A Language Beyond …

Hermann Burger, the so versatile Swiss writer once noted: “To be a writer means to have language beyond death”.
For Hans Rosling (1948-2017), working hard to make statistics not only understandable but also respected and used, this is equally true. Once thanks to his bestseller ‘Factfulness‘ and now also thanks to a newly launched idea: “The Project Rosling”.

Project Rosling

Project Rosling has its origin in the UN World Data Forum in Bern (October 2021) and wants to continue the spririt of this event. The project website paraphrases this as follows: ‘The Project Rosling aims to bridge the gap between the data and statistical community and a diversity of stakeholders to advance data ecosystems and provide the information needed for a fact-based worldview’.

And in even more detail: ‘The Project Rosling follows the Road to Bern, an initiative of the Swiss Confederation that aimed to prepare discussions before the 3rd UN World Data Forum 2021 in Bern and to engage the public in the 2030 Agenda (more information here). Over one and a half years, conferences, debates and activities with the general public created a momentum within the data and statistical community that the Project Rosling will seek to maintain and expand.
As such, it has two aims:
> Expand the data and statistics dialogue
> Deepen knowledge’
(-> go to source)

In memoriam

This meritorious project and its ambitious mission recall and continue what Hans Rosling pursued in his life and what was his interest and project. In an interview in 2013 he expressed himself as follows: ‘My interest is not data, it’s the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers’.

More about Hans Rosling:

Two Years Ago

You Can See in Numbers

Two Years Ago

He was a pioneer and a great inspiration for what public statistics always strives for: more visibility, more understanding and more resonance. Two years ago Hans Rosling (27 July 1948 – 7 February 2017) died too young.

Demanding and enriching was an encounter with Hans Rosling. His demand for public statistics was urgent and a prerequisite for his enlightening work: that statistical data should be open to all. Here he saw successes. It was and is enriching how he conveyed these data combined with a message. With innovative, precise, entertaining and always very personal presentations, he clarified what had happened and what developments could be desired. He was a realist regarding his effectiveness and yet always an optimist ….. better: a “possibilist”. What remains for me is how he taught to see with numbers – a constant challenge for public statistics.

“One little humble advice” he gave to his audience at the end of a presentation in 2013:

On BBC 2013

Full presentation here:  
 DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population 

It Goes On

Gapminder (“a fact tank, not a think tank”), with its innovative tools and commitment, continues to live with Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling.

And recently Factfulness, a book by the three (Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling) has been published with the subtitle “Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think”

“Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. “

There’s more

State of Open Data in Europe

The European Commission (Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology) just published the second Open Data Maturity Report.

‘Open Data refers to the information collected, produced or paid for by public bodies which can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose.’ (all pages from the report, p.6)

‘The two key indicators used to measure Open Data Maturity are Open Data Readiness and Portal Maturity.
— The first key indicator, Open Data Readiness, assesses to what extent countries have an Open Data policy in place, licensing norms and the extent of national coordination regarding guidelines and setting common approaches.
— The second key indicator, Portal Maturity, explores the usability of the portal regarding the availability of functionalities, the overall re-usability of data such as machine readability and accessibility of data sets, for example, as well as the spread of data across domains.
The two key indicators as well as the sub-indicators are shown in the table below.

(pp.6 and 10)

Open Data Maturity in Europe 2016: The results

Overview by countries:

Results from the Open Data Maturity Assessment for the EU28+ countries 
for 2016 (p.59)

From European Data Portal, all the details here.

(p.59)

And one more result blog about stats enjoys:

About Re-Usability

One of the criteria for open data maturity is the re-usability of data and especially machine readability of data. Six questions focus on this item:

‘When looking at the data on the European Data Portal, over 49 different file formats are used. The most used data formats are CSV, HTML and WMS. The fourth most used data format is PDF. PDF is one of the few data formats that is not machine-readable. The following most frequent distributions are ZIP, JSON, XLS and XLSX, followed by WFS and XML. Numbers range from nearly 49,000 CSV formats to just over 23,000 JSON formats to the least used 263 shape formats. Most data formats are or are related to a spreadsheet, which enables to analyse the data more swiftly.’ (p. 49).

That is not enough and the report recommends:

‘On the more technical side, some improvements are still necessary. To further develop automated processes each national portal should have an API in combination with a complete metadata profile. This allows a portal to share the data with data users more easily. This can for instance enable harvesting data directly from public administrations in an automated fashion, saving efforts in manual uploading of data and limiting errors when editing data and metadata manually.  … Typos or different spellings can limit the discovery of data. Here activities conducted at EU level on controlled vocabularies can be of interest to learn from in order to increase semantic interoperability. ‘  (p.63)

There is more

PDF is poor, XLS is better, CSV even better, also JSON and APIs; and metadata are of crucial importance. The European Data Portal gives a good example: it organizes the datasets in the triple format (RDF) and offers an SPARQL search.

