Science Library Pad

Canada's Digital Research Future - Call for White Papers

Canada's New Digital Research Infrastructure Organisation (New DRI Organisation, or NDRIO) has put out a call for white papers.

https://engagedri.ca/ndrio-call-for-white-papers-on-canadas-future-dri-ecosystem/

Submissions should briefly describe individual perspectives on current challenges accessing Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) tools, services and support; the ideal future state of DRI in Canada; and how NDRIO could achieve such a state.

Deadline for submissions is 17:00 Canadian Pacific Standard Time (PST), Friday December 4, 2020.

NDRIO's scope includes Research Data Management, Research Software, and Advanced Research Computing / High-Performance Computing, for Canadian researchers.

Contact [email protected] for general details, or Felipe Pérez Jvostov, Senior Analyst for Outreach and Engagement at [email protected] about this specific call.

Disclaimer: I work on the Digital Research Infrastructure Strategy at ISED.

Provide feedback on the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy

The three federal research funding agencies—the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (the agencies)—have developed a draft Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy, which aims to support Canadian research excellence by fostering sound digital data management and data stewardship practices.

feedback on the draft policy is requested by August 31, 2018

Feedback can be sent electronically to any of the following email addresses:

SSHRC:

[email protected]

NSERC:

[email protected]

CIHR:

[email protected]

Data archiving and sharing - Le partage du savoir - Dominique Roche - Les années lumière

Canada's national French language public radio Radio-Canada has a science show, Les années lumière.

Every episode has some standard segments, including Doc / Post-Doc, which is an interview with a doctoral or post-doctoral researcher.

For February 21, 2016 the researcher was Dominique Roche, specifically about his research on Policies and practices surrounding data archiving and sharing.

You can see his academic home page at Université de Neuchâtel: http://www2.unine.ch/ethol/lang/en_GB/dominique_roche

and his Twitter is @dom_roche

Relevant papers on this topic are:

• Data deposition: Fees could damage public data archives - Nature 502, 171 (10 October 2013) - doi:10.1038/502171a - Published online 09 October 2013 (closed access)
• Troubleshooting Public Data Archiving: Suggestions to Increase Participation - Roche DG, Lanfear R, Binning SA, Haff TM, Schwanz LE, Cain KE, et al. (2014) Troubleshooting Public Data Archiving: Suggestions to Increase Participation. PLoS Biol 12(1): e1001779. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001779
• Public Data Archiving in Ecology and Evolution: How Well Are We Doing? - Roche DG, Kruuk LEB, Lanfear R, Binning SA (2015) Public Data Archiving in Ecology and Evolution: How Well Are We Doing? PLoS Biol 13(11): e1002295. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002295

You can visit the segment page for the Feb 21, 2016 Doc / Post-Doc on Roche, but the JavaScript popup audio player may cause problems depending how your system is set up.

Here is a direct link to a web page that should take you to the specific audio segment, but it requires Flash for playback on desktop computers.

An easier option may be to go to the audio segment in the podcast.  It runs from approximately 36:02 to approx. 43:13.

• direct MP3 link
• general podcast feed link (you'll have to pick the right episode)
• iTunes general podcast link (you'll have to pick the right episode)
• iTunes specific episode podcast link (note that this doesn't always work)

Consultation on developing a Digital Research Infrastructure Strategy for Canada

Consultation has opened at

http://www.ic.gc.ca/DRI

closes September 14, 2015

The DRI strategy will include new policies on research data management and storage, and a coordinated long‑term approach for the provision of high speed networking, high performance computing and software tools.

...

We are interested in all elements of the DRI ecosystem, including high‑performance computing, high‑speed networks, research data management, software, tools and human capital, with a particular emphasis on identifying opportunities and gaps.

A Digital Research Infrastructure strategy is item 6.2.3 in the ST&I Strategy and is in section 3 of Digital Canada 150 2.0

• Enhanced Canada’s research capacity through digital research infrastructure by developing a strategy to optimize the various elements of the digital research ecosystem, including high-performance computing, high-speed networks, research data management, software, tools and human capital.

