Often the concept of Linked Open Data is hard to understand for “ordinary people”. The innovative power and the technological potential is somethimes hidden behind nerdy experts diction. The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) works day-by-day to get a bridge between these tech-talk and the interestes and motivation of the target groups which are intended to be on the benefiting end of these technologies. I had the change to talk to Jonathan Grey, who is in charge of Community Comminication at the OKFN.
Thomas Thurner: Open Knowledge Foundation is THE driving force behind Open Government Data in Europe. After years of basic work, now initatives, governments and concrete projects get visible. What do you think, made the OKFN such a powerful and effective promotor of the OGD-Idea?
Jonathan Gray: Above all I would attribute this to the calibre of people that we work with, our approach, lots of time, and lots of hard work. We’ve been working to expand and strengthen the open data community around the world for around six or seven years. We’ve put on dozens of targeted events in different countries, we’ve now got dozens of mailing lists, we’ve spent hundreds of hours working with advocates and ambassadors for the OKF around the world, we’ve drafted hundreds of blog posts, and we’ve engaged with people interested in setting up open data initiatives in their country at an early stage. We’re a very young, energetic organisation, and we’ve spent a lot of time travelling around and talking to people!
Also we’ve made a real effort to engage with a wide range of different stakeholders – from public servants, to journalists, to NGOs, to ordinary citizens who are interested in using data to understand an issue or to address a problem. We believe in the importance of building a stronger community of data users – as well as a culture of ‘open by default’ in the public sector.
Thomas Thurner: While the Open Data Idea is understood well at public adminstartion, the concept of “linked open data” is’nt so well recogniced by them. OKFN has made a strategic move into the direction of semantic technologies in participating in the LOD2 project. Can you bring some of the arguments, which brought you to this decission, as well as those you want to bring to public administartion to convince them also in the use of linked data?
Jonathan Gray: While most people quickly pick up that “open data” is related to eliminating legal or technical barriers that prevent people from using data, “linked open data” is something that usually takes a bit longer for people to grasp. Technical jargon like RDF, SPARQL and talk of “triples” can make people think it is all more complicated than it really is. But when you boil it down to the basic idea of linking together datasets from different sources, most people can see why this is important.
As soon as people reflect on how difficult it can be to reconcile and meaningfully integrate data from different sources – they appreciate the need for tools, technologies and standards that make this possible. Beyond this, I think the proof is in the pudding. Are there simple, intuitive tools that harness cutting edge technologies to solve real world problems? Things like the LOD2 stack should help to show people how Linked Data technologies can help people get value out of data, and use it in more sophisticated ways to do more clever, useful things.
Thomas Thurner: European Commission is working on Open Government Data also. There are two Open Data portals in the planning, one for their own data, and one as a central collection point. With publicdata.eu, you have pinoneered already such portals. Which are the main lessons learned in doing this portal trials?
Jonathan Gray: While PublicData.eu is still a beta prototype, we’ve developed it with input and feedback from users – along the lines of the “perpetual
beta” approach of data.gov.uk (which is also powered by CKAN, the software which powers PublicData.eu). We think that its really important to look at how people want to use data portals, and to understand how we can develop the project to meet their needs. Hence we tend to work in short iterations, and enable people to comment and make suggestions via public mailing lists (in this case the ckan-discuss and ckan-dev lists (http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-discuss and http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-dev). We’ve also worked hard to engage contacts from data portals that we are aggregating data from – and to build standards and mechanisms for the exchange of data between data portals. Our long term vision for this area is for people to be able to interact around datasets and for there to be a whole range of different tools, extensions and plugins that people can use to connect
datasets with other applications and services – a but like WordPress has thousands of third party plugins. Things like TheDataHub.org and the CKAN plugin and extension system will hopefully go some way to realising this. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, we’d love to hear from you!
Short summary about OKFN
The Open Knowledge Foundation is one of the world’s leading organisations promoting open data, open content and the public domain. Founded in Cambridge, UK in 2004, the OKF has expanded rapidly with local groups and chapters starting up in dozens of countries around the world.
