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

From May 5 – 6, 2010 the 3rd Semantic Web Day in Leipzig will take place. What will be this year’s topics? Who should attend?

The Semantic Web Day is targeting IT people, software developers, decision makers and users interested in learning about the potential of semantic technologies. The language during the event is German, so primarily Austrians, Swiss and Germans will attend. Beside semantic technologies a particular focus of this years event is open data in governments, public administrations and science. Although the programme is not yet finalized we already compiled an interesting number of talks and presentations including talks about the open biodiversity database Fishbase, the European Digital Library Europeana, a Linked Data project of the German Umweltbundesamt, use case presentations in the pharma, publishing and telecommunication industries and many more (cf. http://aksw.org/LSWT). Also, in addition to AKSW the Topic Maps Lab and the Web Data Integration Labs from Universität Leipzig be present at LSWT.

One of the highlights of this year`s Semantic Web Day is the official institutionalization of the German Chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. How did this come around? What does this mean for the OKF as a whole?

OKFN started to work in 2006 and since then managed to sucessfully complete a number of projects facilitating open knowledge. In particular, the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), the OKCon conference series, the open knowledge definition and recently OKFN’s involvement in the launch of data.gov.uk are prominent examples of OKFN’s successful work. However, many of the OKFN activities were primarily driven by an active group of volunteers in the UK. With the official launch of the German OKFN branch we will strengthen the international dimension of OKFN’s work. Especially for Germany, where data privacy and security are perceived to be most important, raising awareness for enabling open, standards compliant access to public information will be an important target of OKFN’s activities.

The InFAI has become one of the hotspots in Semantic Web development in Germany over the past few years. What are you working on at the moment? What are the most interesting research and development aspects for the near future?

From our point of view establishing a network effect around the publishing and use of linked data is the most important research and development goal for the near future. We just completed a first draft and implementations of a semantic enabled pingback method (http://aksw.org/Projects/SemanticPingBack), which applies a similar peer notification mechanism to linked data endpoints as it is widely deployed on the blogosphere. Other important research issues we are tackling with our partners are closing the performance gap between RDF and relational data management, increasing the coherence and quality of linked data and the provisioning of adaptive user interfaces for authoring and maintaining information on the data web.

About Sören Auer

Dr. Sören Auer leads the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at University of Leipzig. His research interests include Semantic Web technologies, knowledge representation, engineering and management, agile methodologies as well as databases and information systems. Sören is founder (respectively co-founder) of several high-impact research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia, the open-source innovation platform Cofundos.org or the social Semantic Web toolkit OntoWiki. Sören is author of over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications, co-organiser of several workshops, chair of the Social Semantic Web conference 2007 and I-Semantics 2008, serves as an expert for industry, the European Commission, the W3C and is member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Show what is possible! As Martin Kaltenböck – one of the organizers oft the recently held Semantic Web Meetup on an Austrian Open Government Data Initiative – said, there is a lot of enthusiasm and energy to inform the public and engage politics about the impact a initative similar to those in US and UK may have for Austria. And the KickOff was promissing. Inspiring talks by Rufus Pollock (UK) and Stefano Bertolo (EU) where giving an insight whats possible in the specific field of Open Government Data, as well as how a start of an initiative can look like.

As ePSI-Platform wrote in their blog
The Austrian Open Data initiative is online and at work.

The event was very well attended, and brought together stakeholders from science, industry, government and citizen activists, A promising melange of people which may carry the project forward to very concrete UseCases and Trials in the very near future. As the initiative is ment to be carried by a broad group of proponents, the follow-up of the meeting will be a round table talk, of those who are willing to contribute in upcoming light-tower projects and opening concrete sets of government data for that.

The next meeting of the Austrian Open Data Initiative
takes place on the 12th May at 9.30 a.m. in
Room D, quartier 21 of the Vienna Museum Quarter.

More resources

The answer to me is that database and data are different.  They’re different legally and different practically in what consumers and producers of open data want to do with it.  They’re also different in what the future looks like in terms of things like linked data.

Read the details in the full interview.

That´s more than annoying for me who´s been trying for years to establish ethical aspects in my work as a journalist, as a pr-person (believe it or not!) – as a human-being. Being sensitive for the special challenges connected with discussing ethical issues in a diverse global economy I´ve always been trying to publish and talk about the philosophical approach to these matters.

Therefore I ´m happy to come across Tim Berners Lee´s request at the current International World Wide Web Conference in Madrid: Clean the web! He – which is not at all surprising – is claiming a clean web. The user has to know which data he can trust and may pass on. Also privacy must be protected he postulates one more time. All these arguments deal authentically with ethics. But not only. They concern the future. The future of us all.