• $100 million to support digital research infrastructure through the Canada Foundation for Innovation;

Previously:
December 5, 2014  2014 Science, Technology, Innovation Strategy
July 23, 2014  Digital Canada 150 [version 1.0]

update on Open Science and Open Access for Government of Canada research

This is a bit of a complicated trail, but here goes:

Open science is in the Digital Canada 150 strategy.

Open science was a proposed idea in the phase 2 ideas consultation for the 2nd Open Government Action Plan.

Open science is now a proposed action (proposed commitment) in the phase 3 activitives consultation.  This is the last phase of online consultation.  The next step will be to issue the OGAP 2 plan.

The feedback on the proposed idea does not carry over to the proposed action.  If you want to be heard again, you have to post comments on the proposed action: Open Science.

UPDATE 2014-09-20: The action consultation (phase 3 consultation) is now closed, as of Sept. 19, 2014.  However, the data.gc.ca mailing list has announced that there will be a 4th phase of consultation "to request public input on the draft version of Canada’s Action Plan on Open Government 2.0" from Oct. 6-17, 2014 Oct 9, 2014.  ENDUPDATE

There are also still in-person consultations to be completed.  You can read about them here and here.

I do not have the exact schedule.  Contact [email protected] for the correct information.

It looks something like this, but there may be changes:

Round Table #6

September 11 – Halifax (1841 Argyle St., Halifax City Hall, Halifax Hall)

3 hour session

September 12 – Saint John, New Brunswick ?

Round Table #7	October – Edmonton (date and location to be confirmed)	3 hour session
GTEC	October – Ottawa (details forthcoming)	Workshop
Round Table #8	Lethbridge (date and location to be confirmed)	3 hour session

okfest14 - Open Digital Science - notes

Open Knowledge Festival 2014 - July 16, 2014

Session "Open, Digital Science - moving beyond open access" by Celina Ramjoué and Silvia Luber.

Sched entry.

Etherpad https://pad.okfn.org/p/Open,_Digital_Science

Dr. Ramjoué and Dr. Luber presented the progress on open science in the EU to date

• full open access mandate in Horizon 2020 research program
• also pilot on open research data in Horizon 2020 - see Guidelines on Data Management in Horizon 2020 (PDF)
• now working on next step: Open Digital Science
• public consultation: http://www.consultation-science20.eu/ closes 30 September 2014

They presented a framework of the larger set of issues involved when you look at the impact of digital technologies on all of science:

The session was mainly group discussions; these are summarized in the Etherpad.

The question of what policy actions are needed to support this new scientific ecosystem is an interesting one; it's a complex system and we are still figuring out necessary pieces.

csvconf 2014 - Data Hacking with Wikimedia Projects - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

12:20 Data-Hacking with Wikimedia Projects: Learn by Example, Including Wikipedia, WikiData and Beyond by Matt Senate @wrought and Max Klein @notconfusing

Matt and Max have clearly done a lot of thinking about how to make a project work within the WikiMedia context.  The project they described is about automatically extracting information about open access content and then enriching multiple WikiMedia sites with the appropriate information.

Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5T6RoEckAQ

• Wikipedia is by far the largest of the WikiMedia projects
• In order to contribute successfully, you need to understand the community for each project, the cultural protocols.
• Rambot added US Census data to WikiMedia
• When contributing from an open access article to WikiMedia
• text to WikiSource
• media (images etc.) to WikiMedia Commons
• metadata to Wikidata
• signals (information about the article such as license) used to enrich e.g. citations in Wikipedia
• the bot is called RecitationBot
• goals:
• improve citation management
• integrate metadata into wikidata
• forge deep knowledge resources
• automation combined with human judgement
• Paths for Data Hackers (things to work on in order to succeed, particularly in WikiMedia context)
• reputation
• understanding of cultural protocols
• knowing the history and context of previous efforts, and fitting your work into that narrative
• connecting to community e.g. IRC, mailing lists
• RecitationBot is essentially a process of enriching newly posted citations
• can also initiate RecitationBot with a DOI as you create a reference

csvconf 2014 - CSV Validation at UK Archives - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