But there is more.

Not only the datasets could foster semantic interoperability but also the data in these sets. Linked data and adequate formats can assure this interoperability and with this extended machine readability and use of data. So why not add this criterion to the questionnaire (Question 7.6 +) and lead the national portals in this direction?

Linked data? Tim Berners-Lee explains

And related: https://blogstats.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/open-data-portals-news/

Open Data: Global Goals, Local Impact

Upcoming Open Data Event

IODC16 Madrid. Global goals, local impact

The 4th International Open Data Conference, IODC16 will take place in Madrid. October 6-7, 2016. It will be ‘designed not as a single statement on open data, but rather as a curated record of discussions and debates, providing a snapshot of key issues and setting out a path forward based on the visions, ideas, and agreements explored at IODC 2015′ in Canada.

Reporting IODC 2015

From the 2015 report:

‘More than 1000 participants from 56 different countries took part in the 3rd International Open Data Conference (IODC) in Ottawa from May 28-29, 2015 . Hosted by the Government of Canada, the International Development Research Centre, and the World Bank, IODC brought together open data experts to understand the global impact of open data, coordinate action, and share best practices.’ p.5

‘A few years ago, debates about open data centered on dataset formats and data portals—not any more . Today, the open data debate covers an increasingly broad spectrum of topics: from comprehensive principles for open data and the measurement of impact, to the development of common standards, and critical issues such as privacy, multilingual data communities, and indigenous knowledge.’ p.30

Using Linked Open Data LOD

An example showing how LOD helps break down silos: Florian Bauer’s presentation in IODC 2015 ‘Using Open Data Thesauri to Connect Climate Platforms’.

‘Data + Environment = Mobilizing Knowledge
Addressing climate change and environmental sus-
tainability is a knowledge-intensive enterprise . With
billions of data points from scientific research and mil-
lions of journal articles published in many different
languages over recent decades, organizing all that in-
formation, and getting it to the right people at the right
time requires both active intermediaries and shared
knowledge infrastructures . The Climate Knowledge
Brokers (CKB) group is building on the Renewable En-
ergy and Energy Efficiency Partnership’s (REEEP) mul-
tilingual climate thesaurus to tag and enrich content
from different document repositories, using a shared
Linked Open Data taxonomy . This helps to break down
the silos that keep information apart, building a stron-
ger open data ecosystem.’

Open Data Standards. LOD?!

‘In collaboration with Iniciativa Latinoamericana por los Datos Abiertos (ILDA), Open North interviewed governments and civil society organizations in 10 low- and middle-income countries to get a sense of their progress, challenges, needs and interests with respect to open data standards. After reviewing the previously identified gaps in standardization in light of the interview results, we proposed 32 draft recommendations, which we now invite stakeholders to discuss, comment on, and eventually implement.’ (Guest post on the Blog IODC 2016 from James McKinney of Open North).

The bad news for LOD is: It’s only nice to have in these countries. The good news is: LOD is on the radar even in countries with not so many resources. The five-star step in the WEB needs time.

On page 40/41 the report ‘Identifying recommended standards and best practices for open data’ (By Stéphane Guidoin (Open North), Paulina Marczak (Open North), Juan Pane (ILDA) and James McKinney (Open North).) gives the following recommendation.

‘Implementation
● When  possible,  government  could  provide  data  using  linked  data  format  like  RDF  or JSON­LD
● Data  tools  should  support  existing  ontologies  and  vocabularies  and  adopt  the relevant ones when possible
Discussion
On one  hand,  linked  data  and use of existing vocabularies is  perceived a significant  aspect  of open  data.  With linked  data,  it is possible  to  significantly  increase  the  automation  capabilities since data attributes become much less ambiguous.
On  the  other  hand,  linked  data  almost  did  not  appear  in  the  answers of  either government  or consumer  interviewees,  and  most  of  the  government  agencies  appeared  to  already  have difficulties  to  comply  with  more  simple  simple  recommendations.  Finally  linked  data  is  more difficult  to  use  and  require  more  advanced  tools  to  be  used  that  average  citizens,  CSOs  and even developer do not always know.
As  a consequence, use of linked data is presented as a “nice to have” recommendation and can be added to, but should not replace more accessible formats like tabular data.’

