Linked Open Government Data and the Semantic Web
Download as PPT, PDF9 likes1,548 views
The document discusses the current state of open government data, emphasizing the need for smart markup and enhanced information presentation for transparency. It highlights the potential of linked data and semantics to improve data usability, but identifies challenges such as trust, provenance, and curation. Additionally, it notes efforts in the UK and US to convert government data to RDF for better accessibility and semantic utilization.
Linked Open Government Data and the Semantic Web
- 1. Open Government Data Jim Hendler Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science Assistant Dean of Information Technology and Web Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler @jahendler (twitter)
- 2. Government Data on the Web
- 3. 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
- 4. 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 !
- 5. Fits Web Architecture ~2006: Web app developers discover the Semantic Web RDF Triple Store Dynamic Content Engine HTTP RDF Web App (w SPARQL) RDF Triple Store … HTML 2008 examples include sites from "regular" Web players such as Dow Jones, Reuters and Yahoo!
- 6. Government Data on the Web
- 7. 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
- 8. Moving data.gov to linked data (UK) Built around linked data with top-down push from “Number 10”
- 9. 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
- 10. Pump through to Google Viz for demos
- 12. Adding some Web magic Web Analytics Social Data Networks External Links
- 13. Identifying cross cuts in the data
- 14. NTIA internet study vs. libraries
- 15. NTIA internet funding vs. tweets about #haiti
- 16. Visualization can help identify data errors Correlates fires, acres burned, and agency budgets
- 17. Visualization can help identify data errors Were there really no fires in 1985?
- 18. Combining data from different sites
- 19. Presents a challenge – different ontologies
- 20. Presents a challenge – different ontologies
- 21. Presents a challenge – different ontologies Same or different?
- 22. 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 …
- 23. 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, …