Today, Open Data is an imperative. Government data, research data, and data from various other fields must be freely accessible and reusable – of course within the limits of legitimate interests of privacy and secrecy. Open Data provides value for democracy and for the economy: Open Data furthers participation, increases transparency, opens up new business opportunities, helps facilitate decision making and drives the app we use every day. To be open, data must be findable, interoperable, accessible and reusable. Free reuse implies that there are no legal, economic or technical barriers to free access – the totality of a dataset needs to be available for download or accessible through an API. Government and research data are the result of administrative or research activities that are completely or often largely financed by public funds. They deal with issues of public interest. It therefore seems legitimate to open the resulting datasets to the public, so that the data can be exploited in new, fruitful ways that were not originally envisioned. As datasets are non-rivalrous goods, multiple usages do not diminish their value, quite to the contrary! With these multiple usages of data in mind, Tim Berners-Lee has devised his five-star maturity model that posits that the most valuable form of open data is linked open data. Linked data allows data users to concentrate their efforts on the analysis and the exploitation of the data by greatly reducing the effort required to re-capture and to re-aggregate the data for every new purpose. Thus, linked data is a modest extra investment made by data producers or data holders for the greater benefit of all potential and real data users. As data can be put to a variety of uses, it is impossible to foresee or plan for them from the outset. New questions trigger creative reuses of existing data, and serendipity leads to data being exploited in novel ways. However, data are typically created with a particular intention and for a specific purpose. And the context of their original production matters; data cannot be combined at will, for if we do, we risk misguided interpretations and erroneous applications. It is therefore crucial to make data available in a form that preserves enough information about their original context, permitting informed re-use by third parties. Furthermore, it is indispensable that the data be made available in a form that facilitates their combination. Linked open data is the state-of-the-art approach to achieve this. However, to fully exploit its potential, we need to foster cooperation across organizations and sectors even in areas where collaboration has rarely taken place. Besides aligning data models and providing the technical infrastructure, coordination is needed in various areas to help organizations acquire the necessary capacity and to foster the required skills among their workforce. In order to close these gaps, the opendata.ch association has created a linked open data working group. It is open to everyone who is willing to support concerted efforts to promote linked data in Switzerland, not only by calling upon data providers to make an extra effort to facilitate the re-use of their data, but also by enabling cooperation among various stakeholders, and by empowering people interested in using linked open data. Each of the articles of this thematic issue of SocietyByte illustrates one or several of the “missing links” in the world of the semantic web that need our attention if we want to create a flourishing linked data ecosystem. We wish you an exciting and insightful reading.
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The goal of an innovation platform is ambitious. It is not just about realising a technical platform, or connecting complementary technologies such as the Internet of Things, Big Data and Cloud. Other projects do that too. Smart City Innovation means that the platform, or new applications and services based on the platform, provide real added value for society and for the actors in the city – residents, visitors, private companies and the public administration. To achieve this, the platform must be open, both in terms of the integration of other data sources and the access of third parties to the data (keyword: open data), naturally in compliance with data protection. In the urban environment, the integration of open public authority data is of particular interest. The project benefits from the fact that more and more authorities are following this trend and publishing their data on open data portals – in Switzerland, for example, on opendata.swiss, but the city of Zurich is also one of the pioneers in this field. CPaaS.io will go one step further here and also make the relevant data available as Linked Data. This means that the data is semantically annotated and also provided with metadata, e.g. on the provenance and quality of the data. Only this enables a simplified machine integration and use of the data in further applications. This can be used during large events, for example: In which direction do streams of visitors move? How has public transport been adapted to the current situation? How is the system reacting to dangerous situations, accidents, weather conditions, etc.? In order to identify beneficial applications for society, to implement them in the project, and thus to be able to validate the benefits of the platform, the involvement of cities is of central importance. To this end, the project has been able to initiate cooperation with several cities that already have experience in the areas of Open Data or Smart City. In Europe, these are Amsterdam, Murcia and Zurich, and in Japan Sapporo, Yokosuka and Tokyo. Field trials are planned in several of these cities. We are convinced that the longer we have more and more data, the more important it becomes to be able to master the social and economic challenges. Based on data infrastructures like the ones CPaaS.io will deliver, new applications and services will be offered and transparency will be increased. And for cities, this will become an important location factor, because innovative companies will prefer to settle where such platforms are available that they can use to provide their services.
The project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement n° 723076) and NICT in Japan (Management Number 18302).
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