DATA – Page 588 – The Living Library

Next.Data.gov

Curated on July 17, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nick Sinai at the White House Blog: “Today, we’re excited to share a sneak preview of a new design for Data.gov, called Next.Data.gov. The upgrade builds on the President’s May 2013 Open Data Executive Order that aims to fuse open-data practices into the Federal Government’s DNA. Next.Data.gov is far from complete (think of it as a very early beta), but we couldn’t wait to share our design approach and the technical details behind it – knowing that we need your help to make it even better. Here are some key features of the new design:

Leading with Data: The Data.gov team at General Services Administration (GSA), a handful of Presidential Innovation Fellows, and OSTP staff designed Next.Data.Gov to put data first. The team studied the usage patterns on Data.gov and found that visitors were hungry for examples of how data are used. The team also noticed many sources, such as tweets and articles outside of Data.gov featuring Federal datasets in action. So Next.Data.gov includes a rich stream that enables each data community to communicate how its datasets are impacting companies and the public.

In this dynamic stream, you’ll find blog posts, tweets, quotes, and other features that more fully showcase the wide range of information assets that exist within the vaults of government.
Powerful Search: The backend of Next.Data.gov is CKAN and is powered by Solr—a powerful search engine that will make it even easier to find relevant datasets online. Suggested search terms have been added to help users find (and type) things faster. Next.Data.gov will start to index datasets from agencies that publish their catalogs publicly, in line with the President’s Open Data Executive Order. The early preview launching today features datasets from the Department of Health and Human Services—one of the first Federal agencies to publish a machine-readable version of its data catalog.
Rotating Data Visualizations: Building on the theme of leading with data, even the masthead-design for Next.Data.gov is an open-data-powered visualization—for now, it’s a cool U.S. Geological Survey earthquake plot showing the magnitude of earthquake measurements collected over the past week, around the globe.

This particular visualization was built using D3.js. The visualization will be updated periodically to spotlight different ways open data is used and illustrated….
We encourage you to collaborate in the design process by creating pull requests or providing feedback via Quora or Twitter.”

Metrics for Government Reform

Curated on July 17, 2013October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan: “How do you measure a programme of government reform? What counts as evidence that it’s working or not? I’ve been asked this question many times, so this very brief note suggests some simple answers – mainly prompted by seeing a few writings on this question which I thought confused some basic points.”
Any type of reform programme will combine elements at very different levels. These may include:

A new device – for example, adjusting the wording in an official letter or a call centre script to see what impact this has on such things as tax compliance.
A new kind of action – for example a new way of teaching maths in schools, treating patients with diabetes, handling prison leavers.
A new kind of policy – for example opening up planning processes to more local input; making welfare payments more conditional.
A new strategy – for example a scheme to cut carbon in cities, combining retrofitting of housing with promoting bicycle use; or a strategy for public health.
A new approach to strategy – for example making more use of foresight, scenarios or big data.
A new approach to governance – for example bringing hitherto excluded groups into political debate and decision-making.

This rough list hopefully shows just how different these levels are in their nature. Generally as we go down the list the following things rise:

The number of variables and the complexity of the processes involved
The timescales over which any judgements can be made
The difficultness involved in making judgements about causation
The importance of qualitative relative to quantitative assessment”

Open Data Tools: Turning Data into ‘Actionable Intelligence’

