Monthly Archives: May 2011

Thomas Thurner

data.wien.gv.at – the process to Vienna’s open data portal

by , Category: Open Government Data, Politics

On 17 May 2011 the time has come – the first Open Government Data (OGD) portal of a public administration in Austria was launched – and it was the capital Vienna that did this courageous and so important step in Austria and thereby took the role of a pioneer in the area of open data in our country – and hopefully will act as a model for communities, cities, states and the federal government (also important to be mentioned here is that the Open Commons Region Linz has been the first city government that has announced a data portal in Austria still before Vienna – launch date will be September 2011).

http://data.wien.gv.at is a first well done step in the area of Open Government Data for a modern and open City of Vienna. Open human- and machine readable data in several formats and from several categories (e.g. population, education, budget, leisure time and many more) are availabe for re-use now. Into the bargain available under the CC-BY-3.0 License of Creative Commons.

The road to 17th of May 2011 has started about 1 year ago – at least from the pointview of the Austrian (and Viennese) open data community: on the 8th of April 2010 a group of linked open data enthusiasts – representatives of universities, companies and the civil society – invited interested people to come to the 1st Open Government Data Meetup at the OCG (Austrian Computer Society) in Vienna. For talks there were Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation on site in Vienna as well as Stefano Bertolo of the European Commission has been hooked up via skype to shine a light on this – at this time – for Austria and Vienna very new topic of Open Government Data to present their experiences and best practices in the field to about 60 participants. The interest was very high – also on the side of the media – and therefore a basic interest as well as a first braod information in Vienna was built.
Afterwards everything went quickly until the 17th of May 2011 (and also if one year seems to be a long time I do think that it was an enormous performance of all involved parties to manage so much in only one year!) – after the mentioned MeetUp, the OGD Austria was founded – an initiative thats’ objective is to open (linked) government data (non personal) in Austria in human- and machine readable formats for re-use. To do this together with politics, administration, civil society and industry. Other initiatives as open3 as well as established institutions in the area of administration research as KDZ – Zentrum für Verwaltungsforschung or the Danube University of Krems or Joanneum Research – but also companies like the Semantic Web Company or Compass Verlag, and above all lots of representatives of the civil society who were interested in the topic of Open Government Data (it is important to say that in Vienna we do have a very active creative scene and web 2.0 community) did work together to push the field of open data in Vienna / Austria.

In June 2010 the Semantic Web Company (SWC) – with support from above mentioned institutions – submitted a proposal to the technology agency of the City of Vienna (ZIT) to build and implement a bundle of measures for awareness-building activities in the field of Open Government Data in Austria – the project: OGD2011 was born. The authorisation of this project (partly funded by ZIT) for sure helped a lot to inform the relevant stakeholders (politics, public administration, civil society, industry, academia and media) in the mentioned time period and to build awareness about the power, the potentials as well as about the challenges – and the important concrete steps – of Open Government Data!

The following measures were implemented and will be implemented in the course of OGD2011:

  • Open OGD Austria Stammtisch every second month (meetup, until today only in Vienna)
  • 4 Stakeholder Workshops (politics, administration, civil society, industry) in February 2011 to evaluate and identify as well as to discuss the requirements on Open Government Data in Austria from the viewpoint of the respective stakeholder group
  • Publishing of the OGD Digest Austria – Information around Open Data in Austria and international in print & PDF (until today 4 editions available)
  • Set up and operation of a mailing list as well as a XING group
  • Organisation of an open MeetUp on OGD on 15th of  Juni 2011 in Vienna
  • Set up and operation of open wiki spaces for collection of information and provision of relevant information in the field of Open Data
  • OGD2011 Conference on 16th of Juni 2011 in Vienna
  • And very important: about 40-50 bilateral talks with representatives of politicians and public administration in Vienna about OGD to raise awareness and clarify misconceptions
  • Networking with international initiatives on the topic of open data as the Open Data Network (Germany), the Open Knowledge Foundation (UK) or the ePSIplattform (just to name a few) to ensure continuous exchange on the topic – as well contentwise as about the process for an Open Government Data strategy – to learn from each other and to support each other…
  • Furthermore in July/August 2011 the Open Government Data White Book Austria will be published as a fundamental work on open data in Austria

Inspite the OGD2011 project is arranged for the whole country of Austria the participants at the workshops and events were mainly from Vienna – what is not really surprising as most of the Austrian public bodies are located in Vienna and the City and the State of Vienna has a special status in Austria.

In November 2010 another very important step happened becuase without an Open Government Data strategy it is nearly impossible to be implemented – the political YES to Open Data in Vienna in the programme of the government of the new red-green coalition.

