Encouraging open data usage by commercial developers: Report
From the post:
The second Share-PSI workshop was very different from the first. Apart from presentations in two short plenary sessions, the majority of the two days was spent in facilitated discussions around specific topics. This followed the success of the bar camp sessions at the first workshop, that is, sessions proposed and organised in an ad hoc fashion, enabling people to discuss whatever subject interests them.
Each session facilitator was asked to focus on three key questions:
- What X is the thing that should be done to publish or reuse PSI?
- Why does X facilitate the publication or reuse of PSI?
- How can one achieve X and how can you measure or test it?
This report summarises the 7 plenary presentations, 17 planned sessions and 7 bar camp sessions. As well as the Share-PSI project itself, the workshop benefited from sessions lead by 8 other projects. The agenda for the event includes links to all papers, slides and notes, with many of those notes being available on the project wiki. In addition, the #sharepsi tweets from the event are archived, as are a number of photo albums from Makx Dekkers,
Peter Krantz and José Luis Roda. The event received a generous write up
on the host’s Web site (in Portuguese). The spirit of the event is captured in this video by Noël Van Herreweghe of CORVe.
To avoid confusion, PSI in this context means Public Sector Information, not Published Subject Identifier (PSI).
Amazing coincidence that the W3C has smudged yet another name. You may recall the W3C decided to confuse URIs and IRIs in its latest attempt to re-write history, calling both the the acronym, URI:
Within this specification, the term URI refers to a Universal Resource Identifier as defined in [RFC 3986] and extended in
[RFC 2987][RFC 3987] with the new name IRI. The term URI has been retained in preference to IRI to avoid introducing new names for concepts such as “Base URI” that are defined or referenced across the whole family of XML specifications. (Corrected the RFC listing as shown.) (XQuery and XPath Data Model 3.1 , N. Walsh, J. Snelson, Editors, W3C Candidate Recommendation (work in progress), 18 December 2014, http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-xpath-datamodel-31-20141218/ . Latest version available at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-datamodel-31/.)
Interesting discussion but I would pay very close attention to market demand, perhaps I should say, commercial market demand, before planning a start-up based on government data. There is unlimited demand for free data or even better, free enhanced data, but that should not be confused with enhanced data that can be sold to support a start-up on an ongoing basis.
To give you an idea of the uncertainly of conditions for start-ups relying on open data, let me quote the final bullet points of this article:
- There is a lack of knowledge of what can be done with open data which is hampering uptake.
- There is a need for many examples of success to help show what can be done.
- Any long term re-use of PSI must be based on a business plan.
- Incubators/accelerators should select projects to support based on the business plan.
- Feedback from re-users is an important component of the ecosystem and can be used to enhance metadata.
- The boundary between what the public and private sectors can, should and should not do do needs to be better defined to allow the public sector to focus on its core task and businesses to invest with confidence.
- It is important to build an open data infrastructure, both legal and technical, that supports the sharing of PSI as part of normal activity.
- Licences and/or rights statements are essential and should be machine readable. This is made easier if the choice of licences is minimised.
- The most valuable data is the data that the public sector already charges for.
- Include domain experts who can articulate real problems in hackathons (whether they write code or not).
- Involvement of the user community and timely response to requests is essential.
- There are valid business models that should be judged by their effectiveness and/or social impact rather than financial gain.
Just so you know, that last point:
There are valid business models that should be judged by their effectiveness and/or social impact rather than financial gain.
that is not a business model, unless you have renewal financing from some source other than by financial gain. That is a charity model where you are the object of the charity.