11:55 session CSV Validation by Adam Retter @adamretter

Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pIBG5iv5XI

• has been working at UK National Archives
• there is a new digital archive for the UK - the Digital Records Infrastructure (DRI)
• need to ingest metadata from many sources
• CSV was decided upon as file format for metadata
• many possible errors in the CSV provided (including some people just rename Excel files, rather than exporting as CSV)
• approach: fail fast as repeat
• was decided to create a CSV Validator
• providing code to suppliers - now the suppliers can do up-front data validation
• want to be able to write rules, beyond just basic checks, and have it make easy enough to do so that domain experts can write rules
• CSV Schema language as a way to write rules
• https://github.com/digital-preservation/
• looking for developers to help advance this work

See also UK National Archives blog: CSV validator – a new digital preservation tool.

csvconf 2014 - Data usability: the tabular data package - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

10:35 session Data usability: the tabular data package and friends by Nick Stenning @nickstenning

Data publishers at #csvconf: my message to you today is “put it in a box.” Publish your data as data packages: http://dataprotocols.org/

— Nick Stenning (@nickstenning) July 15, 2014

Slides at https://github.com/nickstenning/put-it-in-a-box

• analogy with international shipping: things in containers vs. people carrying them individually
• things not in containers are very expensive to move
• which means you do a lot of work carrying the things, rather than using the things
• containers are: 1. simple, 2. opaque, 3. diverse within constraints ("moderated diversity")

Introducing The Data Package, datapackage.json

See info at http://dataprotocols.org/data-packages/#specification

My question: What about BagIt?

Answer from Rufus Pollock (@rufuspollock): Other formats were examined, there is a white paper.

UPDATE 2014-08-01: Review of Existing Packaging Work via @rufuspollock

csvconf 2014 - introduction - notes

csv,conf 2014 introduction by Max Ogden and Rufus Pollock - @maxogden and @rufuspollock
July 15, 2014

(csv is Comma-Separated Values, a way of representing data.)

• wanted to reach out to data hacker community
• wanted to bring together open data / open tools / open standards communities
• csv has strength of simplicity
• csv inherently "hackable"
• csv can be used for big or small data, it "scales", it "streams"

Hashtag #csvconf

Canadian Polar Data Network - webinar

Research Data Canada webinar

September 17, 2013

13:00 Eastern time

Scott Tomlinson will present on "The Genesis of the Canadian Polar Data Network: An example of a collaborative network for data stewardship". Scott is the former Data Management Coordinator for the Canadian International Polar Year Program.

for more information see http://rds-sdr.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/events/webinars/invitation.html

CISTI / DataCite Canada - presentations for Open Access Week 2011

Two presentations for Open Access Week 2011:

Introduction to DataCite Canada

Karen Morgenroth (CISTI) & Wendy Watkins (Data Centre- Library); Monday, October 24, 2011; 2:00-3:00pm; Room 235 Library [Carleton U, Ottawa]

...

Karen Morgenroth will discuss DataCite Canada's technical solutions for registration. It will also look at DataCite Canada's beta project with several Canadian data centres, including Carleton University.

Carleton's pilot involves the Millennium Scholarship Foundation Research Data holdings, a unique and valuable collection rescued by the Data Centre. Wendy Watkins will provide an overview of the resource, its importance to scholarlship and the progress of the project to date.  Assigning persistent identifiiers to this collection will mean that scholars and students will be able to find and use the resource in the future.

from Carleton Library - Scholarly Communications: OA Events

Also see this document (PDF) from CARL with information about registering for in-person or webcast.

Open Access to Data: New Initiatives and the Challenges of Data Management

Date: Thursday, October 27.   Time: 1:00-3:00

Location: Ante Chamber 3129DV,  U of T Mississauga.

Join us for a panel presentation and discussion of new initiatives and challenges associated with opening access to national, regional, municipal and research data.

...

Panel members: 

• Steve Czajka, OLS, OLIP, Supervisor, Information Planning, City of Mississauga Planning and Building Department, Policy Planning Division
• Ron Jaros MES, MCIP, RPP, OLS, OLIP, Planning Manager, Information and Intelligence Team, Region of Peel
• Diane Carley, Digital Initiatives Analyst,  Project Manager - DataCite Canada, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
• Andrew Nicholson, GIS and Data Librarian U of T Mississauga Library  
• Berenica Vejvoda, Data Librarian, Data Liberation Initiative Representative, Map & Data Library University of Toronto Libraries.

from University of Toronto (Mississauga) - Join Us for 2011 Events

For other events from Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) members, see 2011 Events @ CARL Libraries.