Regarding the implementation of data.wien.gv.at the City of Vienna received support by the EU project LOD2 – LOD2 did consulting on the following topics: Open (Government) Data, Linked Open Data, licenses and business models, as well as in the area of data sheets, meta data and URL schemas in the course of the LOD2 Publink Consultancy Services.

I think that in total the following indicators were crucial for the success of the Open Government Data movement in Vienna so far:

  • Broad awareness raising at all involved stakeholder groups
  • Collaboration of all stakeholders and establishing of an open dialogue between these groups
  • Political commitment on the highest level
  • High interest as well as engagement on the side of the public administration at the City of Vienna
  • High interest and support by the media – most of all by the Open Data Blog of futurezone
  • Support of the OGD2011 project by ZIT to enable a basic funding for concrete activities and measures
  • Building of a strong community for Open Data and therefore permanent presence of the topic in the public
  • Evaluation and representation of potentials and opportunities – but also of existing risks – of Open Government Data in Vienna
  • Exchange of knowledge and experiences with international initiatives to learn from each other and use best practices vice versa
  • Intense analysis of: licenses, meta data, data description (data governance) and a very well done implementation of phase 1 of data.wien.gv.at by the City of Vienna (with support by LOD2 et al.)

But this phase one of data.wien.gv.atcan only be a start – the City of Vienna already announced continuous exchange between the public administration and the community for further development of the data portal (and today on 26th of May 2011 we had the first meeting with about 50 participants and really very fine discussions about 2 hours long). Further an online survey is planned for summer 2011 (to ask the public for concrete data needs) and an open data challenge is planned for the end of 2011 on the basis of Viennese Open Government Data – and there will also happen something in the area of the scope of the provided data sets (more data will be opened) as well as in the area of the provision of additional data formats and interfaces (along the lines of the EC and UK the City of Vienna wants to follow the path of Linked Open Government Data)….

… I am absolutely curious about how the process of Open Government Data in Vienna will go on from here in 2011 and 2012!

Additional Links: http://www.wien.gv.at/english/politics-administration/open-data.html

 

Author Martin Kaltenböck is CFO of the Semantic Web Company Wien and co-founder and member of the executive board of the OGD Austria

 

Tassilo Pellegrini

I-SEMANTICS 2011 – Final Reminder for Extended Submission Deadline

by , Category: Calls & Competitions


This is the final call for papers for I-SEMANTICS 2011. Due to several requests we decided to extend the deadline of the I-SEMANTICS Conference till Monday, May 30 , 2011.

The new dates are:
Extended Submision Deadline: May 30, 2011
Notification of Acceptance: June 27, 2011
Camera Ready Paper: July 18, 2011

I-SEMANTICS 2011 (www.i-semantics.at) is the 7th conference in the I-SEMANTICS series and takes place from September 7 – 9, 2011 in Graz / Austria. I-SEMANTICS brings together both researchers and practitioners in the areas of Linked Data, Social Software and the Semantic Web in order to present and develop innovative ideas that help realising the “Social Semantic Web” and the “Corporate Semantic Web”.

I-SEMANTICS 2011 will be the host of the 6th AIS SigPrag International Conference on Pragmatic Web as well as the 4th edition of the TRIPLIFICATION Challenge. Further on I-SEMANTICS will be complemented by I-KNOW (www.i-know.at), the 11th International Conference on Knowledge Management. This setup is aiming to reflect the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge management and semantic systems.

The scientific track invites long and short papers along the main topics “Linked Data and Web of Data” to “Semantic Web Applications and Application Building Blocks, Studies, Metrics & Benchmarks”. The papers will be published in the ACM ICPS series. The detailed CfP containing all scientific tracks can be found here: http://i-semantics.tugraz.at/scientific-track/call-for-papers

To address the needs and interests of industry the i-Praxis track invites enterprises and public organisations to present industry relevant solutions in the field of semantic technologies. Presenters will be granted free access to the conference and will have generous time slots to present their applications. The presentations will be published on the conference website. Please find more information here: http://i-semantics.tugraz.at/industry-track/call-for-papers

Thomas Schandl

Interview on Enhancing Semantic Web applications with Linguistic Information

by , Category: Conferences & Events, Text Mining

John McCrae (Uni Bielefeld), Elena Montiel-Ponsoda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and Tobias Wunner (DERI Galway) will hold a tutorial at the ESWC 2011 with the title “Enriching the Semantic Web with Linguistic Information“. We had a chance to talk to them beforehand:

Can you please tell us about the aims and purpose of your tutorial and the importance of incorporating linguistic information in the Semantic Web?

