The Democratisation of Data

Making data available (and accessible) to the general public

http://keithandrews.com/talks/2008/politcamp2008-dod/

Keith Andrews

IICM, Graz University of Technology

http://www.iicm.edu/keith/

This Talk

• Freeing Public Data
• Making Data Accessible

Freeing Public Data

• Hans Rosling
• TED 2006 talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92
• gapminder.org

Mashups

Current mashups are based on:

• Screen-scraping - extracting data from HTML
• microformats

These are only stop-gap measures until the semantic web arrives.

Semantic Web (Web of Data)

The necessary underlying technology is here (or emerging): semantic web

• RDF - data and relationships
• SPARQL - query language for RDF
• OWL - ontologies

Tim Berners-Lee at MITX 2007 Awards: http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-27921.html

Eurostat

• Public data in electronic form: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/

New York Times Information Graphics

• Debate Analyzer
• Movie Revenues

IBM Many Eyes

• upload (public) data
• create public visualisations
• many-eyes.com

Thank You

Thank you for your attention

http://keithandrews.com/talks/2008/politcamp2008-dod/