1. 1
Democratizing
Open Data
Alvaro Graves
Tetherless World Constellation
Department of Cognitive Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
gravea3@rpi.edu
@alvarograves

2. 2
Good news first
• More than 1 million datasets available from
many national and local governments over the
world
• Billions of triples in the LOD cloud
• There is information available about people,
budgets, education, transportation, geography,
etc.

3. 3
OK, now the bad news....
• “Bad” data being published
• No use of standards, inconsistent, hard to consume
and automatize
• “Boring” data, not useful for many people
• Budget of 1994 is not as exciting as you may think
• “Unusable” data: There is no app for that
• Apps and hackathons don’t scale to cover the
needs of the long tail

4. 4
Small-scale activism/journalism
• How can a small community benefit from Open
Data (even from national repositories)?
• How can non-geeks make use of OpenData
without someone building an app for them?
• How the promises of transparency, accountability,
etc. can be enforced by common citizens?

5. 5
Looking back at the Web
• Web 1.0
• You needed to learn HTML, CGI-BIN, FTP, or...
• Have a Webmaster
• Web 2.0
• Better tools (e.g., MediaWiki,Wordpress, Drupal)
simplified the process of publishing and creating
content on the Web

6. 6
Challenges are similar,
but not the same
• Creating and reading a webpage is “easy”
• Writers and readers have been doing it for
centuries in books and newspapers
• Managing (semi-)structured data is relatively new for
many people
• Different metaphors are needed

7. 7
Easy win:Visualizations
• Allowing people to create custom
visualizations based on Open Data easily
• Nice way to consume and communicate
large amounts of data
• Nice way to identify trends and detect
outliers

8. 8
Visualbox
• Tool for creating
visualizations based on
Linked Data
• Presented a session at
the Mozilla Festival 2012
• Great feedback, but still
hard to use by non-
SemWeb geeks
• SPARQL is hard!
• Quality of Linked Data
is an issue

9. 9
Conclusions
• A call to arms:We need better tools to empower
citizens to use Open Data
• The needs of the LongTail are important and can’t
be dismissed
• Visualizations can be an easy start
Thanks!
Alvaro Graves - @alvarograves

10. 9
Conclusions
• A call to arms:We need better tools to empower
citizens to use Open Data
• The needs of the LongTail are important and can’t
be dismissed
• Visualizations can be an easy start
Thanks!
Alvaro Graves - @alvarograves