Strategies to make data more open








25 July, 2009



WSRI RPI Summer School

Problem Statement

There is so much data locked up in silos and we are trying to formalise how we can convince data providers to open this data to benefit the community as a whole, and how we can make it easy for them.

The economist laments "The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web."
Illustration by David Simonds Reproduced from "Everywhere and nowhere". May 19, 2008. Economist 2008

Economic Concerns and Solutions

Concern Solution
Open == Free ? Not necessarily!
  1. New business plans, flexible charging policies
  2. Better visibility in search, e.g. Yahoo SearchMonkey and GoodRelations annotations

Legal Concerns and Solutions

Concern Solution
Intellectual Property Rights Licenses to protect data

Social Concerns and Solutions

Concern Solution
Unforeseen consequences
  1. Anonymize the data
  2. Supply second-order data
  3. Release private data only to the owner

Technical Concerns and Solutions

Concern Solution
Different Formats Exporters and Converters
Entity resolution Third party service providers

Conclusion

  1. There are existing or feasible ad-hoc solutions to many obstacles
  2. A coherent framework is needed to combine all of the knowledge from different domains
  3. How to achieve this is itself a complicated research problem
  4. Multidisciplinary expertise definitely required