Twitter:

• Karen Morgenroth @kmorgenroth
• Diane Carley @dianecarley
• DataCite Canada @datacitecanada
• DataCite @datacite

DataCite conference - Data and the Scholarly Record: the Changing Landscape - Aug 2011

DataCite will hold its second Summer Meeting on August 24th and 25th [2011] at the historic Shattuck Plaza Hotel in Berkeley, California. The Summer Meeting will be a 1.5 day event and is open to all. You can register at:
http://datacite2011.eventbrite.com/

DataCite blog - DataCite Summer Meeting “Data and the Scholarly Record: the Changing Landscape” - June 30, 2011

DataCite is a service for providing permanent DOIs to data sets, in particular to enable consistent citation of data sets in the scientific literature.

There are many international partners in DataCite, CISTI's role is to establish DataCite Canada.

Government of Canada open data and data stewardship presentations

The Ottawa chapter of Data Management International (DAMA-Ottawa) had an event on June 15, 2011 that was primarily about exploring possible alignment between the DAMA Data Management Book of Knowledge (DM-BOK) and the draft Directive on Data Stewardship, but which included some coverage of open data.

The presentations are now up

Data Management – Enabling Open Data and Interoperability (PDF) - June 15, 2011 - Pierre Boucher, Deputy CIO, Government of Canada

Directive on Data Stewardship (PDF) - June 15, 2011 - Mark Armstrong, Senior Policy Analyst, Treasury Board Secretariat

The complete set of presentations from DAMA-Ottawa is available on their Events Archive page.

I declared the hashtag for the event to be #damaott - and have recorded an Archivist Desktop archive (XML) of the tweets.

UK open data, open government

I was sorely tempted to title this "would uk like some data, guv?"

The UK government is picking up the challenges issued in the excellent Power of Information Taskforce report.

Via Andy Powell in my FriendFeed, I find a Guardian article Free our data: UK set to follow successful US data method

Now the UK government has picked up on the idea, and in a post on the Cabinet Office blog Richard Stirling is asking the British public how a UK version of the US site should be implemented. "What characteristics would be most useful to you - feeds (ATOM or RSS) or bulk download by FTP?," he asks. "Should this be an index or a repository? Should this serve particular types of data eg XML, JSON or RDF?"

Although there is a list of dozens of the UK government's published data sources there is no clear pan-governmental approach to making data available. The proposal has been received with pleasure by a number of web developers and would-be data users, although it is not clear how free people would be to use the data commercially.

Richard Stirling is writing in the UK Cabinet Office Digital Engagement blog

http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/

At some point I will no longer be saying things like "yes, that's an official gov.uk blog" but... well, it is.

The four themes they list on their about page: open information, open feedback, open conversation, open innovation.

A more extensive extract of what Richard Stirling asks in his posting Information and how to make it useful :

Any solution must support open standards and would ideally be open source, but there are a couple of other questions we are pondering at the moment:

• What characteristics would be most useful to you – feeds (ATOM or RSS) or bulk download by e.g. FTP, etc?
• Should this be an index or a repository?
• Should this serve particular types of data e.g. XML, JSON or RDF?
• What examples should we be looking at (beyond data.gov e.g.http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data)?
• Does this need its own domain, or should it sit on an existing supersite (e.g. http://direct.gov.uk)

There are already 19 substantive comments, and he indicates they are also monitoring Twitter for the hashtags #poit (Power of Information Taskforce) and #opendata

There is a new Director of Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott, according to his official Twitter feed, @DirDigEng , he was scheduled to start in his position yesterday.

Sometimes I feel like a certain country often considered to be between the UK and the US is missing out on this whole official open data, blogging, twitter thing...

If anyone were to want someone to start blogging officially about government open data in a certain northern neighbour of the US, I am available...

data.gov, Whitehouse open gov, Rewired UK Parliament and whither Canada

Data.gov is live.

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. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data.

But there's more.  Much, much more.

In the Whitehouse (yes, The Whitehouse) Open Government blog http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/blog/ they have announced a national consultation on open government.  Note the very aggressive timeline.

