MSIS meeting 2012 in Washington few slides for Open Data panel MSIS presentations can be found at http://www.unece.org/stats/documents/2012.05.msis.html MSIS wiki: http://www1.unece.org/stat/platform/display/msis/Home+Page

1. MSIS 2012
some Open Data issues
Carlo Vaccari (Istat, UniCam , ISF , MZ , ...)
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vaccaricarlo@gmail.com
http://vaccaricarlo.wordpress.com
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Open Data panel, MSIS 2012 Washington

2. data ↔ applications
Open Data need applications/interfaces: should Public
Administration focus on the production and publication of
raw data and information, leaving development of applications
and interfaces to the private sector?
Pro:
diversity/richness of interpretations
growth of new districts of the immaterial economy
new production model alongside the traditional one
Con:
absence of official “voice” - possibly contradictory results
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difficult to distinguish between official figures and other sources
of statistics
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Open Data panel, MSIS 2012 Washington

3. Italian experience
Findings:
many Open Data released by Public Bodies, but few users use
them
many Open Data released but few applications are developed
often only communities (civic hackers) use, test, improve,
advertise/criticize Open Public Data
OpenPolis, SpaghettiOpenData, it-OKFN, DataGov.it,
LinkedOpenData.it
Needs:
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habit/culture of using data (eg data journalism)
civil society actors
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Open Data panel, MSIS 2012 Washington

4. Open Data for Statistical Orgs
as input:
Open Data can replace Administrative Data and data
exchanged with public and private respondents
availability of tools → savings! (eg maps for GIS)
new sources → the Web
integration issues → tools and standards
as output:
confidentiality problems, like in micro-data dissemination
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legal issues: need for a standard license (EUPL equivalent) -
today too many licenses (Italy IODL and CC-BY)
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Open Data panel, MSIS 2012 Washington

5. learn to surf
Official Statistical organizations data more and more are
compared to data coming from “unofficial” sources:
Open Data compared to Statistical publications
Data from the Web, like Google Prices Index
Data from Internet of Things - automatic collection: see Cosmos
Data from private companies (Ebay, telecom providers, …) and
from social networks
To exploit and improve our skills on data → coopetition between
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public and private: on standards, tools, licenses, big data
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Open Data panel, MSIS 2012 Washington

6. which are the standards?
Standards are those from Semantic
Web: TBL 5 stars , RDF , SPARQL
To avoid becoming dinosaurs:
1 - We must learn to use new tools for
data cleaning (like Google Refine),
new techniques like Data scraping
for extracting data from the Web
2 – Our data must be re-usable
(linkable): Statistical Data must be
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part of Linked Data → must be
in the map
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Open Data panel, MSIS 2012 Washington