[TriZPUG] TriZPUG Digest, Vol 64, Issue 10

Wed Aug 21 15:10:37 CEST 2013

Hi Chris and everyone reading this listerv.

I spoke with Colin yesterday about his experience sharing what he knows about open data around the Triangle with Trizpug. Having been a member of this group in a number of roles first as a plone/zope evangelist and now and open data program manager at the City of Raleigh I know I will be speaking to a more informed crowd than what I usually speak to. My first post was somewhere back in Plone 2.5 days. I asked how to skin a sub folder. I was told if I had to ask I probably should not be trying to do that. The respondent was right. I broke out the Plone bible at the time and started digging into Plone/Zope architecture and did eventually figure out how to do it.

The short answer to sum up Chris's notes on RDF, the semantic web, ontologies and open data in practice is this: open data is a rapidly evolving movement and we iterate what the definition of open data is based on lessons learned. The semantic web never really caught on as it still relied on humans to create and tag text via RDF. RDF as Chris Metcalf from Socrata noted, is making a come-back. 

What my presentation will show is how an open data initiative evolves and how Open Raleigh achieved some traction through developing a policy and strategy and linking the program to public events. Our engagement level is high.

That being said, winning a PTI award for having an open data portal is like saying we are the best of the worst. The open data environment suffers from a lack of UX thinking to make data truly usable to a larger audience (folks outside this group for example). 

What Josh write is an excellent snapshot in time of where we were two years ago. Most of what he wrote, the principles, still work today. I will touch on privacy, usability, the emergence of "my data" and the boondoggle of transparency. http://opengovdata.io/ 

I am hoping this is an interactive session as I certainly don't have all the answers, nor does anyone else. I am looking forward to a lively collaborative session.

Jason Hare
Open Data Program Manager
City of Raleigh - Information Technology
One Exchange Plaza, Suite 900
Post Office Box 590
Raleigh, North Carolina 27602-0590
P:  919-996-3599  |  M: 919-323-2767
E:  jason.hare at raleighnc.gov
W:  data.raleighnc.gov

IT Customer Support Center 919-996-6000

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: RDF and Open Data (was Re: TriZPUG Digest, Vol 64, Issue
      6) (Eric Leary)
   2. Raleigh and Coworking (Chris Calloway)
   3. Pyramid Sprint (Chris Calloway)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 22:48:37 -0400
From: Eric Leary <eric.leary at gmail.com>
To: "Triangle (North Carolina) Zope and Python Users Group"
	<trizpug at python.org>
Subject: Re: [TriZPUG] RDF and Open Data (was Re: TriZPUG Digest, Vol
	64, Issue 6)
Message-ID:
	<CABWRpxAo0=kjN1wDQRBudt65EU8E5E+yTNpRYqGDvBKFLWkn0w at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

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/SPA
> RQL>
>
> 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-gover
> nment->
>
> 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 
> ______________________________**_________________
> TriZPUG mailing list
> TriZPUG at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/**mailman/listinfo/trizpug<http://mail.python.o
> rg/mailman/listinfo/trizpug> http://trizpug.org is the Triangle Zope 
> and Python Users Group
>

--
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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Message: 2
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 00:25:11 -0400
From: Chris Calloway <cbc at unc.edu>
To: "Triangle (North Carolina) Zope and Python Users Group"
	<trizpug at python.org>
Subject: [TriZPUG] Raleigh and Coworking
Message-ID: <52144127.9 at unc.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Do you live in Raleigh? Are you curious about coworking?

Slip your name in the basket here:

http://bullpenraleigh.launchrock.com/

--
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

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 00:38:50 -0400
From: Chris Calloway <cbc at unc.edu>
To: "Triangle (North Carolina) Zope and Python Users Group"
	<trizpug at python.org>
Subject: [TriZPUG] Pyramid Sprint
Message-ID: <5214445A.3010505 at unc.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

I only found out about this after a couple of friends started tweeting from Germany last week...

Report out: 
https://github.com/Pylons/pyramid/wiki/Pyramid-and-Pylons-Project-Summer-Sprint-2013-Wrap-Up

Pics or it didn't happen: 
https://plus.google.com/115189453091926671125/posts/KewEQzfB84p

--
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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