Curated on July 13, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Shannon Bohle in SciLogs: “My previous two articles were on open access and open data. They conveyed major changes that are underway around the globe in the methods by which scientific and medical research findings and data sets are circulated among researchers and disseminated to the public. I showed how E-science and ‘big data’ fit into the philosophy of science though a paradigm shift as a trilogy of approaches: deductive, empirical, and computational, which was pointed out, provides a logical extenuation of Robert Boyle’s tradition of scientific inquiry involving “skepticism, transparency, and reproducibility for independent verification” to the computational age…
This third article on open access and open data evaluates new and suggested tools when it comes to making the most of the open access and open data OSTP mandates. According to an article published in The Harvard Business Review’s “HBR Blog Network,” this is because, as its title suggests, “open data has little value if people can’t use it.” Indeed, “the goal is for this data to become actionable intelligence: a launchpad for investigation, analysis, triangulation, and improved decision making at all levels.” Librarians and archivists have key roles to play in not only storing data, but packaging it for proper accessibility and use, including adding descriptive metadata and linking to existing tools or designing new ones for their users. Later, in a comment following the article, the author, Craig Hammer, remarks on the importance of archivists and international standards, “Certified archivists have always been important, but their skillset is crucially in demand now, as more and more data are becoming available. Accessibility—in the knowledge management sense—must be on par with digestibility / ‘data literacy’ as priorities for continuing open data ecosystem development. The good news is that several governments and multilaterals (in consultation with data scientists and – yep! – certified archivists) are having continuing ‘shared metadata’ conversations, toward the possible development of harmonized data standards…If these folks get this right, there’s a real shot of (eventual proliferation of) interoperability (i.e. a data platform from Country A can ‘talk to’ a data platform from Country B), which is the only way any of this will make sense at the macro level.”

How algorithms rule the world

Curated on July 13, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Leo Hickman in The Guardian: “From dating websites and City trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches (Google’s search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola), algorithms are increasingly determining our collective futures. “Bank approvals, store cards, job matches and more all run on similar principles,” says Ball. “The algorithm is the god from the machine powering them all, for good or ill.”…The idea that the world’s financial markets – and, hence, the wellbeing of our pensions, shareholdings, savings etc – are now largely determined by algorithmic vagaries is unsettling enough for some. But, as the NSA revelations exposed, the bigger questions surrounding algorithms centre on governance and privacy. How are they being used to access and interpret “our” data? And by whom?”

Big Data Comes To Boston’s Neighborhoods

Curated on July 12, 2013October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

WBUR: “In the spring of 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published a seminal article in The Atlantic Monthly titled “Broken Windows.”
The piece focused public attention on a long-simmering theory in urban sociology: that broken windows, graffiti and other signs of neighborhood decay are correlated with — and may even help cause — some of the biggest problems in America’s cities.
Wilson and Kelling focused on the link to crime, in particular; an abandoned car, they argued, signals that illicit behavior is acceptable on a given block….Some researchers have poked holes in the theory — arguing that broken widows, known in academic circles as “physical disorder,” are more symptom than cause. But there is no disputing the idea’s influence: it’s inspired reams of research and shaped big city policing from New York to Los Angeles…
But a new study out of the Boston Area Research Initiative, a Harvard University-based collaborative of academics and city officials, suggests a new possibility: a cheap, sprawling and easily updated map of the urban condition.
Mining data from Boston’s constituent relationship management (CRM) operation — a hotline, website and mobile app for citizens to report everything from abandoned bicycles to mouse-infested apartment buildings — researchers have created an almost real-time guide to what ails the city…
But a first-of-its-kind measure of civic engagement — how likely are residents of a given block to report a pothole or broken streetlight? — yields more meaningful results.
One early finding: language barriers seem to explain scant reporting in neighborhoods with large populations of Latino and Asian renters; that’s already prompted targeted flyering that’s yielded modest improvements.
The same engagement measure points to another, more hopeful phenomenon: clusters of citizen activists show up not just in wealthy enclaves, as expected, but in low-income areas.”

Power of open data reveals global corporate networks

Curated on July 11, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Data Institute: “The ODI today welcomed the move by OpenCorporates to release open data visualisations which show the global corporate networks of millions of businesses and the power of open data.
See the Maps
OpenCorporates, a company based at the ODI, has produced visuals using several sources, which it has published as open data for the first time:

Filings made by large domestic and foreign companies to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Banking data held by the National Information Center of the Federal Reserve System in the U.S.
Information about individual shareholders published by the official New Zealand corporate registry

Launched today, the visualisations are available through the main OpenCorporates website.”