“Free citizens must be able to hold big institutions and powerful individuals to account.”

I attended a speech at the Institute for Government by UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg at which he outlined the government’s stance on civil liberties. This topic is one I am particularly passionate about as a citizen of two democracies, and as a lover of history and human communication, but what was there to interest a software evangelist?

Mr Clegg’s speech is available as a transcript from his party’s site, so you can have a look at the same words I heard. If you read through a lot of the political positioning (references to “Labour”, for non-UK readers, refer to the majority party of the previous government), you get to the bit that interests me as a Talisian as well as a human.

The final point talks about citizens having the right to public information, and the right to speak out about what government (and, notably, publicly-subsidised industry) is doing. The freedom of information and freedom of speech are under the same heading. As Clegg put it:

“It is a modern right to information combined with traditional freedom of expression.”

Examples are given of current transparency measures, including the publishing of particular datasets that are already being used in innovative ways and to hold the government accountable. It’s clear from the speech that transparency is a priority, and that publishing data is seen as fundamental to this.

The theme of balancing security and freedom is repeated throughout the talk, alluding to the fact that some information in any government is clearly going to be kept secret. But the emphasis is on publishing wherever possible, and it was interesting that this felt like the most specific theme of an otherwise very high-level speech. This is an area of public policy that has been changing through the launch of data.gov.uk and the continued efforts of two successive governments (and, interestingly, all three major UK parties) to put public data online. The idea that these datasets will be used, reused, mashed up and seed innovation is at the forefront of these talks. This isn’t just data that can be seen, it’s data that can be used.

So, this government seems committed to continuing the trend for transparency through public information, and for their data to be made available online and in useful ways. The emphasis in this speech, however, adds a new dimension to the commitment, at least the way I understand it. It’s not just that data is a right of any free citizen—the Prime Minister said as much before he was PM—but that this right goes hand-in-hand with the citizen’s right to free speech.

Government publishing its data online, free to reuse and feed applications that make it easier to interact with the information has been a huge step. Alongside this is the area of libel reform, which is a topic too big to get into here but involves the scrutiny of scientific and journalistic investigation without the fear of prosecution. (Guardian journalist Simon Singh discusses libel reform here.)

Although Mr Clegg’s talk is mostly general, discussing big ideas and leaving out specifics, I think the principles discussed were hugely important, and it is good to see a further commitment to public data. As a Talisian, it’s great because we work a lot with this kind of data, and it means we get to do more interesting things with it. As a citizen, it’s important that we can see more of what’s going on within government and that it is being considered fundamental enough to mention alongside freedom of speech and libel reform encourages me.

What I’d like to see this year is the specifics, now. What specific things will make publishing public data easier and more thorough?

On the eve of the American Thanksgiving holiday, millions of people travel to spend time with friends and family.  Before I share a meal with relatives, I contemplate the connection between the first thanksgiving and the emerging Open Government movement.

The “First Thanksgiving” celebration in the US was a feast shared by 53 starving pilgrims who survived a brutal winter in New England, and 90 Native Americans.  The Native Americans knew how to manage their land and waters to provide sufficient fish, meat, vegetables and fruit.

The connection between the first American Thanksgiving and Open Government has to do with adapting to a new world by sharing information.  Four hundred years ago,  the Native Americans shared information on seeds, crops and planting conditions, helping the pilgrims survive.  Today, sharing information via the Web is helping us to better understand climate conditions, our health care options and issues impacting our local community.

Last week I joined about 250 people at the first International Open Government Conference, hosted by the US Department of Commerce in Washington DC.  Approximately half the conference delegates were from government, the balance from academia and the private sector.  The speakers discussed Open Government projects underway in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. Speakers shared success stories and areas for future development.  The common theme: democratizing public sector data and driving innovation.  Jonas Rabinovitch from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs highlighted several eGov strategies in developing nations.  Mr. Rabinovitch noted that all but three UN member nations have a basic Web presence, many offer online forms and some provide the ability to perform transactions via the Web.

Given the conference was hosted in the US Department of Commerce, data.gov featured prominently.  “The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.”  Seven countries have stood up Open Government sites in the last 18 months, including UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Finland.  Government administrators are seeking to restore public trust and establish an environment of transparency, participation and collaboration with the public.

