In the course of the World Energy Future Summit from 17. – 19.01. 2012 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, the side event ‘Linking Open Data to Accelerate Low-Carbon Development – A workshop for decision makers in clean energy organisations’ took place on Wednesday the 18th of January 2012 in Masdar Institute at Masdar City organised by REEEP (The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership), supported by the German Ministry of Environment (BMU), the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the US National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and Masdar Institute.
The aim of this workshop was to build awareness as well as to provide a first insight in the concepts of Open Data and mainly Linked Open Data as a powerful mechanism to accelerate low – carbon development by linking data from different respective data sources to each other and thereby create benefits as for instance to avoid duplications in data collection and thereby in cost saving or by mashing up data to create new knowledge in the field.
The LOD2 project was invited by REEEP to give the introduction talk about Open Government, Open Government Data and Linked Open Data to provide an overview of the respective basic ideas, principles and mechanisms. Martin Kaltenböck, Managing Partner of the LOD2 partner Semantic Web Company (SWC, Austria) gave this presentation to ~ 35 decision makers from all over the globe that were very interested to learn more about LOD to use this for data publishing / -management in their own organisation.
Beside Martins Talk there were presentations of 2 best practise examples in the field by Florian Bauer (REEEP) about the Linked Open Clean Energy Portal reegle.info and Jon Weers (NREL) about the OpenEI Wiki on Renewable Energy – as well as the exchange of data and information between this two important information hubs by using Linked Open Data principles and technologies. Furthermore John Sheridan of the National Archive, UK gave an insight about the Linked Open Data strategy and projects (on provenance, statistics and organogramms) of the UK government, Jose Alonso of the Web Foundation spoke about Open Data in Developing Countries and Dr. Bitange Ndemo provided very useful insights about the Open Data Strategy of Kenya as the first African Nation going the Open Data way.
The workshop also provided several interactive parts in which the participants discussed and identified A) the possible potentials & benefits of Linked Open Data for their own organisation, B) available data sets of their organisation as well as data sets from other participating organisations that could be linked to their own datasets to create benefit as well as C) the most important challenges they wanted to discuss and lean about in the field of Linked Open Data.
At the end of an intense and successful workshop day Florian Bauer and Martin Kaltenböck officially presented the brand new REEEP & SWC publication: Linked Open Data: The Essentials – A Quick Start Guide for Decision Makers and handed over books to all participants and speakers to explore more detailled information on the topic of Linked Open Data. This publication was also supported by LOD2 beside others and is available for PDF download.
The publication provides a quick start guide for decision makers who need to quickly get up to speed with the Linked Open Data (LOD) concept and who want to make their organisation a part of this movement. Furthermore comprehensive link- and further-reading sections are included to offer the possibility to dig deeper in the field of Linked Open Data by exploring resources as for instance LOD2 or LATC beside many others. You find more information about Linked Open Data: The Essentials at the Corporate News Blog of the Semantic Web Company.
Additional Information & Articles
- All slides of the workshop presentations on slideshare
- Photo collection of the workshop on the LOD2 flickR account
- Photo Collection on REEEP flickR account
- LOD: The Essentials on ISSUU
- Article about the new LOD publication on reegle.info blog
- OpenEI Blog: http://blog.openei.org/2012/01/linked-open-data-essentials.html
- Energy Enviro Finland Article
2 Responses to LOD2 speaks at Accelerate Low – Carbon Development Workshop in Abu Dhabi