observing the observatory :-)

Greetings David and all.
Thanks again for the webcall earlier today, nice meeting everyone
Just to finish off a few thoughts and kick off some discussions perhaps ...

- What are we observing? First we should identify what  accessible
data.information/knowledge sources
are there, and evaluate their quality to some extent (accuracy, currency
etc)
what are we looking at? this could be an important evaluation task of the
open web (is the web really open? how much data is open? how meaningful
and querieable are the open datasets out there>)


- So we evaluate against competence questions, such as whatever is it
that we (the users of the system) want to observe, Be it behaviours, events,
correlations, occurrences, trends  in the social, scientific, technical
spheres
All public datasets should be accesible and capable of answering at least
in part some questions.
How many politicians are being arrested for corruption worldwide everyday?
Is there any trend? Homicides? Suicides? Zombies? Assaults? Poisonings?
Diseases? It should be
possible to answer the question by aggregating the datasets in real time
from t relevant authorities worldwide, if these were uptoscratch and
published accessibly with shared schemas. There could be stats about
everything. Rapes in India yes, but what about in Turkey, Albania, Italy,
the Usa, Africa  and elsewhere. Trade, governance data of all institutions
could - should? be
available in real time and meaningfully  'queriable'.

A web observatory should observe the web of data, help evaluate its quality
and its usefulness through the delivery of generally intelligent web
services :-)

Next is inevitably scope. Is there any scoping done already? I am
for including everything (I can explain why but not here, please consider
this
as given)

By soliciting user input from the widest possible user base, it should be
possible to capture a large variety of queries to see to what extent one
can ask the web general everyday questions and get
useful answers,  even using generic search engines like Google.

I do it everyday, with varying degrees of success, and I am convinced that
through the focus of a group like this, it is possible to improve the
quality of
the outcome of general queries. Could this be a possible goal? (discuss and
if ok add to charter draft pls!)

In the meantime, I am interested to learn about subsets of reality, at the
many observatories which focus on something specific , so will watch out
for those

Accidentally, I only remembered after the call that indeed my own project
is an observatory too! (had completely escaped me temporarily, it's
openaccessmonitor.org also  presented at DR12 in Oxford)

So, here it goes a first rant that also serves as introduction P-)
Thanks for the consideration

Keep up the good work


PDM

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 2:05 PM, David De Roure
<david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk>wrote:

> Dear Observers I am pleased to confirm that our April Teleconference will
> be on
> Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM London (15:00-16:00 UTC). We've
> booked a webex conference for flexibility in joining by phone or also
> online for
> those who wish – details below (including links to toll free numbers etc).
> Thanks - looking forward [...]
>
>
>
> ----------
>
> This post sent on Web Observatory Community Group
>
>
>
> 'W3C Web Observatory Group Teleconference confirmed for Wed April 24 4-5pm
> London time'
>
>
> http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory/2013/04/02/w3c-web-observatory-group-april-teleconference-confirmed-for-wednesday-april-24-2013/
>
>
>
> Learn more about the Web Observatory Community Group:
>
> http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory
>
>
>
>