open government data (approaches, concerns and barriers, lessons learned)
DESCRIPTION
slides for the SharePSI workshop, Brussels, 10-11 May 2011TRANSCRIPT
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)
Economical and Business
Macroeconomic StabilityFinancial MarketsMarkets for Goods and ServicesBusiness Environment
Economical and Business
Macroeconomic StabilityFinancial MarketsMarkets for Goods and ServicesBusiness Environment
Social
DemographicsLabor MarketQuality of LifeEducation and Literacy
Social
DemographicsLabor MarketQuality of LifeEducation and Literacy
Infraestructures y Sci-Tech
InnovationICT UsageInfraestructures
Infraestructures y Sci-Tech
InnovationICT UsageInfraestructures
Open Access
Legal BasisAwareness and SupportData and InteroperabilityAgents
Open Access
Legal BasisAwareness and SupportData and InteroperabilityAgents
Institutional and Political
Governance and DemocracyTransparency and CorruptionCooperation
Institutional and Political
Governance and DemocracyTransparency and CorruptionCooperation
OGD Ecosystem: Context is very important
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• [email protected]• [email protected]• [email protected]• @josemalonso