[TriZPUG] RDF and Open Data (was Re: TriZPUG Digest, Vol 64, Issue 6)

[Eric Leary]

The two most recent posts from Manu Sporny <http://manu.sporny.org> are
where I left the bunny trail on Microdata and RDF etc. this weekend. I
hadn't heard of JSON-LD before (second post) and anything JSON sounds more
tractable than anything XML at this point in my personal psychedelic shack
I call my mind. Mileage may vary.

Since I still have to scrape my first web page (thanks to Cris Ewing at the
Python Web Programming Bootcamp for showing me how) my opinion doesn't
count for much. I do make sure tables on my inventory application can be be
downloaded as csv (thanks to Calvin and a productive project night at
Caktus.)

My first real landing point with RDF was a primer by, of all people, Josh
Tauberer from 2008 <http://www.rdfabout.com/intro/>.  He seems to have
cooled a bit sense then. He does point out in his Open Data book that the
Australian government has specified RDF in its Open Data policy, though he
expresses circumspection as to whether it will finally obtain traction.

The SPARQL book recently released by O'Reilly caught my attention because
it turns out the author, Bob DuCharme <http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog/> works
for a company that moved across the street from Web Assign, Top Quadrant.
(I was looking for work....maybe if I shamelessly shill on our listserv
......)

urq



On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 3:16 PM, Chris Calloway <cbc at unc.edu> wrote:

> On 8/19/2013 6:24 PM, Eric Leary wrote:
>
>> Colin warmed every one up perfectly last month to a lot of the same
>> material thats in Josh's book - so I think we are ready for a
>> presentation that gets a little closer to the realities of
>> implementation for coders. Recently I've gone down the rabbit hole on
>> RDF, RDFa, and JASON-LD in trying to understand their future role or
>> rejection. Are they dead, or do they just smell funny?
>>
>
> Open Data has breathed new life into RDF via two developments:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**SPARQL<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**GeoSPARQL<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoSPARQL>
>
> My co-worker in the office next door does SPARQL for metadata ontologies.
>
> I have my doubts about whether ontologies are ever going to be useful,
> however. If disciplines can't agree about metadata and vocabularies, who is
> going to arbitrate metadata translation? Does having a Russian to English
> dictionary translate War and Peace into English on its own?
>
> I've never believed in the semantic web.
>
>  Chris and James were able to point out a lot of paradoxes in principle
>> and in day to day trade craft that made me realize how naive I am about
>> the "power of open data" and "open anything."
>>
>
> Just to be open, things I pointed out to Eric:
>
> 1) Data liability is an obstacle to openness. If I provide data, and you
> provide a service on top of that data, and then your service fails because
> the data I provided you were faulty, am I liable to you even if I were
> providing the best available data in good faith? Many open data providers
> will post a policy that tries to wash off any liability. But the law may
> not recognize such policies. If open data is "use at your own risk," can
> open data every be useful for public safety? For investment decisions?
> Aren't those the kind of things we need open data for, the things that
> matter?
>
> 2) Personal privacy is an obstacle to openness and openness is an obstacle
> to personal privacy. Data about people generally needs to be anonymized in
> order protect individual privacy. Yet calls for openness have gone so far
> that the personal names, home addresses, home phone numbers, and *salaries*
> of state government employees are available through open data services
> (luckily NC teachers and university employees have somehow been overlooked
> in this particular boondoggle). I can freely look up how much you paid for
> your house and how much you had to borrow for a mortgage. I can look up
> your political party affiliation, your age, race, gender, home address, and
> which elections you voted in over the last several years.
>
> 3) Governments hide public data through third party vendor access. Some
> government agencies may hold public but have no legal or budgetary mandate
> to help you find or access it. There's an opportunity there for agencies to
> make money giving private companies the raw public data, and then the
> private companies will charge you for organized search and access to public
> data. Arrest records are public data but you'll need to fork over some
> dollars to private companies to look at this data, just enough to
> discourage it in most cases. Sometimes companies can get exclusive rights
> to distribute public data.
>
> 4) Governments will only go so far to allow access to data. The more
> valuable or politically sensitive data is, the more likely it is to be
> "classified" even if paid for by tax dollars. Governments also respond to
> business interests to suppress access to or defund generation of data,
> particularly scientific data. It's easy to access data from successful
> clinical trials. But it's not easy to access data from unsuccessful
> clinical trials. Even when the unsuccessful trials outnumber the successful
> ones by orders of magnitude for a particular drug.
>
> 5) Governments can and do own intellectual property which they can and do
> decide to keep proprietary rather than openly license, going so far as to
> generate revenue streams with proprietary licensing. There have been bills
> in front of Congress, so far fortunately unsuccessful, to restrict access
> to nationally financed weather data to only certain companies such that you
> would have to pay those companies to get weather reports. Most state
> university systems operate intellectual property offices to capture patents
> and copyrights for royalties.
>
> 6) Providing access to public data is an expensive public service.
> Archiving data long term is super expensive. Cataloging and classifying
> data is labor intensive. Who pays for it? If it comes from access fees,
> does that provide unfair advantages to those who can afford access over
> those who can't but who did help pay for creating the data? When financial
> times are tight and just keeping the public safety net patched is a
> challenge compared to other interests, is open data all that important?
> What if you visited the public library, and all the books were piled on a
> table without Dewey decimal numbers and there were no card catalog? What if
> there were no public library? Data requires the online equivalent of
> libraries and librarians. Is public data an essential governmental service?
>
> We have this recent and rather toothless presidential executive order:
>
> http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-**press-office/2013/05/09/**
> executive-order-making-open-**and-machine-readable-new-**
> default-government-<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/09/executive-order-making-open-and-machine-readable-new-default-government->
>
> I'm witnessing the speed of at least one government agency's response to
> this order, however, and know it will be years in the making if at all.
> There are so many silos within that have to agree to all manner of
> standards to make this work. There are so many offerings of standards and
> methods to implement standards from each silo. Every department already has
> a half-assed skunk-works of an open data project already in operation. And
> the management style for most agencies making these decisions on how to
> "come together" is via consensus (so no one gets blamed for bad decisions).
> Having to make the decisions and then implement them also are generally not
> the within the agencies missions, so not only are the decisions by
> consensus, but the implementations are pretty much volunteer work. The
> public at large would be amazed to know just how much government function
> is accomplished via volunteer work by mid to low level government employees
> in addition to their regular jobs.
>
> But it's a start. The real open data movement is occurring at individual
> municipal levels, such as what the City of Raleigh is doing, and also
> occurring by private uplift, such as Code for America in Durham. There's
> also an overlap in what people consider open data and crowd sourced data.
> Open data is more about unlocking access to already existing government
> data.
>
> --
> Sincerely,
>
> Chris Calloway http://nccoos.org/Members/cbc
> office: 3313 Venable Hall   phone: (919) 599-3530
> mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599
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-- 
Science is the establishment of expectations.  Art is the manipulation of
expectations. Justice is the fulfillment of expectations.  Expectations are
patterns of mind.
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