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The Web is My Back-end: Creating Mashups with Linked Open Government Data
Abstract
Governments around the world have been releasing raw data to their citizens at an increased pace. The mixing and linking of these datasets by a community of users enhances their value and makes new insights possible. The use of mashups — digital works in which data from one or more sources is combined and presented in innovative ways — is a great way to expose this value. Mashups enable end users to explore data that has a real tangible meaning in their lives. Although there are many approaches to publishing and using data to create mashups, we believe Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies solve many of the true challenges in open government data and can lower the cost and complexity of developing these applications. In this chapter we discuss why Linked Data is a better model and how it can be used to build useful mashups.
... This prediction can be used to issue warnings or evacuation orders in time. The city of Rio de Janeiro is a good example of this use case, as an operations centre 11 was established with the aim to prevent weather-related disasters (amongst other aims). -Health: Patient data can be used to generally monitor a patient during an ongoing treatment or to issue reminders when check ups or vaccinations are due. ...
... -Simpler data access through a unified data model; -Rich representation of data enabling the documentation of data semantics; -Re-use of existing vocabularies; -Use of URIs allow fine-grained referencing of any information; -Related information is linked, allowing its unified access. While significant efforts in literature cover advantages of using Linked Data (for example [11,14,35,36]), there is no evident effort targeted towards the benefits of using Linked Data specifically in open government data value creation. We here therefore proceed to focus on the value creation techniques described in Section 4 and the benefits provided through the use of Linked Data. ...
Governments are one of the largest producers and collectors of data in many different domains and one major aim of open government data initiatives is the release of social and commercial value. Hence, we here explore existing processes of value creation on government data. We identify the dimensions that impact, or are impacted by value creation, and distinguish between the different value creating roles and participating stakeholders. We propose the use of Linked Data as an approach to enhance the value creation process, and provide a Value Creation Assessment Framework to analyse the resulting impact. We also implement the assessment framework to evaluate two government data portals.
... Some municipal governments are looking for successful m-apps, which is reflected in tremendous adaptation of hackathons (hacker marathons). In these hackathons members of government institutions and citizens come together and work on new innovations (Baraniuk, 2013;Briscoe & Mulligan, 2014;DiFranzo et al., 2011), such as the AppVenture Challenge, staged by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore (Chan, 2013). Nevertheless, the potential of urban m-apps has been highlighted by different researches on open data or mobile applications, however, there is a lack of systematic analyses in this field. ...
... Open urban government data show their assets to advantage when combined among each other or with further open tools such as Google Maps in the sense of mashups (DiFranzo et al., 2011). Such linked data will break "data out of the silos" (Shadbolt & O'Hara, 2013, p. 73) and "facilitates the provision of innovative services" (Shadbolt & O'Hara, 2013, p. 72). ...
Mobile applications (m-apps), which are based upon open urban data, make up new ways of governmental services and information. In a large-scale study we analyzed 471 m-apps of 24 metropolitan regions all over the world, regarding their implementation and usage development. For instance cities like Sydney, New York or Berlin host so-called hackerthons (hacker marathons) to actively push the development of m-apps based on government data. We model a typology of these m-apps and present a unique overview of the variety of types, used eco-systems and developers. For Android m-apps the success was measurable by the amount of counted downloads. Finally we argue that we are still in the beginning of citizen-oriented e-government and need more actionable research in this field.
... The NOAA's RESTful APIs provide access to data in CSV, SSV, JSON, PDF, and NetCDF formats. Our work is based on NOAA climate data [7]. b) Climate Analysis Ontology: In our research, we use the CA ontology [3] to model the NOAA daily summary datasets. ...
The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles are fundamental for climate researchers and all stakeholders in the current digital ecosystem. In this paper, we demonstrate how relational climate data can be "FAIR" and modeled using RDF, in line with Semantic Web technologies and our Climate Analysis ontology. Thus, heterogeneous climate data can be stored in graph databases and offered as Linked Data on the Web. As a result, climate researchers will be able to use the standard SPARQL query language to query these sources directly on the Web. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of our SPARQL endpoint for automated climate analytics. We illustrate two sample use cases that establish the advantage of representing climate data as knowledge graphs.
... Similar to the material found in the FOI movement, most of the first reports on OGD provide a simplistic and optimistic view of its benefits (Maali et al. 2010, DiFranzo et al. 2011, Hoxha & Brahaj 2011, Villazón-Terrazas et al. 2011, Wang et al. 2011) but lack analysis of the barriers, risks, disclosure and use of open government data . This largely relates to the work of advocacy and evangelists in both groups of initiatives (FOI and OGD). ...