The US Administration launched its Open Government Initiative in April 2009.  In the last two years, I’ve watched the US Executive Branch begin to move from  a “need to know” to a “need to share” culture.  This cultural transition and thus this Open Government Conference, was truly historic.  The conference underscored to me that we all, regardless of our political views and affiliation, live in a highly  interconnected global economy, underpinned by the World Wide Web.

Respected advisors on Open Government initiatives including Professor Jim Hendler of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, agreed that public participation and collaboration will be key to the success of Open Government initiatives.  I believe that more conferences like this one and the Open Government Data Camp 2010 held in London last week, drawing delegates from a variety of disciplines, from several countries, will do a great deal to reinvigorate civic engagement and economic growth from the ground up.

Government employees are responding to mandates to publish content to Open Government websites.  Data.gov was launched in April 2009 with 47 data sets.  Vivek Kundra, U.S Chief Information Officer stated that data.gov has in excess of 300,000 data sets as of November 2010.  A large portion of the data.gov data sets are geospatial information which is an opportunity for scientists and entrepreneurs to build tools for analysis and visualization of this valuable data.  The UK Government as published over 4,600 data sets, including many from Great Britain’s national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, providing the most accurate and up-to-date geographic data for the UK.

“The stakes are high for our interlinked global economy.”  Dr. Robert Schaefer, Deputy Project Scientist from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab gave a compelling presentation on the need for mechanisms to make sense of published data as Linked Open Data. Publishing the content as in RDF is not sufficient, rather, providing context on what the data implies is necessary.  Better tools for analysts and scientists to extract meaning from Linked Open Data will allow critical information on climate change and space weather, for example, to be more readily understood by policy makers.  Professor Schaefer stated the implications for climate change are serious, wide ranging & urgent.  Current CO2 emissions are higher than the International Panel of Climate Change “worst case” scenario.  Billions of people may experience serious consequences from climate change.  Professor Schaefer reiterated the need to get started as soon as possible.  “When the water from the sea rises, millions of people will have to move.”  This international conference will hopefully stimulate cooperation between the public and private sectors.  It is a critical step in making data accessible and providing decision support tools for space weather and climate change.

Mr. Kundra acknowledged we have much more to do to improve the quality of published data sets.  He said, “when I’m able to perform analytics on the fly, grounded on quality data, we will have achieved success.”  Delegates were encouraged by Mr. Kundra and  other speakers to build out communities of interest, lead by individuals, rather than government agencies. The US Government is regularly launching challenges, see http://www.challenge.gov, with modest cash prizes targeting citizens to gain insights on how we, the people, not government, can solve problems ranging from education on childhood obesity to sustainable urban housing that respects the environment.

Beth Simone Noveck, United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, leads President Obama’s Open Government Initiative.  Based at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, she is an expert on technology and institutional innovation. Ms. Noveck stated that “the Open Government Initiative is not transparency for transparency’s sake.  It is through participation and collaboration with academia and the public sector that there is value.”  Creating partnerships to use Open Government Data for important and unforeseen uses is empowering individuals with the ability to make better decisions and affect our quality of life.

We are in the very early stages of making Open Government available as Linked Data. Today, we are in the very early phases, however,  there are many good reasons to support Open Government initiatives including accountability in spending, improved health care provision, and addressing climate change and space weather which affects the world’s population.   The international data exchange standards are in now in place.  While experts will continue to refine the technical underpinnings and best practices will evolve, the citizen lead movement, assisted by government, is truly underway.

Bright young geeks are increasingly involved in American civic life through non-profit organizations like Code for America.  Passionate entrepreneurs like Dan Melton show that being being super bright and engaged at a grassroots level in government is both hip and necessary.  Code for America recruited twenty “fellows” from 362 applicants to get involved in city projects in 2011.  One example discussed was the Boston Project whose idea is to bring info on students together & create interesting applications leveraging federal census content, student data, transit info, city and state data.

Each month new mobile applications and social networking solutions are made available.  These are not expensive, government top down initiatives, rather, they are coming from the ground up by military personnel, students, local government officials, publishers, scientists and citizens who value transparent government.  An interesting mobile app for Android, iPhone and the iPad was unveiled for the New York Senate.  It is a real-time constituent mobile dashboard to the legislative process allowing citizens to connect with Senators, find and comment on bills, review votes and transcripts.