In recent days – here at Semantic Web Company – we have had a lot of discussions on how the future of the Semantic Web (name it Web3.0 if you like) will develop. Several stakeholders on the future of the Semantic Web see already, that also a potential danger will come along with the technical realisation of the web3.0: This is the present possibility to create applications and mashups with semantic technologies that are a real drain on privacy and information ethics. Without an underpinning discussion about the ethical framework within technolgies like linked data, text-mining, biometric-systems and geo-systems in combination with the web of data, the whole domain is in danger to be doomed like genetic engineering some years ago.

It’s crucial for the public opinion on the Semantic Web, to adress the immanent risks regarding privacy and ethics. In this context I’ll see also Tim Berners-Lee‘s statement yesterday: “W3C wants to help make sure data use is appropriate,” he said. Berners-Lee, who is director of W3C, said in an interview on Wednesday that the teams working on the Semantic Web project are making sure that privacy principles are included in its architecture: “The Semantic Web project is developing systems which will answer where data came from and where it’s going to — the system will be architectured for a set of appropriate uses.”

Maybe it’s an important step in keeping the further development of Semantic Web trusty in the eyes of public opinion, that the W3C has privacy and information ethics on their agenda and persons like Berners-Lee stand with their reputation for it. But it is also crucial to build this awareness on the corporate side. Only if everyone within the domain follows a common ethic understanding we have a public opinion, which is on the future potential of the Semantic Web, and not in fear of the same.

Dear all

It is my pleasure to introduce you to Rafael Capurro and Michael Nagenborg both experts in Informationethics. Following a podcast interview i held with Rafael (available @ archive.org ), we pursued his suggestion to initiate a dialogue about what underlying values users care about in their online lifes?

We have developed a short questionnaire which we invite you to fill out and spread amongst your network @ http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/node/63

This survey is meant as first step to gather some empirical data so we can (a) deliberate and discuss these themes further in the forum (where we have setup a dedicated discussion thread @ http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/node/64 and (b) strategize & formulate our project (and funding) proposals based on empirical evidence.

Again, please invite your friends and peers to contribute to this exploration of what user really care about when online.

Looking forward to discuss with you
Rafael, Michael and Max

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet. Obama´s Internet Campaign Changed Politics. “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

America´s new president Barack Obama didn’t go out and recruit on facebook, they came to him at first. Did the internet make Obama’s natural “viralness” quicker and more transparent? Obama’s huge victory on Tuesday night was celebrated in Austria and Germany, as it was around the world: German Press on Obama Victory: “The Dream is Alive“. Der Spiegel‘s Gabor Steingart – who for months dismissed the notion that Obama had a real chance for the White House – writes about the Resurrection of the American Dream: “His base note is conciliatory, his overtone is exalted and the harmony is finely balanced. If anyone out there still doubted that the American dream was alive, he called out to his supporters in Chicago, “tonight is your answer.”

However things will happen or not and however the „Change has come to America“: The president´s new official website is online www.whitehouse.gov. And here users are really being involved. We all are involved. Obama means change. Let´s see in what ways this will concern the future of the internet.

These findings are based on empirical data estimating that an average internet user invests approximatly USD 3000.- per year getting to grips with the various privacy policies of their service providers.

But – bluntly speaking – as “noone” reads privacy statements anyway, this is not a real economic loss. So you might say it is an academic problem. But still it raises the interesting question what it would cost if you as an internet end-user wanted to make use of your civil rights and gain some souvereignty towards your service providers.

So here the question arises how semantic web technologies, especially the Policy Aware Web, can be a viable solution to this economic problem. But the answer to the question is a political one, which means it will be up to the politicians to recognise this problem and support a (technological?) solution … which from my point means that there are interesting times ahead for a Policy Aware Web.

Read a more detailed coverage of the study at out-law.com.

Author: Tassilo Pellegrini

In their first reading on September 24, 2008 the European Prarliament voted against the the “Telecom Package” advocating the so called “Bono Amendment” – which refers to the French Socialist MEP Guy Bono – which basically states that that courts need to be involved in any disconnection procedure. In the original passage, quoted in a recent EU Observer article, it says:

No restriction may be imposed on the rights and freedoms of end users … without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities.”

This decision has some relevant implications for any future developments of the internet. While the telcos and the media companies are struggling hard to adapt to the social logic the internet, searching for new business models and lobbying for regulation in their favour, it is obvious that the existing abundance and innovativeness of the internet is hardly compatible with their notion of making money on the web – basically by restricting access and promoting artificial scarcity.

It also is relevant to developments like Linking Open Data, as in an increasingly interconnected and mashupped world it is getting harder and harder to comply with strict and rigid copy- & usage rights policies – even if they are published under any sort of commons license. In this respect it is important to mention that research on judicial problems arising from the automated processing of content released under differing commons licenses is still missing (as far as I know – does anybody have a hint for me?). But with the current decision of the European Parliament we can observe a very promising shift in the notion that the internet is made up of much more than its commercial exploitability. And that any attempt to stiffle this notion by imposing unbalanced regulatory restrictions on the rights of the users is a major threat not just to the internet as it exists but to democracy itself.

In this respect enjoy a great talk of Lawrence Lessig on this topic.