The Social Dynamics of Open Data is a collection of peer reviewed papers presented at the 2nd Open Data Research Symposium (ODRS) held in Madrid, Spain, on 5 October 2016. Research is critical to developing a more rigorous and fine-combed analysis not only of why open data is valuable, but how it is valuable and under what specific conditions. The objective of the Open Data Research Symposium and the subsequent collection of chapters published here is to build such a stronger evidence base. This base is essential to understanding what open datas impacts have been to date, and how positive impacts can be enabled and amplified. Consequently, common to the majority of chapters in this collection is the attempt by the authors to draw on existing scientific theories, and to apply them to open data to better explain the socially embedded dynamics that account for open datas successes and failures in contributing to a more equitable and just society.
... In database driven approach, reference [26] proposed the service data model for adaptation of heterogeneous web services, the service relation model for representation and refinement of data interaction between services, and the service process graph for describing business logics of mashup applications. Another approach is the linked data mashup approach [27,28] which uses semantic web technology based on linked data for combining, aggregating, and transforming data from heterogeneous data resources to build linked data mashups. ...
Due to the exponential growth of the data and its services, visiting multiple webs/apps by a user raises three issues—(1) consumption of extra bytes; (2) time killing process of surfing inside the webs/apps; (3) tedious task of remembering address of webs/apps with their credentials. The data mashup is a set of techniques and user-friendly approaches which not only resolves above issues but also allows ordinary user to fetch required data from multiple disparate data sources and to create the integrated view in his defined digital place. In this paper, we have proposed an extension of existing REST protocol called Structured Data REST (SDRest) protocol and user-friendly novel approach which allows even ordinary users to develop end to end data mashup, using the innovative concept of Structured Data Mashup Box (SDMB) and One Time Configuration (OTC)-Any Time Access (ATA) models. Our implementation shows that pre-mashup configuration can easily be performed by an ordinary user and an integrated user interface view of end user data mashup can be created without any technical knowledge or programming. We have also evaluated the proposed work by comparing it with some of the related works and found that the proposed work has developed user friendly configurable approach using the current state of the art techniques to involve not only the ordinary user but also the mashup service provider and the data service provider to develop public, private and hybrid data mashup.
... Our analysis suggests that the latter generally offers an enhanced level of dialogue with the user, and can aggregate data from multiple sources. These solutions, which can integrate open government data with user data, user-generated content, or data from third-party sources, can also be described as "mash-ups" (Cranefield et al., 2014;DiFranzo et al., 2011), An example of an interactive app is a transportation planner app that aggregates information from the user (e.g. location), as well as data from various transportation modalities and companies, in order to provide the user with actionable recommendations regarding available travel options. ...
The release of government data in an open format is broadly expected to generate innovation and economic value. However, despite the emerging public notoriety of this issue, literature is still scarce regarding the commercial application of open government data. The main goal of this study is to understand how firms use open government data to create value. More specifically, we aim to identify what types of use are currently in place and which industries are more prominent in exploiting open government data. Building on the analysis of a dataset of 178 firms that use open government data across various industries in the U.S. we find twelve different atomic models. Additionally, our findings suggest that the way in which open government is used to create value is contingent to the firms' activities. Supported by robust empirical data, we anticipate that our research produces practical insights to entrepreneurs as well as firm managers in deriving value from public datasets, and equip government officials with relevant evidence for advocacy and policy-making.
... In the field of mashups, DiFranzo et al. (2011) proposed an approach to create mashups from linked open government data. The work of Minhas et al. (2012) presents a framework driven to the study and evaluation of mashup tools. ...
Motivated by transparency policies, government agencies have been publishing more valuable data. In order to take advantage of this initiative, data must be published in accordance with Linked Open Data principles. This work proposes a platform capable of enriching police reports with data available on the Web. This work also presents an evaluation tool, which consumes the linked data provided by a Web API, expands it with data extracted from other sources and provides an interface to assess the relevance of the expansions. Results show that the proposed expansion method might be useful for discovery and evaluation of related information, supporting richer analysis of the published data.
... There are considerable studies on how to provide government's data as Linked Data 7 [4]. In [5], [6], [7], [8] and [9], the authors propose a semantic approach on attaching meaning to government data by applying ontologies to formally and semantically represent data. ...
... Essentially, these initiatives can serve to reduce information asymmetry between public agencies and their external stakeholders for the innovation of government services. Although datasets are in their raw form and may not have much value on their own, public agencies can leverage on businesses and citizens to contribute to the innovation of government services through the reorganizing, repackaging, and synthesizing information from various sources (DiFranzo et al., 2011). However, beyond the buzz created through these ad-hoc initiatives and even with the efforts to improve data availability, it appears that the full potential of massive participation and collaboration to achieve innovation in government services has yet to materialize. ...
