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DemocratizingOpen Data

Alvaro GravesTetherless World Constellation

Department of Cognitive ScienceRensselaer Polytechnic Institute

gravea3@rpi.edu@alvarograves

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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.

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Conclusions•A call to arms: We need better tools to

empower citizens to use Open Data

•The needs of the Long Tail are important and can’t be dismissed

•Visualizations can be an easy start

Thanks!Alvaro Graves - @alvarograves