Christine L. Borgman at ERCIM News: “Data sharing has become policy enforced by governments, funding agencies, journals, and other stakeholders. Arguments in favor include leveraging investments in research, reducing the need to collect new data, addressing new research questions by reusing or combining extant data, and reproducing research, which would lead to greater accountability, transparency, and less fraud. Arguments against data sharing rarely are expressed in public fora, so popular is the idea. Much of the scholarship on data practices attempts to understand the socio-technical barriers to sharing, with goals to design infrastructures, policies, and cultural interventions that will... (More >)
Breaking Public Administrations’ Data Silos. The Case of Open-DAI, and a Comparison between Open Data Platforms.
Paper by Raimondo Iemma, Federico Morando, and Michele Osella: “An open reuse of public data and tools can turn the government into a powerful ‘platform’ also involving external innovators. However, the typical information system of a public agency is not open by design. Several public administrations have started adopting technical solutions to overcome this issue, typically in the form of middleware layers operating as ‘buses’ between data centres and the outside world. Open-DAI is an open source platform designed to expose data as services, directly pulling from legacy databases of the data holder. The platform is the result of... (More >)
Open data could turn Europe’s digital desert into a digital rainforest
Joanna Roberts interviews Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich at Horizon: “…If we want to be competitive, Europe needs to find its own way. How can we differentiate ourselves and make things better? I believe Europe should not engage in the locked data strategy that we see in all these huge IT giants. Instead, Europe should engage in open data, open innovation, and value-sensitive design, particularly approaches that support informational self-determination. So everyone can use this data, generate new kinds of data, and build applications on top. This is going to create ever more possibilities... (More >)
Making emotive games from open data
Katie Collins at WIRED: “Microsoft researcher Kati London’s aim is “to try to get people to think of data in terms of personalities, relationships and emotions”, she tells the audience at the Story Festival in London. Through Project Sentient Data, she uses her background in games development to create fun but meaningful experiences that bridge online interactions and things that are happening in the real world. One such experience invited children to play against the real-time flow of London traffic through an online game called the Code of Everand. The aim was to test the road safety knowledge of... (More >)
Data for good
NESTA: “This report explores how capturing, sharing and analysing data in new ways can transform how charities work and how social action happens. Key Findings Citizens Advice (CAB) and Data Kind partnered to develop the Civic Dashboard. A tool which mines data from CAB consultations to understand emerging social issues in the UK. Shooting Star Chase volunteers streamlined the referral paths of how children come to be at the hospices saving up to £90,000 for children’s hospices around the country by refining the referral system. In a study of open grant funding data, NCVO identified 33,000 ‘below the radar... (More >)
Unleashing the Power of Data to Serve the American People
“Memorandum: Unleashing the Power of Data to Serve the American People To: The American People From: Dr. DJ Patil, Deputy U.S. CTO for Data Policy and Chief Data Scientist ….While there is a rich history of companies using data to their competitive advantage, the disproportionate beneficiaries of big data and data science have been Internet technologies like social media, search, and e-commerce. Yet transformative uses of data in other spheres are just around the corner. Precision medicine and other forms of smarter health care delivery, individualized education, and the “Internet of Things” (which refers to devices like cars or... (More >)
Amid Open Data Push, Agencies Feel Urge for Analytics
Jack Moore at NextGov: “Federal agencies, thanks to their unique missions, have long been collectors of valuable, vital and, no doubt, arcane data. Under a nearly two-year-old executive order from President Barack Obama, agencies are releasing more of this data in machine-readable formats to the public and entrepreneurs than ever before. But agencies still need a little help parsing through this data for their own purposes. They are turning to industry, academia and outside researchers for cutting-edge analytics tools to parse through their data to derive insights and to use those insights to drive decision-making. Take the U.S. Agency... (More >)
'From Atoms to Bits': A Visual History of American Ideas
Derek Thompson in The Atlantic: “A new paper employs a simple technique—counting words in patent texts—to trace the history of American invention, from chemistry to computers….in a new paper, Mikko Packalen at the University of Waterloo and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, devised a brilliant way to address this question empirically. In short, they counted words in patent texts. In a series of papers studying the history of American innovation, Packalen and Bhattacharya indexed every one-word, two-word, and three-word phrase that appeared in more than 4 million patent texts in the last 175 years. To focus their search on... (More >)
Dataset Inventorying Tool
Waldo Jaquith at US Open Data: “Today we’re releasing Let Me Get That Data For You (LMGTDFY), a free, open source tool that quickly and automatically creates a machine-readable inventory of all the data files found on a given website. When government agencies create an open data repository, they need to start by inventorying the data that the agency is already publishing on their website. This is a laborious process. It means searching their own site with a query like this: site:example.gov filetype:csv OR filetype:xls OR filetype:json Then they have to read through all of the results, download all... (More >)
The Tricky Task of Rating Neighborhoods on 'Livability'
Tanvi Misra at CityLab: “Jokubas Neciunas was looking to buy an apartment almost two years back in Vilnius, Lithuania. He consulted real estate platforms and government data to help him decide the best option for him. In the process, he realized that there was a lot of information out there, but no one was really using it very well. Fast-forward two years, and Neciunas and his colleagues have created PlaceILive.com—a start-up trying to leverage open data from cities and information from social media to create a holistic, accessible tool that measures the “livability” of any apartment or house in... (More >)
