Alvaro Graves

TWC LOGD: A portal for linked open government data ecosystems

International open government initiatives are releasing an increasing volume of raw government datasets directly to citizens via the Web. The transparency resulting from these releases not only creates new application opportunities but also imposes new burdens inherent to large-scale distributed data integration, collaborative data manipulation and transparent data consumption. The Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has developed the Semantic Web-based TWC LOGD portal to support the deployment of linked open government data (LOGD). The portal is both an open source infrastructure supporting linked open government data production and consumption and a vibrant community portal that educates and serves the growing international open government community of developers, data curators and end users. This paper motivates and introduces the TWC LOGD Portal and highlights innovative aspects and lessons learned.

TWC data-gov corpus: incrementally generating linked government data from data.gov

The Open Government Directive is making US government data available via websites such as Data.gov for public access. In this paper, we present a Semantic Web based approach that incrementally generates Linked Government Data (LGD) for the US government. In focusing on the trade-off between high quality LGD generation (requiring non-trivial human expert input) and massive LGD generation (requiring low human processing cost), our work is highlighted by the following features: (i) supporting low-cost and extensible LGD publishing for massive government data; (ii) using Social Semantic Web (Web3.0) technologies to incrementally enhance published LGD via crowdsourcing, and (iii) facilitating mash-ups by declaratively reusing cross-dataset mappings which usually are hard-coded in applications.

Visualization tools for open government data

In recent years many government organizations have implemented Open Government Data (OGD) policies to make their data publicly available. This data usually covers a broad set of domains, from financial to ecological information. While these initiatives often report anecdotal success regarding improved efficiency and governmental savings, the potential applications of OGD remain a largely uncharted territory. In this paper, we claim that there is an important portion of the population who could benefit from the use of OGD, but who cannot do so because they cannot perform the essential operations needed to collect, process, merge, and make sense of the data. The reasons behind these problems are multiple, the most critical one being a fundamental lack of expertise and technical knowledge. We propose the use of visualizations as a way to alleviate this situation. Visualizations provide a simple mechanism to understand and communicate large amounts of data. We also show evidence that there is a need for exploratory mechanisms to navigate the data and metadata in these visualizations. Finally, we provide a discussion on a set of features that tools should have in order to facilitate the creation of visualizations by users. We briefly present the implementation of these features in a new tool prototype focused on simplifying the creation of visualization based on Open Data.

Producing and Using Linked Open Government Data in the TWC LOGD Portal

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.

Creation of visualizations based on linked data

A common task with any relatively large amount of data is to create visual representations that help users to make sense of such data and observe trends that otherwise would be hard for them to appreciate. The creation of these visualizations usually requires some knowledge in a programming language, making it difficult for non-technical savvy users to create visualizations. In this paper we present Visualbox, a system that makes it easier for non-programmers to create web visualizations based on Linked Data. These visualizations can be accessed by any modern web browser and can be easily embedded in web pages and blogs. We describe how people can create visualizations using Visualbox and we show examples of work done by real users. Finally we present a study that shows that Visualbox makes it easier for users to create Linked Data-based visualizations.

The Web is My Back-end: Creating Mashups with Linked Open Government Data

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.

A case study for integrating public safety data using semantic technologies

Information about public safety has become critical for government organizations, non-government organizations and citizens in general. It enables informed decisions to be made by individuals, as well as guides the creation of public policies. As with many domains, information on public safety is usually spread across different organizations, described in different formats and published at different levels of granularity and richness. In this paper, we present work done on a web-based portal that aggregates and displays public safety information for the city of Troy, New York. This portal shows how the use of semantic technologies facilitates the integration of multiple data sources with disparate characteristics. The portal demonstrates two types of functionality: First, it shows different examples of integration of public safety information through a variety of examples and visualizations. Second, it acts as a source of semantified data that third-party developers can use in their own applications.

A farm in every window: a study into the incentives for participation in the windowfarm virtual community

Virtual communities have great potential in connecting people from different backgrounds and locations and giving them a common space to share, explore, and solve problems. A key factor into whether a virtual community will be successful is user participation. Insight into why users of virtual communities participate, and how to increase this participation is still poorly understood. There is no unifying model or consensus on incentives or incentivization in virtual communities and this makes studying them very difficult. In this paper we describe our study into the incentive structures for members of the Windowfarm virtual community and look into what ways the community could be improved. We explore user incentives using methodology and models from different disciplines and fields, trying to find which of these best explains the behaviors and interactions in the Windowfarm community. We present this as a case study so that other research groups and community leaders can look into and better understand incentives in virtual communities based on the recent work done in this space.

A study on the use of visualizations for Open Government Data

In the last years, many government organizations have implemented Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives. The data published describe a broad set of areas, including environment, budget and education among others. While these initiatives often report anecdotal success regarding improved efficiency and governmental savings, the potential applications of OGD remain a largely uncharted territory. In this paper, we claim that there is an important group of people interested in OGD -e.g., journalists and activists- who could benefit from the use of OGD, but who cannot do so because they cannot perform the essential operations needed to collect, process, merge, and make sense of the data. The reasons behind these problems are multiple, the most critical one being a fundamental lack of expertise and technical knowledge related to data management and visualizations. We propose the use of visualizations as a way to alleviate this situation. Visualizations provide a simple mechanism to understand and communicate large amounts of data. We also show evidence that there is a need for exploratory mechanisms to navigate the data and metadata in these visualizations. Finally, we provide a discussion on a set of features that tools should have in order to facilitate the creation of visualizations by users. We briefly present the implementation of these features in a new tool prototype focused on simplifying the creation of visualization based on Open Data.

Functional requirements for information resource provenance on the web

HTTP transactions have semantics that can be interpreted in many ways. At a low level, a physical stream of bits is transmitted from server to client. Higher up, those bits resolve into a message with a specific bit pattern. More abstractly, information, regardless of the physical representation, has been transferred. While the mechanisms associated with these abstractions, such as content negotiation, are well established, the semantics behind these abstractions are not. We extend the library science resource model Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Resources (FRBR) with cryptographic message and content digests to create a Functional Requirements for Information Resources (FRIR) ontology that is integrated with the W3C Provenance Ontology (PROV-O) to model HTTP transactions in a way that clarifies the many relationships between a given URL and all representations received from its request. Use of this model provides fine-grained provenance explanations that are complementary to existing explanations of web resources. Furthermore, we provide a formal explanation of the relationship between HTTP URLs and their representations that conforms with the existing World Wide Web architecture. This establishes the semiotic relationships between different information abstractions, their symbols, and the things they represent.