Sally Jenkinson – An Introduction to Open Data #fronteers15

Open data
Big data buzzwords
90% of the world’s data was created in the last 2 years
Several ways to use data in your work
Tea tracker for personal tea consumption
Data is often restricted
- Only certain data is displayed
- Can’t use data freely
- restricted
You sometimes can’t get your hand on the data that you want
Data sharing
- Restrictive data sharing to restricted set of people
Open data means to not be confined to the data provider’s conditions
Opendefinition.org
Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose.
Data spectrum: http://theodi.org/data-spectrum
Re-publish
Derive new content or data
make money by selling products
charge a fee for access
data needs to be open, but the delivery access (API) can be restricted
Licensing similar to the known content licence, not just Creative comments, for example Open Government Licence or OS Open Licence ect.
Dbpedia – Wikipedia data in RDF
Data.gov.uk
MusicBrainz
plaidplug.com
awesome-public-datasets
Consuming open data is pretty easy
- data is not special
- download periodically or via API
Sometimes data is released as PDF, “openly”
d3js.org – Data-Driven Documents
Example: Mark up fire hydrant violations in NY, top grossing hydrant was actually very confusing for parkers, almost a trap. Reaction from administration: Make clear where not to park.
open data -> may generate 3 million dollars
Transparency
- Not only access
- but also analyze and visualize
- combine with other data
- freely to use
- open by default would save so much time
Data and User Experience
- mapumental.com answers the time to work in minutes instead of miles.
- How accessible is our nearest school, post office or hospital?
- How quickly could fire engines reach a given postcode?
- Improved efficientcy, effectiveness, measure impact
- Improved products
Not just digital, also in the real world, for example as art
- Internet of things
- opensensors.io
- dougmccune.com – Artistic projects based on open data
- stevanie posavec
Linked data
- timbl doesn’t only want us to share documents but also the data
- new knowledge from combined data sources and patterns
- Misinterpretation:
  - Some sites don’t allow it because they don’t want to have their data in the wrong context
  - spurious-corelations
- Combining data sets & licenses
Publishing open data
- People use it in ways you never dreamt of
- Step one: Identification & planning
- Clear licensing & usage information
- Structure & quality
- A plan for support – data needs to be maintained
- Accuracy
- Step two: transform and clean data
  - data privacy & the individul
  - openrefine
  - cleansheet
- Step three: Sharing
  - http://5stardata.info/en/
  - think about your data from the beginning
  - https://certificates.theodi.org
In conclusion:
- We collect and share data and it is a component to the web, just like documents.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/sallyjenkinson/an-introduction-to-open-data-53732088