Decentralised Open Data for world citizens

Use the link to access the full text article written by Christophe Guéret, Victor de Boer, and Anna Bon of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A presentation on the topic was also recently given by Christophe Guéret at the conference “Using Open Data policy modeling, citizen empowerment, data journalism” which took place June 19-20, 2012. The abstract reads as follows: “Open Data production and consumption is currently considered essentially through access to centralised data servers. This short position paper highlights the shortcoming of this approach for world citizens having a limited access to network infrastructures and cites the work done at the VU University Amsterdam (VUA) to tackle this issue... In a lot of contexts, for example in the specific case of developing countries, access to network infrastructure is limited. Citizens may not have the reliable access to the Internet nor a stable electricity grid needed to operate the applications that use of the open data they want to consume. To ensure access for all citizens to Open Data published by the government as well as individuals, access patterns have to be decentralised, switching from a central read/write point to several distributed ones... At VUA several initiatives were taken to realise decentralised data publication and consumption to empower people living in developing countries. Among the different projects, the following are of particular relevance: [1] RadioMarché: a voice-accessible market information system in rural Africa [2] Foroba Blon, decentralised open data for community radios in rural Africa [3] SemanticXO: implementation of a data management layer for the XO distributed by One Laptop per Child (OLPC). This data management stack allows for the publication and sharing of data directly from the XO, without having to rely on centralised storage. In the following sections we give describe examples of decentralised data publication in a development context.”