only through APIs.

On open data catalogues, the number of downloads can be monitored.

Effective reuse of data is more difficult to trace if reusers do not establish a direct contact with the data publishers.


Most popular datasets on the Paris Open Data portalopendata.paris.fr

UK / data.gov.uk

314 apps listed; Domains of application include:• Economy (Property prize , Job market)

• Environment (Use of renewable energies)

• Transparency (e.g., Availability of governmental financial data with the app. « Where does my money go? »)

• Society (Criminality map)

• Local services (best surgery services next to me, postal code where I am, fuel station search)

• Education (geological layers where I stand), and

• Citizen life (elections results, « UK arms export licence browser »)

18/02/2014 How open data are turned into services? 17Thematic distribution of applications based on datasets published on data.gov.uk

UK / data.gov.uk

Although categories are not exactly similar

• Imbalance between low number of geographic and transportation datasets and large proportion of transportation services.

• Suggests the quite uneven potential of datasets for reuse.

• Transportation datasets appear to have a high reusability potential

• Education datasets attract less reusers in proportion of their quantity.

Domain is clearly not the only element to take into consideration when assessing the reusability of a dataset.


Thematic distribution of applications

Distribution of datasets by topic

How are datasets reused?

78% reuse only a single dataset.

As an exception, Sketchmap.co.uk uses 19 datasets.

Most reused datasets are Code-Point® Open and the National Public Transport Access Nodes (NaPTAN).

• Transportation datasets are popular.

80% of apps are available for free• Others are most often sold for less than 1£.

The most downloaded app available via GooglePlay is NHS direct app (medical diagnostic) with more than 100.000 downloads.

• This application was however created by the same administration which released the data.


Evaluation of open data initiatives

Evaluation of open data initiatives

Usage, audience, and uniqueness of the services

Entailed changes in public institutions opening data (improved

data management, increase information sharing culture)

Created business opportunities

Citizen and business perception of the city (open data as a

communication tool on how modern a city or country is)

Modification to particular markets it has entailed

Sustainability of created services

New dialog created with citizens (open legislation process, UK)


Conclusion

Studies suggest that reusers are not really interested in open datasets Not a demand driven initiative but rather an initiative of data providers,

hoping for a possible impact in terms of service creation.

Inadequacy between released datasets and created services as well as between the claims of huge potential service creations and the low demand from service creators, particularly companies

• Are reusers aware of the potential reuse of datasets or do not they really need them?

• Is there an adequacy between the datasets that are of interest to reusers and the datasets actually opened?

• Can we measure the potential for reuse of particular datasets? Which are the obstacles to reuse?

• Is the potential impact of open data in terms of service creation really inflated or are there obstacles to data reuse that have not been sufficiently addressed?


How open data are turned into services?

Muriel Foulonneau, Sébastien Martin, Slim Turki

[email protected]

[email protected]

IESS 2014 – 5th Int. Conf. onExploring Services Science5-7 February 2014Geneva, Switzerland

Thank you for your attention

how open data are turned into services?

Technology

public data

data metadata

roi18022014how open

data providers

data producers

context of data

assessment of data

data journalists