Re: Civic apps and Linked Data

On 6/26/13 11:02 AM, Sands Alden Fish wrote:
> Alvaro, it's a very good question!
>
> At MIT Libraries, we're currently working on a proof of concept to 
> model geotagged accesses to our research and how it connects with the 
> parts of the world the research is about (to see if the people who can 
> benefit from it are reading it, and hopefully improve that connection).
>
> See here <http://www.sandsfish.com/blog/?p=120> for some of my very 
> early attempts at modeling Africa from LOD sources (using GeoNames 
> lookup as a start).
>
> And this is a high level summary 
> <http://www.sandsfish.com/blog/?p=124> and short interview about our 
> goals.
>
> We want to use LOD about the countries in question to pull in more 
> context about both the areas that are seeing research as well as 
> enriching the metadata around research with the same data.  Of course 
> we would like to go further than this and be able to link more and 
> more relevant entities to this graph and ideally have an LOD source 
> that describes specific issues around the globe.

Remember, you can make much cleaner and purpose specific data in a 
spreadsheet that's merged with the LOD cloud via Google's Open Refine. 
Of course, you can also do this by hand etc..

This is just another good Linked Data dog-fooding exercise where 
existing productivity tools aid the process. It's really quite an easy 
and pleasurable exercise :-)

>
> I would love to hear from anyone who knows of data sets that may help. 
>  I am also, like you, curious to hear any other civic use cases for 
> the use of this technology.

What do you want to know about Africa? I ask because "I'm currently 
embarking on an EDA project to build a graph of currently relevant data 
about the African continent, it's countries and cities." doesn't make 
the details clear enough etc..

Links:

1. 
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1uRVwifs4Roy6rj0OEDAPwpaUVAWMpx2BpCbFfPQ 
-- Google Fusion Table (which you import into a Google Spreadshet en 
route to Google Refine re. LOD cloud meshing)

2. http://bit.ly/17eOuHi -- PivotViewer report based on DBpedia-Live 
(this can evolve inline with additional Linked Data about African 
countries etc..).


Kingsley
>
>
> - Sands Fish
> - Senior Software Engineer / Data Scientist
> - MIT Libraries
> - sands@mit.edu
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* alvaro.graves@gmail.com [alvaro.graves@gmail.com] on behalf of 
> Alvaro Graves [alvaro@graves.cl]
> *Sent:* Wednesday, June 26, 2013 10:03 AM
> *To:* Linked Data community
> *Subject:* Civic apps and Linked Data
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> A few days ago I attended ABRELATAM'13 an unconference focused on Open 
> Data in Latin America. I proposed a session about Open Data + Linked 
> Data to discuss how semantics and LOD in general can help government 
> and civi organizations. I want to share the main ideas that emerged 
> from the conversation:
>
> - SW/LOD sounds really cool and the direction where thing should move.
> - However there are many technical aspects that remain unsolved
> - Since for many people having a relatively good solution using CSV, 
> JSON, etc. is easier, they don't want to use SW/LOD because it is an 
> overkill and too complicated.
>
> So my question is: Why we don't see lots of civic apps using Linked 
> Data? Where are the SW activists? Why we haven't been able to 
> demonstrate to the hacker community the benefits of using semantic 
> technologies? Is it because they are hard to use? They don't scale 
> well in many cases (as a googled pointed out)? Are we too busy working 
> in academia/businesses?
>
> I know very few civic apps using semantic technologies and I don't 
> think I have seen anyone that has made real impact in any country. I 
> would love if you can prove me wrong and if we can discuss how can we 
> involve more activists and hackers into the SW/LOD community.
>
>
> Alvaro Graves-Fuenzalida
> Web: http://graves.cl - Twitter: @alvarograves


-- 

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