 

Open Data Portals: News

There are new or refurbished open data portals to be announced.

opendata.swiss

Switzerland just published opendata.swiss in a new look for a better presentation of data. See the press release.

europeandataportal.eu

The European Commission published some months ago the European Data Portal.

europeandataportal.eu is much more than a collection of open data. It is an ecosystem with lots of documents explaining and promoting open data.

SPARQL inside!

The portal offers metadata as linked open data with an SPARQL endpoint for powerful searching.

select ?theme (count(?theme) as ?count) where {?s a dcat:Dataset . ?s dcat:theme ?theme} GROUP BY ?theme LIMIT 100  gives all  data categories/themes and their number of datasets .

Impact studies

Most of all these data are already published on other websites. The advantage of such open data portals are a centralized access and clear licence information, A main intention is to attract developers, to foster data usage and with this economic growth.

A Swiss study (January 2014) assesses the economic impact of Open Government Data: ´The report determined that the economic benefits from OGD for Switzerland lie most likely between CHF0.9 B and CHF1.2 B´.

       All the details >>> here  (look for the extended executive summary).

A European Study (November 2015) within the context of the launch of the European Data Portal got these results: “The aim of this study is to collect, assess and aggregate economic evidence to forecast the benefits of the re-use of Open Data for the EU28+. Four key indicators are measured: direct market size, number of jobs created, cost savings, and efficiency gains. Between 2016 and 2020, the market size of Open Data is expected to increase by 36.9%, to a value of 75.7 bn EUR in 2020. The forecasted number of direct Open Data jobs in 2016 is 75,000 jobs. From 2016 to 2020, almost 25,000 extra direct Open Data jobs are created. The forecasted public sector cost savings for the EU28+ in 2020 are 1.7 bn EUR. Efficiency gains are measured in a qualitative approach. ”

See the details >>> here

Next: LOD

Open and machine-readable formats help to access data and foster the economic impact. Even better when the data have metadata in a standardized description. Linked Open Data (LOD) in RDF format provide this; europeandataportal.eu uses this format describing the harvested datasets (metadata). The next step will and must be data in this format in order to link masses of data in the linked data cloud.

With data.admin.ch a first step is been made in Switzerland.

Linked Data? In europeandataportal.eu’s ecosystem well made videos present explanations:

 

 

For a fact-based Worldview

Hans Rosling, co-founder and promoter of the Gapminder Foundation and of gapminder.org fights with statistics against myths (‘Our goal is to replace devastating myths with a fact-based worldview.’) and tries to counterbalance media focussing on war, conflicts and chaos.

Here one more example (and this in a media interview…): ‘You can’t use media if you want to understand the world’ (sic!)

And this statement on gapmider.org; ‘Statistical facts don’t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite. Most people understand the world by generalizing personal experiences which are very biased. In the media the “news-worthy” events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes. Slow and steady changes in major trends don’t get much attention. Unintentionally, people end-up carrying around a sack of outdated facts that you got in school (including knowledge that often was outdated when acquired in school).’ http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/

 

 

From Quantity to Quality

Open Data is a much-debated topic and – since the Obama administration launched Data.gov on May 21, 2009 – an international competition, too. Nearly 400 Open-Data Portals emerged meanwhile. But very often there is more concern about the number of published data than about the content of these data.

GODI

This issue has been addressed by Open Knowledge (okfn) with its Global Open Data Index (Global Open Data Index). ‘ …simply putting a few spreadsheets online under an open license is obviously not enough. Doing open government data well depends on releasing key datasets in the right way.
Moreover, with the proliferation of sites it has become increasingly hard to track what is happening: which countries, or municipalities, are actually releasing open data and which aren’t? Which countries are releasing data that matters? Which countries are releasing data in the right way and in a timely way?
The Global Open Data Index was created to answer these sorts of questions, providing an up-to-date and reliable guide to the state of global open data for policy-makers, researchers, journalists, activists and citizens.’

.

The Challenge: Be more than a simple measurement tool

The Open Knowledge Community just started ‘a discussion with the open data community and our partners in civil society to help us determine which datasets are of high social and democratic value and should be assessed in the 2015 Index. We believe that by making the choice of datasets a collaborative decision, we will be able to raise awareness of and start a conversation around the datasets required for the Index to truly become a civil society audit of the open data revolution. – See more at http://blog.okfn.org/2015/08/20/the-2015-global-open-data-index-is-around-the-corner-these-are-the-new-datasets-we-are-adding-to-it/

The result is a list of datasets that can be found on Google docs.