Today we are kicking off an unprecedented process for public engagement in policymaking on the White House website. In a sea change from conventional practice, we are not asking for comments on an already-finished set of draft recommendations, but are seeking fresh ideas from you early in the process of creating recommendations. We will carefully consider your comments, suggestions, and proposals.

Here’s how the public engagement process will work. It will take place in 3 phases: Brainstorming, Discussion, and Drafting.

Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on suggested ideas or add your own.

Then on June 3rd, the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase. On June 15th, we will invite you to use a wiki to draft recommendations in collaborative fashion.

These three phases will build upon one another and inform the crafting of recommendations on open government.

There are more details from the Collaboration Project

Today, the National Academy of Public Administration, in partnership with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has launched an Open Government Dialogue to solicit ideas from the public on how the government can become more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This online brainstorming session which is now open through 1pm on Thursday, May 28th, will enable the White House to hear your most important ideas relating to open government, including innovative approaches to policy, specific project suggestions, government-wide or agency-specific instructions, and any relevant examples and stories relating to law, policy, technology, culture, or practice.

We would like to ask you to participate by doing the following:

1. Go to http://opengov.ideascale.com/ to participate in the dialogue, and

2. Follow @ogovbrainstorm on Twitter to keep up with the highest rated ideas.

They are hashtagging things #ogov

But wait, there's more...
Sunlight Labs has announced Apps for America 2

I'm pleased to wave the green flag on Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. This is a development and visualization challenge to see who can come up with the best application and visualization for data from Data.gov. These are exciting times for us-- the walls between Government and Developers are starting to shrink, and we here in Sunlight Labs are terribly excited to get to work on doing great things with the data that's coming out. Government has made a move in the right direction-- now it is time for us to show them what we can do.

and in the UK at a grassroots level the Rewired State project has announced Rewired Parliament is coming up, along with many hacking events.

above info from Twitter - edsu, ideascale, citymark and rewiredstate

There are no comparable Canadian federal initiatives.

Nothing even close. The only thing even remotely along these lines is the internal-only IT Innovation Campaign.  (Which, don't get me wrong, is an amazing development - just not on the scale and without the public visibility and engagement of the Obama administration's initiatives.)

There are some municipal level activities, such as the recent Vancouver open city announcement (see it on YouTube being read into the record), but nothing on a national scale.

My tiny little group is trying to bring up a site with some data about the budget (StimulusWatch.ca), but just that is a huge challenge.  UPDATE 2010-10-18: This project is no longer active.  ENDUPDATE

We need Canadian open government leaders at all levels of government.  We can do some from the grassroots (as we just demonstrated at ChangeCamp Ottawa 2009), but we need our political leaders to embrace this vision.  Even if you don't care about the tech bits, here's the takeaway: opening up government and government data will create tremendous opportunities for technological innovation and efficiency, and increase the wealth and competitiveness of Canada.

Previously:
March 5, 2009  data.gov is coming - Vivek Kundra named US Federal CIO

a call to journalists to do serious reporting on content copying

Here is some Serious Business Reporting from the Globe

About 32 per cent of the computer software in Canada is pirated, contributing to losses of $1.2-billion (U.S.) in 2008 alone, according to a report from the Business Software Alliance (BSA). If Canada were to crack down and get its piracy rate to around 23 per cent – close to the U.S. rate of 20 per cent – it could result in 5,200 new jobs and contribute $2.7-billion to the country’s economy by 2011, according to a 2008 report from market research firm IDC.

Globe and Mail - Download Decade - New media, old rules - May 19, 2009

Wow: jobs, billions, Business Alliances, all very professional.
There's only one problem.  Those numbers are sh-t.  The RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and CRIA all report dire numbers for piracy and billions lost, numbers which they obtain by... making them up.

Seriously, they just pull them out of thin air.  I might as well say eliminating software piracy would cause Canada to have more pleasant summers and would increase the bison herd.  There's just as much evidence for that.

It is in the interest of industry associations to make digital content copying - which I might add is impossible to prevent technologically - to make this out to be some giant economy crushing disaster.  In the face of counter-evidence (tens of millions in ticket sales for the latest Star Trek, for example) their argument is that some imaginary amount of MORE money would be made, if not for the dread piracy gap.  This is complete, total, unscientific, evidence-free public relations nonsense.

