[open-government] open-government Digest, Vol 39, Issue 3

Sun May 5 13:27:42 UTC 2013

Hi all,

I have another question. Would you say that from your experience and
understanding, do the bureaucrats tend to cope with OD? Do they understand
the advantages for the public, or not so much? Perhaps they feel that
information is power and delivering it freely would cost them more than it
would benefit them? In terms of future dept. budgets etc'. I think I'm
mainly interesting in understanding whether OD projects (especially G2C
ones) are mostly a success, or mostly a failure in terms of the quality of
the data being uploaded, the frequency of the DB's being uploaded,
their engagement to the projects etc.

If I'm a bit unclear I'd love to elaborate and clarify as possible. I'm
still wondering myself about the whole thing :)

Thanks a lot!
Matan

On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 2:00 PM, <open-government-request at lists.okfn.org>wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: Fwd: Invitation to Participate: Demand-driven Open Data
>       (Tom Steinberg)
>    2. Fwd: CFP: First International Workshop on Semantic Statistics
>       (SemStats 2013) @ ISWC 2013 (Sarven Capadisli)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 2 May 2013 12:18:12 +0100
> From: Tom Steinberg <director at mysociety.org>
> Subject: Re: [open-government] Fwd: Invitation to Participate:
>         Demand-driven Open Data
> To: "Samuel S. Lee" <sammyslee at gmail.com>
> Cc: Open Government WG List <open-government at lists.okfn.org>
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CALJT5+toxn_XFaMvTgKDSbJsumQHpQhCrA2C9OxvM4iCz6kFxw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi Sam,
>
> > Tom S., is there a way to access and analyze all of the requests on
> > WhatDoTheyKnow?
>
> If you can describe what sort of analysis you would like to be able to
> do, that will help us to make sure that the Alaveteli codebase (which
> powers WhatDoTheyKnow) gains this sort of feature in future.
>
> thanks,
>
> Tom
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 03 May 2013 11:41:31 +0200
> From: Sarven Capadisli <info at csarven.ca>
> Subject: [open-government] Fwd: CFP: First International Workshop on
>         Semantic Statistics (SemStats 2013) @ ISWC 2013
> To: open-government at lists.okfn.org
> Message-ID: <5183864B.6030103 at csarven.ca>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"
>
> This call might be of interest to some:
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: CFP: First International Workshop on Semantic Statistics
> (SemStats  2013) @ ISWC 2013
> Resent-Date: Fri, 03 May 2013 09:29:28 +0000
> Resent-From: public-lod at w3.org
> Date: Fri, 03 May 2013 11:28:59 +0200
> From: Rapha?l Troncy <raphael.troncy at eurecom.fr>
> Organization: EURECOM
> To: Linked Data community <public-lod at w3.org>
>
>
> =============================================================================
>
>
> First International Workshop on Semantic Statistics (SemStats 2013)
>
> Full-Day Workshop in conjunction with ISWC 2013, the 12th International
> Semantic Web Conference
> 21-25 October 2013, in Sydney, Australia
>
> Workshop Web Site: http://www.datalift.org/en/event/semstats2013
> EasyChair: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semstats2013
> E-mail address: semstats2013 at easychair.org
> Twitter Hashtag: #semstats2013
>
> *Important Dates*
> - Deadline for paper submission: Friday, 12 July 2013, 23:59 (Hawaii time)
> - Notification of acceptance/rejection: Friday, 9 August 2013
> - Deadline for camera-ready version: Friday, 30 August 2013
>
> =============================================================================
>
>
>
> *Workshop Summary*
> The goal of this workshop is to explore and strengthen the relationship
> between the Semantic Web and statistical communities, to provide better
> access to the data held by statistical offices. It will focus on ways in
> which statisticians can use Semantic Web technologies and standards in
> order to formalize, publish, document and link their data and metadata.
>
> The statistical community has recently shown an interest in the Semantic
> Web. In particular, initiatives have been launched to develop semantic
> vocabularies representing statistical classifications and discovery
> metadata. Tools are also being created by statistical organizations to
> support the publication of dimensional data conforming to the Data Cube
> specification, now in Last Call at W3C. But statisticians see challenges
> in the Semantic Web: how can data and concepts be linked in a
> statistically rigorous fashion? How can we avoid fuzzy semantics leading
> to wrong analyses? How can we preserve data confidentiality?
>
> The workshop will also cover the question of how to apply statistical