Academics are doing innovative research.  Grad students and post-docs are rapidly prototyping what the new world of open data will look like.   An increasingly number of software companies, including my employer Talis, are producing light weight platforms and cloud computing solutions.  Thousands of smart people have been creating the foundation of the Linked Data “ecosystem” in the form of International Data Standards and best practices over the last fifteen years, largely through the important work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The availability of improved development tools is seen as a requirement for widespread proliferation of Semantically enabled applications, however,  people are leveraging international standards such as RDF for Linked Data, content sharing models, well-documented licensing models, and existing best practices.  Fully 25% of the applications shipped on a new Apple iPhone use government produced content.

I believe there are significant opportunities for commercial software firms to produce services and products to visualize data sets, find related data sets and most importantly, provide mechanisms as easy to use as the early Web to publish machine and human readable data as Linked Data.  There is burgeoning information economy rapidly forming around provision of public and private data mixed together in novel ways.  I believe that in 2011, truly useful tools for Web developers to create compelling Linked Data applications will be available for use with Open Government data.

We should all acknowledge that data will never be 100% perfect.  Real data is dirty, face it.  Yes, concerns will linger about misinterpretation and inappropriate mashups until people gain experience in making informed decisions based the data presented.  Be patient and don’t expect it to be perfect on day one or even year one.  Allow best practices to emerge from the ground up, by communities of interest.  Issues of data quality, provenance, context and important elements such as units of measure will all be addressed as Linked Data becomes more mainstream.  Harvard Business School published a blue print for use of open government data.  The W3C provides lots of useful guidance on eGovernment and Linked Data activities.

Just as the early American pilgrims experienced miscalculations in weather and agriculture, they eventually they figured out how to plant seeds correctly and increase their potential for a bountiful harvest.  Through information sharing and discussion by informed citizens, the US evolved a free and democratic form of government that is admired by millions of people around the world.

I’m optimistic that the citizens of the world will leverage Open Government initiatives for positive outcomes.  The more our governments support openness and transparency through Open Government initiatives, the more we, the people, can solve issues that matter at the community-level or on a global level.  The stakes are high and we should be grateful and cooperate to harness the power of Open Government data and the Web.  We are defining our history, as well as our future, today.

We’ve had an overwhelming response to our Linked Data and Health open day, which will be running this Thursday in London—there are no places left!

As a quick intro to the day, I’ll quickly post a bit of information about some of our guest speakers here, with a working title for their talks. (Please note, that the titles may change).

Alongside our guest speakers, several of us from Talis will be talking about the wider world of Linked Data, giving an overview, demos of LD applications in use, and doing our best to answer the seemingly simple question: “Why Linked Data for health?”

Dr. Nigam Shah

Dr. Shah’s research is focused on developing applications of bio-ontologies, specifically building ontology-based applications in the biomedical sciences and using Semantic Web technologies to improve search and integration of biomedical information. He teaches at Stanford on topics of how to make and use biomedical ontologies, current trends & future directions in biomedical ontologies and reasoning with biomedical data. He has co-chaired the Bio-Ontologies meeting at the ISMB conference since 2007.

Dr. Shah’s talk is: Opportunities for applying semantic technologies to health care data.

Dr. Michael Wilkinson

Dr Michael Wilkinson is the Business Development Manager for the NHS National Innovation Centre (NIC). Michael is currently leading on a programme of work to create a linked data platform to speed development of technological innovations likely to benefit the NHS. The NIC works across sectors and encourages collaboration between innovators from industry, academia, and NHS clinicians, scientists, and procurement officials. The NIC also works with other government departments and the EU to improve efficiency of innovation procurement. Prior to joining the NIC, Michael was an academic at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has also held appointments at the Cabinet Office, Nesta, and hospitals in the USA.

Mark Birbeck

For a number of years Mark Birbeck has been involved in helping to bring about the Semantic Web, and has consulted, written and spoken widely on this and related topics. He is the originator of the W3C’s RDFa standard, and most recently he has been working on a number of semantic web projects for the UK government.

Mark will be speaking with Dr. Wilkinson, introducing the NHS clinical widget platform, which they jointly wrote about in Nodalities Magazine (pdf).

Dr. Jun Zhao

Dr Jun Zhao is an EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. She has computer science research background in various domains, including e-Science, provenance, Semantic Web and biological data integration. She has more than six years’ experience of applying Semantic Web research and technologies to bioinformatics and biological information representation and integration. Currently she is running her fellowship project, Open-BioMed, which investigates the use of Web of Data for publishing and integrating biomedical data resources and the role of provenance information for evaluating their trustworthiness. She is actively involved in both the W3C Health Care Life Science Interest Group and the W3C Provenance Incubator group.