Statistics

For National Statistics (in okfn’s definition), these are the (few) chosen sets:

‘Key national statistics such as demographic and economic indicators (GDP, unemployment, population, etc).
To satisfy this category, the following minimum criteria must be met:
– GDP for the whole country updated at least quarterly
– Unemployment statistics updated at least monthly
– Population updated at least once a year’

Open, Useful, Reusable

In OECD’s brand new publication ‘Government at a Glance 2015’ we can find a new indicator: The OUR Index. It stands for ‘Open, Useful, Reusable Government Data’.

‘The new OECD OURdata Index reveals that many countries have made progress in making public data more available and accessible, but large variations remain, not least with respect to the quality of data provided. Governments need to make participation initiatives more accessible, targeted, relevant and appealing.’ (p.8)

Method

‘The data come from the 2014 OECD Survey on Open Government Data. Survey respondents were predominantly chief information officers in OECD countries and two candidate countries (Colombia and Latvia). Responses represent countries’ own assessments of current practices and procedures regarding open government data. Data refer only to central/federal governments and exclude open government data practices at the state/local levels.’ (p.150)

.

Based on G8 recommendations

‘The OECD OURdata Index measures government efforts to implement the G8 Open Data charter based on the availability, accessibility and government support to promote the reuse of data, focusing on the central OGD portal in each country'( p.33)

‘The G8 Open Data Charter defines a series of five principles: 1) open data by default; 2) quality and quantity data; 3) usable by all; 4) releasing data for improved governance and; 5) releasing data for innovation, as well as three collective actions to guide the implementation of those principles.’
‘As a first step in producing a comprehensive measure of the level of implementation of the G8 Open Data Charter, the OECD pilot Index on Open government data assesses governments’ efforts to implement open data in three dimensions:
1. Data availability on the national portal (based on principle 1 and collective action 2);
2. Data accessibility on the national portal (based on principle 3) and
3. Governments’ support to innovative re-use and stakeholder engagement (principle 5).
The only principle not covered in this year’s index is Principle 4: Releasing Data for improved governance value (e.g. transparency) as existing measurement efforts have focused primarily on socio economic value creation’ (p.150)

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And here comes the ranking

Data for this chart: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888933249180

Detailed data for the countries: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888933249175

The publication

The publication: OECD (2015), Government at a Glance 2015, OECD Publishing, Paris. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/gov_glance-2015-en

The Cui-bono Approach to Open Data

What’s the problem? Which data are needed to solve it? Who gets an advantage of it?

These few questions are valuable key for implementing the open data culture. Open data not as ‘l’art pour l’art’ but in a pragmatic approach, demonstrating that the ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’.

It seems to work very well as Ton Zijlstra showed in his presentation at the Swiss Opendata Conference 2015.

He gives some examples of situations where open data helped to provide a solution to a problem and where stakeholders got an answer to their issues.

‘Planning for socio-economic impact. open data as a policy instrument.’

link ti

Next Step after OGD: Government’s Big Data Scientist

Open Government Data (OGD) Initiatives have been important steps helping to give broader access to administrative data.

But there was some disappointment because OGD didn’t bring up the mass of apps many hoped. And meanwhile big discussions about using Big Data emerged.

Now the US make a step forward going for a Big Data Initiative: President Obama just nominated a Chief Data Scientist in his Office, DJ Patil.

https://m.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/02/18/white-house-names-dr-dj-patil-first-us-chief-data-scientist

‘Patil’s new role will involve the application of big data to all government areas, but particularly healthcare policy.’ (Source)

EU Open Data Portal. An Evaluation.

Evaluating the EU Open Data Portal

‘The Department of Library and Information Science at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) has published a study that analyses and evaluates the European Open Data Portal.’ . Report presentation: http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/analysis-and-evaluation-european-union-open-data-portal-0 or direct download:  http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/RGID/article/download/99-118/42697. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Some interesting findings summarized below:

Editors

As with most of the other Open Government Data Portals the bulk of data comes from statistical agencies, here from Eurostat: .

Top 10

Number 1 is a translation help for all EU languages (‘translation memory, TM; i.e. sentences and their professionally produced translations’) .

Formats

Evaluation of data formats  follows Tim Berners-Lee’s 5star schema. .

5star for metadata queries

Semantic (****)  or even Linked (*****)  Data are not part of the portal’s data repository. BUT the description of the data with metadata follows 5star requirements and the EU Portal offers a SPARQL endpoint. Great! https://open-data.europa.eu/en/linked-data

Let’s learn SPARQL!