> methods or treatments to linked data, and how to develop new methods and
> tools for this purpose. Except for visualisation techniques and tools,
> this question is relatively unexplored, but the subject will obviously
> grow in importance in the near future.
>
> *Motivation*
> There is a growing interest regarding linked data and the Semantic Web
> in the statistical community. A large amount of statistical data from
> international and national agencies has already been published on the
> web of data, for example Census data from the U.S., Spain or France
> amongst others. In most cases, though, this publication is done by
> people exterior to the statistical office (see also
> http://datahub.io/dataset/istat-immigration, http://270a.info/ or
> http://eurostat.linked-statistics.org/), which raises issues such as
> long-term URI persistence, institutional commitment and data maintenance.
>
> Statistical organizations also possess an important corpus of structural
> metadata such as concept schemes, thesauri, code lists and
> classifications. Some of those are already available as linked data,
> generally in SKOS format (e.g. FAO's Agrovoc or UN's COFOG). Semantic
> web standards useful for the statisticians have now arrived at maturity.
> The best examples are the W3C Data Cube, DCAT and ADMS vocabularies. The
> statistical community is also working on the definition of more
> specialized vocabularies, especially under the umbrella of the DDI
> Alliance. For example, XKOS extends SKOS for the representation of
> statistical classifications, and Disco defines a vocabulary for data
> documentation and discovery; and the Visual Analytics Vocabulary is a
> first step towards semantic descriptions for user interface components
> developed to visualize Linked Statistical Data which can lead to
> increased linked data consumption and accessibility. We are now at the
> tipping point where the statistical and the Semantic Web communities
> have to formally exchange in order to share experiences and tools and
> think ahead regarding the upcoming challenges.
>
> The web of data will benefit in getting rich data published by
> professional and trustworthy data providers. It is also important that
> metadata maintained by statistical offices like concept schemes of
> economic or societal terms, statistical classifications, well-known
> codes, etc., are available as linked data, because they are of good
> quality, well-maintained, and they constitute a corpus to which a lot of
> other data can refer to.
>
> Statisticians have a long-going culture of data integrity, quality and
> documentation. They have developed industrialized data production and
> publication processes, and they care about data confidentiality and more
> generally how data can be used. It seems that after a period where the
> aim was to publish as many triples as possible, the focus of the
> Semantic Web community is now shifting to having a better quality of
> data and metadata, more coherent vocabularies (see the LOV initiative),
> good and documented naming patterns, etc. This workshop aims to
> contribute in these longer term problems in order to have a significant
> impact.
>
> The statistics community faces sometimes challenges when trying to adopt
> Semantic Web technologies, in particular:
>    * difficulty to create and publish linked data: this can be
> alleviated by providing methods, tools, lessons learned and best
> practices, by publicizing successful examples and by providing support.
>    * difficulty to see the purpose of publishing linked data: we must
> develop end-user tools leveraging statistical linked data, provide
> convincing examples of real use in applications or mashups, so that the
> end-user value of statistical linked data and metadata appears more
> clearly.
>    * difficulty to use external linked data in their daily activity: it
> is important do develop statistical methods and tools especially
> tailored for linked data, so that statisticians can get accustomed to
> using them and get convinced of their specific utility.
>
> To conclude, statisticians know how misleading it can be to exploit
> semantic connections without carefully considering and weighing
> information about the quality of these connections, the validity of
> inferences, etc. A challenge for them is to determine, to ensure and to
> inform consumers about the quality of semantic connections which may be
> used to support analysis in some circumstances but not others. The
> workshop will enable participants to discuss these very important issues.
>
> *Topics*
> The workshop will address topics related to statistics and linked data.
> This includes but is not limited to:
>
> How to publish linked statistics?
>    * What are the relevant vocabularies for the publication of
> statistical data?
