Components of an Open Government Data Infrastructure §
December 2007: The initial 8 data principles get drafted and are the basis for amendments and interpretations
2003: The Java based Jena semantic web framework reaches V 2.0. It is the most feature complete implementation of semantic web functionality and widely adopted by business and academia
1999: RDF, the Resource Description Framework for storing arbitrary entities and relations among them, declared as a W3C recommendation
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
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Tim Berners Lee describes URIs as the crucial element of Semantic Web
2003
2004
2005
1. DIRECTIVE 2003/98/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 17 November 2003 on the re-use of public sector information
2001: Foundation of Creative Commons (CC). The Creative Commons organization releases a set of licences suitable for creative and ingenious work and partly adaptable for data. Most importantly, the CC actively promote to the discussion of openness and transparency in the society as a whole.
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2008: OWL, the Web Ontology Language reaches V2 specification. OWL extends the expressive power of RDF & RDFS with formal semantics to support reasoning for automated information generation.
2004: W3C adopts RDF as standard
2007
2006
2008
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Germany adopts Freedom of Information law on federal level
Granada Ministerial Declaration on the European Digital Agenda: Agreed on 19 April 2010 (ministers responsible for the Information Society Policy of the European Union Member States) Austria: OGD performs Workshops with government and business representatives and civil society
The Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment approved unanimously in Malmö, Sweden, on 18 November 2009 includes several declarations of intent regarding increased transparency and openness in the administration process
2009
2010
2011
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14 March 2007: INSPIRE Directive 2007/2/EC establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community
24 May 2004: The Open Knowledge Foundation is founded and promotes open content, data and information and becomes a strong open data supporter.
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May 2009: Going live of US data.gov October 2009: DC Apps for democracy. “4000% ROI in 30 days”
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January 2010: Going live of US data.gov 2010: Austria: Open3 and OGD Austria, civil society open data movements, are founded as associations.
Legal decision or directive Web site or public appearance
2011: Austria: Council of Ministers agrees on the requirement of an Open Data strategy Open3 conducts an Open Government survey among Austrian parliamentarians
2009: Pellet 2.0, the most feature complete semantic web reasoner with support for OWL 2.0 released
The Origin of Species §
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US president Obama releases a memorandum concerning the freedom of information act directed to the heads of federal agencies in which he proclaims: “In the face of doubt, openness prevails”
15 December 2010: Neelie Kroes says “Yes to Open Data”
In October 2010, the Australian Government adopted an open access policy, with Creative Commons as the preferred licence for the release of government information
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October 2010: Vienna agrees on Open Data Strategy
2010: Foundation of Open Commons Region Linz with aim to open Government Data
Civil society movement or action Technical specification or SDK
Open Government Data time-line with a focus on Austria
Legislation
Society
Make Openness the Default
Uncharted Waters
Policy Models
Countries having Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA), with an assumption of “In the face of doubt, openness prevails” , can move much faster towards open data by circumnavigating discussions of purpose, meaning, entitlement and legal necessity.
The effects of releasing Open (Government) Data are boldly touted: More openness and transparency and valuable data sets will spur new economic models, thus lead to new levels of economic growth. There is little supportive, quantitative data to back this assumptions. Observations of medieval change from alchemy to science by transparency of methods and research results support the prospect of broad Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. societal change. Penguin Press, 2010.
For open datasets to be beneficial to more but a small “data elite”, concerns of data and media literacy have to be raised and tacked by adapted curricula, starting at primary school pupils and their teachers.
Apply Meaningful Licences http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8034134/Open-Government-Licence-promises-unlimited-use-of-government-data.html
Open Government Data beneficiaries require meaningful licenses in order to securely base services on released data and create additional value. Those licences regulate IPR, legal liability, naming attribution and derived work. The more liberal those licences are, the more uptake published data will see. License requires attribution to the issuer? Licence / Remarks Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, √ X http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode
X X
Public Domain Dedication and Certification (PDDC), based on U.S. law, enforceability outside US questionable; interesting concept of non-normative community norms. http://www.opendatacommons.org/norms/, focus on data-bases/sets
X X
Open Database License (ODbL), Derivative and creative work allowed, originator must be attributed, resulting work must be released under same licence, focus on data-bases/sets
√ √
Open Data Commons (ODC), Extraction, reutilisation, creation of derivative and creation of collective Databases allowed; Work-inprogress, focus on data-bases/sets
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api.data.gv.at
Organisation
economy.data.gv.at
IPSec Tunnel
Internal Databases
DB1
RDF Database Internal View
DB2
4'
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Understand Prosumerism
Filtering stage
User retrieves URIs by querying open data search engine / URI service (optional)
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Information ressource URIs are resolved against RDF web server, which queries PURL DB to resolve stale URIs
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Web server returns RDF or HTML data based on client request.