Dr. Zhao’s talk will be: Linked Data for Biomedical Science: A Tale of Two Success Stories

Leigh Dodds

Leigh has significant experience of working with Semantic Web and Web technologies as both an independent hacker, researcher, as well as in production environments in a number of roles including developer, software architect and product manager. He has written about, and spoken widely on a range of semantic web topics include SPARQL, Linked Data, managing and aggregating data on the web, semantic web application development, and data licensing and management. Leigh is currently employed by Talis as the Programme Manager for the Talis
Platform and is responsible for both product strategy and business development.

Leigh’s talk is: Why Linked Data for Health?

The room was almost full at the British Library Conference Centre for the Linked Data and Libraries event on 21st July 2010, and many who wanted to attend couldn’t because of distance, other commitments, etc.

We therefore took along our brand new screen grabber device and a video camera to capture as much of the day as we could.  We have completed the editing process so I am ready to share the videos for those that want to view, or remind themselves of, the day.

Like most of the content we produce at Talis, these videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License, so share and enjoy.

	Introduction Talis and the world of Linked Data Zach Beavais, Talis Click for presentation video
	The data.bnf.fr Project Romain Wenz, Bibliothèque nationale de France Presentation not yet available
	Linked Data, RDF, and SPARQL Rob Styles, Talis Click for presentation video
	Linked Data in Action Richard Wallis, Talis Click for presentation video
	Lightning Talk Neil Wilson, The British Library Click for presentation video
	Lightning Talk Sally Chambers, The European Library Click for presentation video
	Lightning Talk Felix Ostrowsk, The North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Click for presentation video
	Linked Bibliographic Data Rob Styles, Talis Click for presentation video
	W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Grouop Antoine Isaac, Scientific Coordinator, Europeana Click for presentation video
	An overview of the Talis Platform Richard Wallis, Talis Click for presentation video

The Talis Linked Data in Libraries event, held at the British Library in London on Wednesday 21st July was attended by 50 enthusiastic interested people interested in the topic.

Below you will find presentations from the day.

Introduction Talis and the world of Linked Data – Zach Beavais, Talis 
Click to play

The data.bnf.fr Project – Romain Wenz, Bibliothèque nationale de France
        (Presentation not yet available)

Linked Data, RDF, and SPARQL – Rob Styles, Talis

Click to play

Linked Data in Action – Richard Wallis, Talis

Click to play

Lightning Talks:
                       Neil Wilson, The British Library

                       Sally Chambers, The European Library
                       Felix Ostrowsk, The North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service

Linked Bibliographic Data – Rob Styles, Talis

Click to play

W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group – Antoine Isaac, Europeana
Click to play

An overview of the Talis Platform – Richard Wallis, Talis

Click to play

Watch this space for videos of some of the sessions.

I’m here in San Francisco at the Semantic Technology conference with a cohort of Talisians and a bunch of the world’s Semantic Web companies and thinkers. I’ll pull together some various posts from the things happening here, but if you wanted to follow my more raw and unpolished notes, mostly from sessions I’m attending, you can have a look at my tumblog. I’m not promising to cover everything, but I’ll have a go

This is my first year attending the ESWC (formerly “European Semantic Web Conference” now the “Extended Semantic Web Conference,” cleverly, the acronym still works) near Heraklion on Crete. It’s only a couple days in, but I thought it’d be a good time to report back to the Nodalities readers. ESWC is a gathering of some of the world’s most influential Semantic Web thinkers, and for me It’s been a few days of meeting people in the flesh with whom I’ve been in touch online for years. As one bloke put it: “What’s kept you away?”

Well, I’m extremely glad I’ve not been kept away this year, and have been excited to see what’s been built recently. ESWC is a very academic conference; indeed I’m quietly auditing the PhD Symposium as I type this. There are papers, PhD symposia, demos and expositions on topics covering anything from ontology development to MapReduce processing of RDF triples. It seems a very fertile seedbed, with many of these ideas having the potential of growing into projects, startups, papers and possibly industries.