I call on all serious journalists to follow the trail of these numbers from the industry advocacy organisations, do some investigation, and I guarantee you will find that they come from nowhere, they're simply made up.

Stop reporting these numbers as facts.  They're not.  They're basically idle speculation dressed up with scary numbers.

There are lots of real issues to report on, for example, incredibly complex international rights agreements that mean Canada almost always gets online content access later than and to a lesser extent than the United States, and archaic Crown Copyright and cost-recovery approaches in government that mean Canadians can't access their own digital data, paid for with public funds.

Google and the web of structured data

Google has announced it will be using (some) microformats and RDFa to enrich search results.  They call this Rich Snippets.

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it's as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags.

Official Google Webmaster Blog - Introducing Rich Snippets - May 12, 2009

O'Reilly Radar says

Moving toward the Semantic Web will allow our searching technologies to become more intelligent and will set the stage for the next revolution in which computing systems can become more aware of the "meaningfulness of data".

We've already seen a shift toward "semantic search": Google has already been augmenting search results with Google Maps, limited catalog searches, and more recent entries into the search market such as Amazon's A9 and the yet to be released Wolfram Alpha differentiate themselves by the structured data and content that can be extracted from a search result. We have yet to a see a compelling reason for web masters to place RDFa or microformats into a site to enable this semantic data to be mined until today, until Google provided a social incentive for site designers.

O'Reilly Radar - Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa - May 12, 2009

Google has a help file to get you started: Marking up structured data.

Incidentally, if you're thinking, "why didn't someone tell me this structured data thing was coming?" I should mention that actually I did try to tell people, whether it was in my presentation to Allen Press in 2007 (where I talked about the need for microformats and semantic enrichment) or in my keynote to NISO Discovery last year (where I talked specifically about Yahoo SearchMonkey using semantic information).

Previously:
September 8, 2008  semantic search thoughts

Wolfram Alpha and the web of structured data

The good news is, WolframAlpha can understand a query like "unemployment in Ottawa".

The bad news is, as you can see in the Result, that while it knows what data it needs to compute the answer, "(data not available)".

This is as clear an example of why we need open data as I can think of.  If you want your computers to start providing you with smarter answers, you have to give them better information to work with.

WolframAlpha provides two channels to try to address this problem: Contribute Structured Data and Suggest Data Sources.  You can also contribute individual facts, but that won't scale very well.

the Open City - the next driver for innovation?

Mayor Gregor Robertson and Coun. Andrea Reimer want the City of Vancouver to support open-source software and open standards.

They also want the city to make as much data as possible freely available to the public. Reimer will introduce a motion [PDF] next Tuesday (May 19) that would see the city endorse the principles of open source, open standards, and open data, as well as start work on publishing data on the Web using open standards.

In a press release issued today (May 14), Robertson said that an “open city” philosophy would help create new opportunities in the information-technology sector.

City of Vancouver set to back open source, open standards, open data - straight.com - May 14, 2009

via Twitter - Rob Giggey (Rob works at the City of Ottawa) - May 15, 2009

(I tried to find the Gregor Robertson press release referenced above, but I haven't been successful - can anyone point me to it?)

Toronto Mayor Miller has also announced toronto.ca/open (which still shows "under construction").

In Ottawa, supported by some City of Ottawa staff but not (yet?) endorsed as any kind of official policy, we're starting the open data discussion as part of ChangeCamp Ottawa.

What can you do as citizens and what can we do as libraries to enable the sharing of our civic data?  Is sharing civic data a next logical step for public libraries as enablers of the public space?

Previously:
May 5, 2009  Web APIs explained on CBC Spark - and Open Data Under Construction

Web APIs explained on CBC Spark - and Open Data Under Construction

(I almost wrote Spark CBC, since that's their Twitter name.)

Spark Episode 76 (audio link available directly in the post, as well as various podcast options)

At 22:02 or so in, they take on the challenge of explaining web APIs, or more specificially, they ask Jer Thorp to help walk them through the concept.  It's always interesting to hear the descriptions people use.  For example, I would generally say "machine-to-machine", which is probably way too abstract.  I also tend(ed) to describe APIs in the context of Service-Oriented Architecture, which probably confused the issue (and the audience).  I don't generally talk about computer programs communicating with other computer programs.