Governments are initiating open data initiatives as a new approach where external stakeholders can play an increased role in the innovation of government services. This is unlike previous approaches of e-government service innovation where services are solely initiated and developed by the agencies themselves. However, despite public agencies actively promoting the use of their data by organizing events such as challenge competitions, the response from external stakeholders to leverage government data for innovative activities has been lacking. This raises the question about the reasons inhibiting the interest to innovate using open data. Yet, the existing literature points to a lack of understanding about external stakeholders’ willingness to innovate with the data provided. Motivated thus, this paper aims to identify the antecedents of the willingness of external stakeholders to innovate with open data. We propose the use of the case study methodology for this purpose.
... The benefits of applying Linked Data principles to government data as covered in literature include [21] [22]: • Simpler data access through a unified data model; • Rich representation of data enabling the documentation of data semantics; • Reuse of existing vocabularies; • Use of URIs allow fine-grained referencing of any information; • Related information is linked, allowing its unified access. While significant efforts in literature cover advantages of using Linked Data (for example [23] [24] [17] [25]), there is no evident effort targeted towards the benefits of using Linked Data specifically in open government data value creation. We here therefore proceed to focus on the value creation techniques described in Section 4 and the benefits provided through the use of Linked Data. ...
... As defined in Section 3, data quality has no agreed-upon definition, and apart from being cross-disciplinary, it is also subjective [53]. Also, the publishing of data on portals does not guarantee that it is of good or high quality [15,59]. For these reasons, we hereby do not define how published data can be of good quality, but we discuss the different aspects which influence the quality of the data, whether positively or negatively. ...
We conduct a systematic survey with the aim of assessing open government data initiatives, that is; any attempt, by a government or otherwise, to open data that is produced by a governmental entity. We describe the open government data life-cycle and we focus our discussion on publishing and consuming processes required within open government data initiatives. We cover current approaches undertaken for such initiatives, and classify them. A number of evaluations found within related literature are discussed, and from them we extract challenges and issues that hinder open government initiatives from reaching their full potential. In a bid to overcome these challenges, we also extract guidelines for publishing data and provide an integrated overview. This will enable stakeholders to start with a firm foot in a new open government data initiative. We also identify the impacts on the stakeholders involved in such initiatives.
... We realized that, to enjoy a true Linked Data experience, we needed to generate datasets represented using vocabularies that enable the creation of relevant local mashups, but also the correlation to other datasets produced globally. According to [DiFranzo et al. 2011], the hardest and most time-consuming step in the creation of a data mashup consists of gaining a deeper working understanding of the datasets that will be the basis of the mashup. We argue that this understanding is fundamental to support the selection of the vocabularies to be used to represent the RDF tuples, because such vocabularies must be directly related to the datasets with which we want to correlate our data in a mashup. ...
This article discusses the current status of open government data in Brazil and summarizes the lessons learned from publishing Brazilian government data as linked data.
The Linked Data initiative has successfully attracted many data providers who agree to adhere to the linked data principles and W3C standards. This movement aims to adopt a unified format, understandable by machines and easily discoverable and exploitable. As a result of this success, there has been a continuous expansion of linked open data available on the cloud. However, a limited number of applications utilize this wealth of data. Therefore, several governmental initiatives were launched to encourage the exploitation and use of public utility data to create applications that improve citizens' lives. This work investigates how linked open data, including government data, can provide public utility applications. Furthermore, this paper proposes a generic approach for creating mobile and web apps based on linked open data.
Open government data (OGD) have important political, economic, and social values that are highly valued by many countries around the world. These data represent the cross-boundary information sharing practices between governments and the public. Therefore, this paper investigates OGD by following the theory and practice of cross-boundary information sharing. Most of the current studies have focused on OGD platform, whereas this study has focused on individual government departments and datasets. From the perspective of public data users, we constructed an evaluation index to measure OGD quality, which reflected the degree of cross-boundary information sharing between the governments and the public. We specifically concentrated on the external environment of OGD and selected 128 government departments in Shanghai, Beijing, and Wuhan in China as samples. We found that institutional capacity is an important factor for OGD quality of individual government departments. However, technology capacity and organization arrangement demonstrated small significance for OGD quality. The pressure from the public and higher-level government departments can moderate the relationship between institutional capacity and OGD quality. These results can guide governments in prioritizing the improvement of OGD quality and implementing an OGD project.
