#ioe12 Open Data

On the heals of open access and open science comes open data in the Openness in Education course. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, gave a Ted talk about “The next web of open, linked data”. When he wrote the code for HTML he did so because he was frustrated by the lack of consistency. He says that his idea was hard to explain at the time. I tend to think that someone who can come up with the idea that became the web is someone worth listening to. He now wants data on the web, not just documents. Specifically linked data. The web is diverse and data is diverse. He wants raw data that is open and accessible to anyone who can access the internet. I had to chuckle when he had the audience saying “Raw data now!”, what a great concept, especially after learning about open science. I can certainly see where having all sorts of data available would be extremely useful for forwarding the creation of knowledge.  Having data open can bridge disciplines, as long as everyone is doing their bit.

The Wikipedia page about open data listed some of the major sources of open data. Most are in science and government.  www.data.gov is a great example. I can easily get lost on the site from the amount of information contained there. Interestingly, while I was teaching my online geology and the environment class yesterday I had come across open data on dams in the world. We happen to be discussing hydroelectric dams this week. So I was able to link to the site and show everyone an image someone had made from the data. What a wonderful way to be able to connect the learning of a topic to the real world!

There are arguments for and against open data, but I had a hard time seeing the arguments as real obstacles. Some of the arguments for open data on Wikipedia included:

• data belongs to the people
• if public money was used it should be public
• facts can not be legally copyrighted
• rate of discovery in science is increased

There are not as many statements against it that seem to have any meat. They included:

• privacy concerns
• it’s time consuming and costly to collect and manage data.

Open Data Commons lists the various licensing options with data. They include:

• Odbl- an open database license with attribution and share alike
• Open data commons attribution license
• PDDL- public domain dedication and license

Terms do not seem as intuitive as the CC system for me.

The article on where to find open data was very useful and included options such as CKAN (comprehensive knowledge archive network), infochimps.org (which is now also offering a platform), DBpedia, Freebase and more. It seems that the idea behind open data is spreading as with all other open topics.  The NY Times even has linked open data of news vocabularies.

http://linkeddata.org/ is pretty in depth with the technical aspects of linked data, which unfortunately is beyond my technical knowledge. In fact most of the open data sites are a little beyond me. My database knowledge is pretty limited and the tutorials quickly moved beyond my knowledge base. Maybe my next learning adventure should be on databases.

Overall open data makes sense to me, just as open science and open access does. I will conclude with a personal reason why open science, data, and access are important to me. My mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in her early 30’s. She is 63 now. If we can increase the ability for people to connect to the data they need to respond to problems such as Parkinson’s disease, maybe someone would not have to live for 30 years with a degenerative disease. I want to see progress in my lifetime so that my children will be able to live in a world where problems can be identified and solved quickly so that someone will not have to live there life as my mother has had to.
Off to the next topic...open teaching!