Open Government Data (approaches, concerns and barriers, lessons learned)

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• josema.alonso@fundacionctic.org• josema@w3.org• josema@webfoundation.org• @josemalonso