Linking Government Data provides a practical approach to addressing common information management issues. The approaches taken are based on international standards of the World Wide Web Consortium. Linking Government Data gives both the costs and benefits of using linked data techniques with government data; describes how agencies can fulfill their missions with less cost; and recommends how intra-agency culture must change to allow public presentation of linked data. Case studies from early adopters of linked data approaches in international governments are presented in the last section of the book. Linking Government Data is designed as a professional book for those working in Semantic Web research and standards development, and for early adopters of Semantic Web standards and techniques. Enterprise architects, project managers and application developers in commercial, not-for-profit and government organizations concerned with scalability, flexibility and robustness of information management systems will also find this book valuable. Students focused on computer science and business management will also find value in this book.
After a fierce presidential election campaign in 2014, the re-elected president Dilma Rousseff became a target of protests in 2015 asking for her impeachment. This sentiment of dissatisfaction was fomented by the tight results between the two favorite runners-up and the accusations of corruption in the media. Two main protests in March were organized and largely reported with the use of Social Networks like Twitter: one pro-government and other against it, separated by two days. In this work, we apply two supervised learning algorithms to automatically classify tweets during the protests and to perform an exploratory analysis to acquire insights of their inner divisions and their dynamics. Furthermore, we can identify a slightly different behavior from both parts: while the pro-government users criticized the opposing arguments prior the event, the group against the government generated attacked during different times, as a response to supporters of government.
If you see Wikipedia as a main place where the knowledge of mankind is concentrated, then DBpedia—which is extracted from Wikipedia—is the best place to find the machine representation of that knowledge. DBpedia constitutes a major part of the semantic data on the web. Its sheer size and wide coverage enables you to use it in many kind of mashups: it contains biographical, geographical, bibliographical data; as well as discographies, movie metadata, technical specifications, and links to social media profiles and much more. Just like Wikipedia, DBpedia is a truly cross-language effort, e.g., it provides descriptions and other information in various languages. In this chapter we introduce its structure, contents, and its connections to outside resources. We describe how the structured information in DBpedia is gathered, what you can expect from it and what are its characteristics and limitations. We analyze how other mashups exploit DBpedia and present best practices of its usage. In particular, we describe how Sztakipedia—an intelligent writing aid based on DBpedia—can help Wikipedia contributors to improve the quality and integrity of articles. DBpedia offers a myriad of ways to accessing the information it contains, ranging from SPARQL to bulk download. We compare the pros and cons of these methods. We conclude that DBpedia is an unavoidable resource for applications dealing with commonly known entities like notable persons, places; and for others looking for a rich hub connecting other semantic resources.
The subject area of this report is Linked Data and its application to the
Government domain. Linked Data is an alternative method of data representation
that aims to interlink data from varied sources through relationships.
Governments around the world have started publishing their data in this format
to assist citizens in making better use of public services. This report
provides an eight step migrational framework for converting Singapore
Government data from legacy systems to Linked Data format. The framework
formulation is based on a study of the Singapore data ecosystem with help from
Infocomm Development Authority (iDA) of Singapore. Each step in the migrational
framework has been constructed with objectives, recommendations, best practices
and issues with entry and exit points. This work builds on the existing Linked
Data literature, implementations in other countries and cookbooks provided by
Linked Data researchers. iDA can use this report to gain an understanding of
the effort and work involved in the implementation of Linked Data system on top
of their legacy systems. The framework can be evaluated by building a Proof of
Concept (POC) application.
Official statistics can be disseminated via different media including the Internet, paper publications, CD-ROM, fax, public speeches, and press releases. Dissemination formats such as HTML pages, PDF documents, and Excel sheets are widely used by national and international statistics agencies in releasing their data. However, with the recent worldwide movement that calls for opening up government or public data, more governments and institutions are increasingly publishing their data in more open formats such as SDMX, CSV, XML that allow users to freely use and reuse or even link their data. Examination of dissemination formats of statistics of the AEC countries in this study has shown that data still need to be disseminated in a more open format in cases of national statistical organizations in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, as well as ASEAN.
As open government initiatives around the world publish an increasing number of raw datasets, citizens and communities face daunting challenges when organizing, understanding, and associating disparate data related to their interests. Immediate and incremental solutions are needed to integrate, collaboratively manipulate, and transparently consume large-scale distributed data. The Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has developed the TWC LOGD Portal based on Semantic Web principles to support the deployment of Linked Open Government Data. The portal is not only an open source infrastructure supporting Linked Open Government Data production and consumption, but also serves to educate the developers, data curators, managers, and end users that form the growing international open government community. This chapter introduces the informatic challenges faced while developing the portal over the past two years, describes the current design solutions employed by the portal’s LOGD production infrastructure, and concludes with lessons learned and future work.
DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from
Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia
allows you to ask sophisticated queries against datasets derived from
Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data. We
describe the extraction of the DBpedia datasets, and how the resulting
information is published on the Web for human- and machine-consumption.
We describe some emerging applications from the DBpedia community and
show how website authors can facilitate DBpedia content within their
sites. Finally, we present the current status of interlinking DBpedia
with other open datasets on the Web and outline how DBpedia could serve
as a nucleus for an emerging Web of open data.
The early Web was hailed for giving individuals the same publish- ing power as large content providers. But over time, large content providers learned to exploit the structure in their data, leveraging databases and server side technologies to provide rich browsing and visualization. Individual authors fall behind once more: neither old-fashioned static pages nor domain-specific publishing frame- works supporting limited customization can match custom data- base-backed web applications. In this paper, we propose Exhibit, a lightweight framework for publishing structured data on standard web servers that requires no installation, database administration, or programming. Exhibit lets authors with relatively limited skills—those same enthusiasts who could write HTML pages for the early Web—publish richly interac- tive pages that exploit the structure of their data for better brows- ing and visualization. Such structured publishing in turn makes that data more useful to all of its consumers: individual readers get more powerful interfaces, mashup creators can more easily repur- pose the data, and Semantic Web enthusiasts can feed the data to the nascent Semantic Web.
In this paper, we describe how the BBC is working to inte- grate data and linking documents across BBC domains by using Semantic Web technology, in particular Linked Data, MusicBrainz and DBpedia. We cover the work of BBC Programmes and BBC Music building Linked Data sites for all music and programmes related brands, and we describe existing projects, ongoing development, and further research we are doing in a joint collaboration between the BBC, Freie Universitat Berlin and Rattle Research in order to use DBpedia as the controlled vocabulary and semantic backbone for the whole BBC.
Linked Data provide many benefits to data consumers, but many publicly available datasets are still released in the Comma Separated Values (CSV) format, a ubiquitous common denominator. We introduce a methodology to transform such datasets into Linked Data. Our design is based on requirements identified while surveying existing governmental datasets released by data.gov. We present an implementation-independent RDF vocabulary to describe how a CSV dataset should be promoted into Linked Data, and use a Java-based converter to produce 5.3 billion RDF triples from 312 data.gov datasets.
The specifications developed in the three areas such as communication protocols, service descriptions, and services discovery of web services, are discussed. The specifications include the simple object access protocol (SOAP), web services description language (WSDL) and the universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI). SOAP is an XML-based protocol for messaging and remote procedure calls (RPC). WSDL defines a service's abstract description in terms of messages exchanged in a service interaction. The UDDI offer users a unified and systematic way to find service providers through a centralized registry of services.
A complete guide to every aspect of creating a variety of different websites using Drupal.ï¾ A trove of well-considered and practical information is presented in a logical and intuitive manner so that you can either build up your site step by step by reading from cover to cover or, alternatively, focus on your specific needs by diving into each chapter as required.ï¾ This book has been written against the latest release v4.7.
Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources. Pipes could be used to "combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate to create your ultimate custom feed. In this article, the author describes how to use Yahoo! Pipes. The author shares what she has learned in experimenting with pipes. (Contains 6 figures and 4 online resources.)
This document introduces the RDF/A syntax for expressing RDF metadata within XHTML. The reader is expected to be fairly familiar with XHTML, and somewhat familiar with RDF.
This is an internal draft produced by the RDF-in-HTML task force [RDFHTML], a joint task force of the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group [SWBPD-WG] and HTML Working Group [HTML-WG].
This document is for internal review only and is subject to change without notice. This document has no formal standing within the W3C.
Despite myriad tools for visualizing data, there remains a gap between the notational efficiency of high-level visualization systems and the expressiveness and accessibility of low-level graphical systems. Powerful visualization systems may be inflexible or impose abstractions foreign to visual thinking, while graphical systems such as rendering APIs and vector-based drawing programs are tedious for complex work. We argue that an easy-to-use graphical system tailored for visualization is needed. In response, we contribute Protovis, an extensible toolkit for constructing visualizations by composing simple graphical primitives. In Protovis, designers specify visualizations as a hierarchy of marks with visual properties defined as functions of data. This representation achieves a level of expressiveness comparable to low-level graphics systems, while improving efficiency--the effort required to specify a visualization--and accessibility--the effort required to learn and modify the representation. We substantiate this claim through a diverse collection of examples and comparative analysis with popular visualization tools.
The ocean floor is being covered with remote-controlled observatories, letting oceanographers keep tabs on the sea without getting wet. Jon Copley investigates.
Google Visualization API http
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