I’ve made a subtle and largely subconscious transition by blogging mostly about projects that are up and running. This has been important because the Semantic Web world is no longer one of “someday,” but a world of current and continuous activity. So, I’ve talked about visualisations of data, products running on Linked Data, data.gov.uk et.al.; and I’ve held back on discussing purely possible. It’s been exciting and uplifting to see the conceptual evolve to the proven and working. But this is a reflection of progress—of moving from hypothesis to implementation. It doesn’t mean the concepts have stopped flowing. It’d be a very short story in the history of human communication if the Semantic Web has used up all of its possibilities in ten years!

ESWC is a little microcosm of the wider research going on in Linked Data and related fields. It seems to me that Big Ideas need the traditional frameworks of academic investigation. Questions need to be asked and answered and debated and tried and broken and rebuilt. Much of this science will not become technology, and this is wholly acceptable because it gives the Big Ideas a lot of scope to be refined.

ESWC is just such a place. PhD students and researchers fill the schedule with proposals and reports, and many possibilities are being constantly debated around coffee, beer, and the beach. It’s been a thoroughly fascinating few days, and I’m very much looking forward to more over the next few.

As a quick note, Talis sponsored the Scripting for the Semantic Web challenge for this, its final year. Alexandre Passant and Pablo Mendes won the prize with SPARQLpush.

Well, we’ve had scores of people attend Platform Open Days now. Some have come to the Talis Offices in Birmingham, and others have joined us in Manchester and London. We’ve had a lot of fun, and some fascinating discussions, and I’m very much looking forward to the next one (16th June, in London).

Many people have asked whether the full slides can be found anywhere, so I thought I’d do a quick round-up of the slides, and share them as images on flickr to make it even easier to follow along.

Just follow the links from the images below to a slideshow of the talk.

Here’s the Introduction to Linked Data, covering who Talis is, RDF, and how to Identify, Describe and Respond:

Here’s the Overview of the Talis Platform, explaining our RESTful API, data storage and SPARQL endpoints:

And here are the slides for our introduction to SPARQL—complete with spaceships:

Richard Wallis’ talk about Linked Data in Action can be seen over here, with more details and a dedicated Screencast.

So, the Platform Open Day Roadshow has now begun. We will be doing our first non-Birmingham day up in Manchester on 14th May. It’ll be at the University of Manchester Visitors’ Centre on the penultimate day of Future Everything.

We like to keep the Days Open, meaning we want you to take what you need from them, so make sure to leave us feedback on what you’d like to learn. As a rough overview, we’ll be covering Linked Data including what it means to make Data into “Linked Data”. There will be an overview of RDF, and a tutorial of SPARQL: the query language of the Semantic Web. We will also show you examples and demonstrations of Linked Data in action—apps, mashups and visualisations built on Linked Data.

The Open Days are free of charge, limited to 30 folk (discussion doesn’t seem to happen with larger groups), and we’re putting on lunch. So, make sure to reserve your place here.

I know what you’re thinking: “He’s going to say Data!”

Well, I might do at some point, but I was going to say “Days”. Last month, Talis flung open its doors to 30 or so folk who were interested in SPARQL, the Semantic Web and Linked … er, Data. The idea was to host an informal event for folks learn about much of what we’ve been talking about for the past few years. We planned some talks on what it means to join up your data, what this Platform is about, and a detailed introduction to SPARQL. With the launch of data.gov.uk and many of the stories covered over in the Magazine, it seemed possible that people were starting to get interested in this whole Linked Data scene.

So, we sent out some invites and tweeted a bit, and soon had to cap the registration numbers. We filled up spaces in the January day not long after New Year, and the February day not long after the January one. March is quickly filling up too (hint). I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting this many people to express an interest so soon. Not only did people sign up, but travelled to Birmingham through adverse weather to come and take part at both ‘Days—and we’ve had a lot of fun.

One thing that seemed to be a good idea was to ask for feedback before the event. It sounds wrong, but the point of an Open Day is to cover things that YOU’re interested in learning or exploring. So, when people registered, they were asked for their expectations and what they’d like to take away with them from such an event—aside from a T-shirt and SPARQL mug, obviously. It made it much easier to work out what we should cover, and I hope it meant that we were able to talk about the things most relevant to the people who came along.

I’d like to do it again, but slightly differently. Instead of hosting an Open Day here at Talis HQ, what if we came to you? Would you be interested in attending a Talis Platform Roadshow? What would you want us to cover? More importantly, where would you like us to go?

Comments below, or email me or tweet me.