I think in general what's presented on the show is a pretty good explanation: websites are opening up their information using APIs, so they can leverage open innovation - outside developers.  We are a long long way from a completely interoperable web of standard APIs though.

Here's the Twitter-sized explanation I had proposed (taking quite a lot of my space to talk about how there wasn't enough space):

scilib: @sparkcbc I don't think that will fit in a tweet. Basically standard interfaces (APIs) allow data to flow between sites, which = mashups.

I would argue as well that web development has gotten sophisticated enough that, while APIs are ideal (at least if well constructed), you can actually get a lot by opening your data, which is the key first step.  Open data enables mashups, APIs just make mashups easier.  Open data means sharing the information your organisation has, out on the web - ideally your default becomes to share.

We're still in early days of open data.  The Guardian calls their approach "Data Store - Facts You Can Use".  I've written previously about the US Data.gov initiative, which currently has the world's simplest website (a giant box reading "coming soon"), but I think is supposed to launch this month.  It's similarly challenging to point to open data cities, because while the Twitter-enabled Toronto @MayorMiller announced toronto.ca/open at Mesh, it also reads simply "Under Construction".

What will be possible is mashups, visualizations, APIs, analysis and much more.

I believe the long term success of projects like StimulusWatch Canada and ChangeCamp Ottawa will depend on open data, and (eventually) on all levels of government having open APIs as well.

Which circles me around to the opening topic of the podcast, about whether online activism ("slacktivism") can actually translate into meaningful real-world activity.  The answer, I think, is tied in with the segment about lurking... the web is mostly lurk, only maybe 10% participate.  Some tiny fraction of those online participants might translate into offline actions.  Maybe one in a thousand?  But nevertheless, it does happen.

While I generally refuse to join these "click your support" Facebook groups (in part because I don't like FB much anyway), they can be low barrier entry points, in particular since so many Canadians (who may otherwise not be very social-web enabled) are in FB.

The kind of canonical Canadian example is the Fair Copyright for Canada group, with its (at time of posting) 90,071 members.  It was brought up in the House of Commons.  It did translate into some offline activism.  And the sheer numbers did, I think, get both attention and generate concern for the party proposing the bill.  There are still lots of issues with that number.  Lots of people around the world care about copyright.  For all I know, that's 81,000 copyright-concerned Americans, and 9000 Canadians.  Such is the global web.

I do think "feel-good clicks" are a bit dangerous, they give you the perception of action without actually doing anything.  I've long been concerned by this kinda of almost mystical power ascribed to online organising.  In my review of Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, I said

Don't get me wrong, I think the Internet has a role to play in reasoned discourse. A small role. A useful tool for pointing attention to falsehoods and referencing inconvenient truths. But electronic communications have a fatal allure of virtual action.

Concerned about the environment? No need to go outside and walk in the woods, or clean up a polluted lot in your neighbourhood, or knock on your representative's door and explain the urgency of your position.

No, instead you can just fire off an email, write a blog posting, and then turn up the air conditioning and the lights and stretch out on the couch and read a good book.

That being said, I have myself translating the online into real world action on a number of occasions.  As I wrote in the StimulusWatch blog, it was an online posting that led me to an event that started a chain leading to the creation of the project.

That same event, and online chatter about a local conference, also led me (as partially outlined in my posting Making government data visible - and is Change coming to Ottawa?) to ChangeCamp Ottawa, a very real event happening at City Hall on May 16, which I have been helping to organise, an event which of course has a substantial online presence including a social network for the specific event, as well as being part of the larger ChangeCamp group on Facebook.

Similarly, a local news article in a free neighbourhood paper (yes, in print, with ink and everything) about a small garden/park space led me to a Facebook group which led me to an offline meeting which led me to create http://www.savethegarden.ca/

And of course, on a much more spectacular scale, the Obama campaign used (and continues to use) online organising as a tool, but they were very clear that the purpose of online was to drive a very extensive (and successful) ground game, people talking and knocking on doors, calling on phones, out in the real world.

So I think when it works best, the online world leads you offline, and offline leads you back online.  It's an ongoing discussion that flows across place and time.

Discussions enable meetings, data enables websites, websites enable more meetings, meetings come to consensus on APIs, APIs enable mashups... round and round it goes.