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Mobile devices query against JSON API; Advanced services issue SPARQL queries
Collaborative Innovation Framework Elite Circle
Consortium
Governance Hierarchical
Flat
Pisano et. al. “Which collaboration is right for you?” HBR 2008 http://hbr.org/2008/12/which-kind-of-collaboration-is-right-for-you/sb1
Participation
Innovation mall
eConsultation eConsultation
Evaluation Co-Drafting Co-Production Co-Production
Müller, Weitzmann, Lesch et.al. Offene Staatskunst- Bessere Politik durch Open Government? Berlin, October 2010.
Implementation
Organisation
For open data to be useful to the public, technical aspects have to be met. These include • machine readability • ease of physical access • permanence • royalty-free data formats
Data Separation
External and intra-organisational data representation has to be separated. By separation, data not meant for disclosure will be filtered, prepared to meet open standards and semantically enriched.
Semantic Annotations
Trust is leveraged by interlinking datasets, thus enabling a user or eService to inspect datasets, preferably down to the data Architectural Components origin (political decision, census data, electronic metering point). This is achieved by meaningful and permanent URIs, a core element of the semantic web.
finance.data.gv.at
00
Community Innovation
Web Interface
RDF DB
Organisation data.gv.at
Peer Production will harness human skill, ingenuity and intelligence more efficiently and effectively. The ability to integrate the talents of dispersed individuals and organizations is becoming and important skill and requires more uptake by politicians and heads of public administration agencies.
Organisation
proxy.data.gv.at
External View
Leverage the Benefits of Peer Production
Open Innovation is not a one-way game. Once an administrative body decides to open-up, the inflow has to be carefully revised and incorporated into subsequent tasks. If society input is neglected, built-up trust will vanish.
RDF DB
Javascript Libraries
data.gv.at
Embrace Open Innovation
Social and commercial entrepreneurs play a core role at turning OGD into new services. This requires an attitude of “letting loose” to enable an inflow of new ideas.
Web Interface
Web Interface RDF-Browser
Open Data Open Data
http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/ten-open-data-principles/
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11
Initialisation
Open Data Principles
Web Interface
JSON-Connectors
√ X
# #
URI Service / Discovery Service
00
SPARQL
CC-0, very liberal licence, the issuer waives all of his or her copyright and neighbouring and related rights in a work, worldwide applicable; re-assertion of copyright not allowed
eParticipation eParticipation
Chance for evaluation of success or failure of government, strengthened by quantitative data
http://wiki.okfn.org/OpenDataLicensing
Derived work is required to be re-shared?
Role of Civic Society
Open Closed
4' 4'
Cross-site Javscript call require proxy service; Obsolete as of HTML5 CORS
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New datasets get syndicated as soon as they become available by RSS, ATOM or pubsubhubbub
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A National URI Infrastructure
Staging and filtering area at which internal datasets, identified as open data, are amended by publicly addressable URIs
URIs by their segmented nature (namespaces) fit the need of democratic governments by following the principles of subsidiarity and local authority. The establishment of a national URI infrastructure has to take place at the national CIO level while itemisation can be left to the respective federal
administrative bodies, eg. http://{domain}.{federallevel }.data.gv.at/{concept }/IDentifier.{RDF|html}
Search and Publication Service
The federal nature of open data by URI segmentation requires a higher level service for aggregation, search and ontological harmonisation. Local government data providers sources publish changes to their data sets to this higher level service by RSS or pubsubhubbub. Koumenides, Christos, Harith Alani, Nigel Shadbolt, and Manuel Salvadores “Global Integration of Public Sector Information.” 26-27, Raleigh, NC, USA, 2010 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21025/.
© Johann Höchtl, Research fellow at Center for E-Government, Danube University Krems, Austria and PhD student at Business Informatics Group, Technical University Vienna, Austria. @myprivate42 johann.hoechtl@donau-uni.ac.at http://www.facebook.com/myprivate42 http://www.slideshare.net/jhoechtl
Technology
http://digitalgovernment.wordpress.com/