>    * What are the relevant vocabularies for the publication of
> statistical metadata (code lists and classifications, descriptive
> metadata, provenance and quality information, etc.)?
>    * What are the existing tools? Can the usual statistical software
> packages (e.g. R, SAS, Stata) do the job?
>    * How do we include linked data production and publication in the
> data lifecycle?
>    * How do we establish, document and share best practices?
>
> How to use linked data for statistics?
>    * Where and how can we find statistics data: data catalogues, dataset
> descriptions, data discovery?
>    * How do we assess data quality (collection methodology,
> traceability, etc.)?
>    * How can we perform data reconciliation, ontology matching and
> instance matching with statistics data?
>    * How can we apply statistical processes on linked data: data
> analysis, descriptive statistics, estimation, correction, visualization,
> etc.?
>
> *Submissions*
> This full-day workshop is aimed at an interdisciplinary audience of
> researchers and practitioners involved or interested in Statistics and
> the Semantic Web. All papers must represent original and unpublished
> work that is not currently under review. Papers will be evaluated
> according to their significance, originality, technical content, style,
> clarity, and relevance to the workshop. At least one author of each
> accepted paper is expected to attend the workshop.
>
> Workshop participation is available to ISWC 2013 attendants at an
> additional cost, see
> http://iswc2013.semanticweb.org/content/registration for details.
>
> The workshop will also feature a challenge based on Census Data
> published on the web or provided by Statistical Institutes. It is
> expected that data from Australia, France, Ireland, the U.S. and Spain
> at least will be available. The challenge will consist in the
> realization of mashups or visualizations, but also on comparisons,
> alignment and enrichment of the data and concepts involved. A reward
> will be attributed to the challenge winner. More details will be
> available soon at http://www.datalift.org/event/semstats2013.
>
> We welcome the following types of contributions:
>    * Full research papers (up to 12 pages)
>    * Short papers (up to 6 pages)
>    * Challenge papers (up to 6 pages)
>
> All submissions must be written in English and must be formatted
> according to the information for LNCS Authors (see
> http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0). Please,
> note that (X)HTML(+RDFa) submissions are also welcome as soon as the
> layout complies with the LNCS style. Authors can for example use the
> template provided at https://github.com/csarven/linked-research.
> Submissions are NOT anonymous. Please submit your contributions
> electronically in *PDF* format at
> http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semstats2013 and before July
> 12, 2013, 23:59 PM Hawaii Time. All accepted papers will be archived in
> an electronic proceedings published by CEUR-WS.org. If you are
> interested in submitting a paper but would like more preliminary
> information, please contact semstats2013 at easychair.org.
>
> *Chairs*
> Franck Cotton, INSEE, France
> Richard Cyganiak, DERI, Ireland
> Armin Haller, CSIRO, Australia
> Alistair Hamilton, ABS, Australia
> Rapha?l Troncy, EURECOM, France
>
> *Program Committee*
> Ghislain Atemezing, EURECOM, France
> Sarven Capadisli, University of Leipzig, Germany
> Ric Clarke, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia
> Jay Devlin, Statistices New Zealand, New Zealand
> Miguel Exp?sito, Instituto C?ntabro de Estad?stica, Spain
> Dan Gillman, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, USA
> Alberto Gonz?lez Yanes, ISTAC, Spain
> Arofan Gregory, Open Data Foundation, United States
> Tudor Groza, The University of Queensland, Australia
> Christophe Gu?ret, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), The
> Netherlands
> Andreas Harth, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
> Yves Jacques, FAO, Italy
> Laurent Lefort, CSIRO, Australia
> Marco Pellegrino, Eurostat, Luxembourg
> Dave Reynolds, Epimorphics, UK
> Monica Scannapieco, Istat, Italy
> Fran?ois Scharffe, LIRMM, University of Montpellier, France
> Wendy Thomas, University of Minnesota, United States
> Bernard Vatant, Mondeca, France
> Boris Villazon-Terrazas, iSOCO, Spain
> Joachim Wackerow, GESIS, Germany
> Stuart Williams, Epimorphics, UK
> --
> Rapha?l Troncy
> EURECOM, Campus SophiaTech
> Multimedia Communications Department
> 450 route des Chappes, 06410 Biot, France.
> e-mail: raphael.troncy at eurecom.fr & raphael.troncy at gmail.com
> Tel: +33 (0)4 - 9300 8242
> Fax: +33 (0)4 - 9000 8200
> Web: http://www.eurecom.fr/~troncy/
>
>
>
>
>
>
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