Google visualizes open government data

Official Google Blog - Adding Search Power to Public Data

We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data. So for example, when comparing Santa Clara county data to the national unemployment rate, it becomes clear not only that Santa Clara's peak during 2002-2003 was really dramatic, but also that the recent increase is a bit more drastic than the national rate

There is also a video about how it works.

via ResourceShelf

So Google, whom do I talk to about adding Canadian data?

Talis hosting linked data in their Connected Commons

I have talked about Amazon's initiative in this area, but in looking back I see it was a bit buried in a larger discussion about library roles

Data is very different from journal articles - it lacks a standard format, and the resources it can consume - into the petabytes make it a daunting task for any organisation or set of organisations to take on.  I really admire the practical work that Amazon is doing with Public Datasets (thanks I suspect in large part to the vision of Deepak Singh).  The most practical things we can do right now is share what data we have, think about what open data will mean, and try to get more and more data openly shared.

This brings me to an email discussion I had with Leigh Dodds about Talis Connected Commons - thanks are due to Leigh for reminding me to look at the Talis approach.

Talis Connected Commons itself is about fostering the Linked Data community, by providing a rich hosting service:

For qualifying data sets, Talis will provide, through the Talis Platform:

• Free hosting of up to 50 million RDF triples and 10Gb of content
• Access to data access services that operate on that data, including data retrieval and text search
• Free access to a public SPARQL endpoint for each dataset.

I asked Leigh how this fits with the Talis Project Xiphos initiative, and he explained that Xiphos is a more focussed initiative around "data in the education, library and publishing sectors", whereas Connected Commons is about any kind of data.

Talis, like Amazon, understands that a modern business is about fostering an ecosystem, a combination of shared data and services that can be used as a platform for software development and business development.

illuminate the government's operations with open data - Sunshine Week

The time has changed, the times have changed, the days are getting brighter - what better time for Sunshine Week.

Sunshine Week is a [United States] national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public's right to know.

March 15-21, 2009

They have a blog, Facebook, Twitter and all that groovy stuff.  I couldn't find a declared tag, so I'm just using the rather long "sunshineweek".

Through their Twitter I find an interesting article from The Economist - Track my tax dollars.

THE taxpayers do their part, and faithfully fling their hard-earned treasure into the gaping public maw. Surely they should be allowed to know what happens to it. So why not put government spending online?

This also gives me a chance to link to a great TED video of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the WorldWideWeb) talking about "linked data".  He talks about the importance of sharing data because you can build so much on raw data.  The data part starts at about 3:58 in, and the government data specific part starts about 9:46 in.



I also very much liked his simple message of "Raw Data Now!" - my experience with Linked Data, at least at Open Repositories 2008, was that it very rapidly descends into obscure discussions about the philosophy of data representations (e.g. "do we point at the data, or the metadata about the data?"). The most important thing is to just get the raw data up, and then we can work to have wonderful semantic markup things once we actually have something to work with.

Tim B-L video via ReadWriteWeb via TED

ICSTI 2009 - Managing Data for Science

The ICSTI 2009 conference has a great lineup of speakers on its programme.  (I can't claim any responsibility for this, since while my organisation has helped with planning the conference, my small personal contribution has just been a few suggestions about the web presence.)

Many of the names you may recognize from enthusiastic blog postings of mine, so as you can imagine, I'm looking forward to going.  Speakers mentioned in this blog (with a link to the relevant posting) include

• Francine Berman (ARL library escience theme presentations - October 9, 2006)
• Richard Boulderstone (BioMed Central OA event presentations, BMC blog - March 7, 2007)
• Jan Brase (system for easy access to sci info using DOIs - Jan Brase - June 11 - IATUL 2007 - June 11, 2007)
• Lee Dirks (data-driven science - Lee Dirks - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy - June 22, 2007)
• Liz Lyon (presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation - March 31, 2006)
• Paul Uhlir (the concepts of open science and information commons - September 8, 2006)

The event will be June 9-10, 2009 at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.  Early registration ends March 31.  I think it will be a great opportunity to discuss science data, e-science, and the roles that our libraries can play.  I am using tag icsti2009.  I hope to see many of you there.

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