Decentralised Open Data for World Citizens

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-27

Summary:

“Christophe Guéret from VU University Amsterdam presents “Decentralised Open Data for World Citizens” at the Open Data Workshop for policy modeling, citizen empowerment, data journalism. The seminar is organized by W3C in the framework of the Crossover project. The venue is at the European Commission’s Albert Borschette Conference Center, in Brussels. The EC and many national governments are currently publishing open data and supporting initiatives in this direction. Especially the combination with social media data seems to become a hot topic... As we watch the geospatial distributions of open data over the world, we see initiatives in Europe and North-America, and a few in South-America. The African map is very empty, with only one small dot in Tanzania. Will this be a second wave of widening the digital divide? Expectedly the interlinking of so many new sources of data wil boost the knowledge economies in the rich and developed world. How will developing countries ever catch up the information society, if they don’t have the infrastructure to access and process all these data? Besides, open data are still very textual, and mainly written in english or a few other world languages. What about the groups that don’t have a tradition of written text? Again these people will stay at the underprivileged side of the digital divide. Is it possible to start linking data from the very beginning, as soon as they are being produced, as is happening now via innovative voice-based systems and newly developed ASR and TTS systems for very small and under resourced local languages…Are there ideas, how we can decentralise? The presentation by Christophe Guéret and others, from VU Amsterdam is different from others in this workshop. It is not only socially engaged, but very practical. It talks about real people having real problems. It refers to linking non-existing data, voice-based data that is currently being collected from rural communities in Mali and neighboring countries. Is it too early to talk about linking data when people don’t even have an internet connection? On the contrary, in this paper the authors argue that linked data principles can be applied from the very beginning. The Semantic XO, is developed for ‘one laptop per child’ (OLPC) project, so that children can share and produce data while playing educative games and start creating content in a creative social space. The linked market data from farmers in Mali is an example of local trading activity, that is relevant in the local context, but can be linked with new initiatives in other regions, it is voice-based, and adapted for mobile phones, and it has the potential to connect the farmers to other trading spaces and potential customers… This presentation is different from other topics discussed here, such as legal issues, huge datasets, governments informing citizens. The initiative presented here is the first one that tackles the problem from the grassroots in developing countries, from the farmers and the school children in remote rural areas. It is not too early to start here…”

Link:

http://worldplantage.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/decentralised-open-data-for-world-citizens/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.policies oa.comment oa.lod oa.events oa.crowd oa.presentations oa.social_media oa.geo oa.audio oa.africa oa.lay oa.north_america oa.south_america oa.w3c oa.europe oa.government oa.south

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

06/27/2012, 20:48

Date published:

06/27/2012, 21:09