With the continuing growth of linked data and semantic technologies the incorporation of linguistic descriptions into Semantic Web resources has become a challenging issue. The integration of linguistic information especially on a multilingual level could greatly benefit Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Furthermore, the continuing growth of ontologies for semantic modeling and the use of terminological resources to add human language descriptions has raised the issue of how to add linguistic information to ontologies and linked data vocabularies and to represent models of lexical and terminological information in a way which is compatible with Semantic Web standards. Prominent examples here are, for instance, multilingual language tags in RDF Schema or SKOS’s success in bringing terminological information to the Semantic Web.

In the Tutorial we would like to discuss trends and novel models such as Lemon – the lexicon model for ontologies – to show possible future directions. The tutorial is targeted at researchers and practitioners interested in learning how to enrich ontologies with linguistic information in one or several natural languages and NLP tool developers interested in understanding how Semantic Web resources can be leveraged fro NLP. There will be two hands-on sessions in this tutorial.

Why did you choose to use PoolParty thesaurus management system in your tutorial?

To create terminology models on the web there are only few tools available which are often very technical and not straightforward to use for non-experts. We found that PoolParty in contrast to other SKOS editors has an attractive and usable interface. In addition the web based interface was preferable, as it did not require the participants to download software, the immediate publishing of linked data is more compatible with linked data principles and the tool has similarities to our own tools for working with lemon.

Thank you for this interview!

Andreas Blumauer

Seevl: Explore the cultural universe based on semantic web technologies

by , Category: Companies & Institutions, Linked Data & Open Data, Mashups & Web services

Just recently Alexandre Passant from DERI Galway went public with a new web service called seevl. First impressions after test driving the system reveal that the seevl team is keeping the promises they have made: “Seevl reinvents music discovery. We provide new ways to explore the cultural and musical universe of your favorite artists and to discover new ones by understanding how they are connected. In addition, we let you comment every piece of data about them.”

I was talking with Alexandre and asked a couple of questions:

Q: seevl.net aims to offer a new way of music recommendations. What exactly can the user expect from it?
The main idea is to offer context around the recommendations, while existing systems are opaque, or rely on collaborative filtering techniques. So that a user know why he could / should like X if he’s browsing page about Y. We hope (and we’ve seen it from our user feedback so far) that it can help to discover new bands and hidden connections.

Q: Yes, indeed this is something new. Maybe for the typical users this could be too complicated. This brilliant feature should somehow be hidden – working just like a magic button?
So far, we include this in the “why is related” button, but we’re constantly working on the UI / UX. Also, we only provide text for now, but are working on dataviz interfaces.

Q: seevl offers for developers a Web API. It seems like you don´t use semantic web standards for that?
We use content-negotiation to provide machine-readable data for every page (search results, entity description, related artists, etc.). If by non-SW standards you mean non-RDF, indeed, we provide JSON instead of RDF/XML or N3, etc. But our JSON integrates URI that you can dereference and follows a similar approach than other existing RDF-JSON serialisation. So, why JSON you may ask. Because our developer target is music hackers, and all APIs from this community (last.fm, echonest, etc.) offer JSON, not RDF. Learning a new JSON schema takes 5 min, learning RDF takes much more.
But we believe that a JSON-RDF serialisation combines the best of both worlds. Actually, we could say we provide our data using standards (we’re giving back a graph that follows the RDF abstract model, with links to dereferencable URIS) but not in a (so far) standardised serialisation.

Q: I agree. But mid-term oriented I would go additionally for SPARQL. A lot of people learn how to SPARQL at the moment.
Yes, we have to measure the cost / ROI. Complete SPARQL can lead to complex queries, that’s why they are somehow hidden behind our search interface (that basically construct a controlled SPARQL query). But that could be something provided to advanced customers.

Q: seevl.net is based on linked data sets like DBpedia, MusicBrainz or Freebase. Is seevl itself offering Linked (Open) Data? I can also see heavy use of the open graph protocol. How could a facebook application of seevl could look like?
Yes, we provide our data back at http://developers.seevl.net. We’re using the Music Ontology and a bit of other models (FOAF, etc.). So far, the OGP markup is used for Facebook likes – but we are looking at other things that could be built on top of this.

Q: Which business model are you following? Can one integrate your service into his shop? would you offer this a cloud service? for how much?
We’ll have B2C (new features on the website are coming soon) and a B2B freemium model. We’re currently identifying how much calls we can support as part of the free-calls per day (so that will indeed be cloud-based, our architecture is on EC2). So, integration of our service / data in shop websites, etc. is definitely what we’d like to see and to feature in our upcoming app-gallery ! The only requirement for data-reuse is attribution and linking-back to the service.

Thanks Alex, and I wish you and your team all the best with seevl.net!