Dutch Semantic Web Meetup

Report

Open Governement Data is an emerging trend in the last year. Starting with Tim Berners Lee's TED talk and the launch of both data.gov.uk and data.gov in the United States. Government data provides a powerful new resource to both citzens and scientists. Semantic Web technologist were instrumental in helping bring about the creation of data.gov.uk. To see how Semantic Web researchers in the Netherlands could help with spur the exposure of government data, the VU University Amsterdam organized the Dutch Semantic Web Meetup. The meetup on Feb. 12, 2010 brought together roughly 100 attendees ranging from computer scientists to civil servants and user interface experts from around the Benelux region. The event, sponsored by the Network Institute, was structured around a keynote, lightening talks and several discussion sessions.

Keynote: Introducing Dutch Open Government Data

Ton Zijlstra along with James Burke gave a powerful introduction to Open Government Data emphazing both succesful projects from around the world as well as current intiatives in the Netherlands. Slides of the talk can be found on Slideshare. The talk ended with a call to action for the partipants of the workshop to be like John Snow, to use government data to empower the public and change lives.

Lightening Talks

After the keynote, 11 presenters had 2 minutes each to present their ideas on Semantic Web Technologies and/or government data. Talks ranged from Hackdeoverheid to helping improve data acquistion through semantic wikis. You can find a list of presenters on the Dutch Semantic Web Meetup wiki site.

Break-out sessions

To further discussion, the audience could attend one of four different break-out sessions. The first discussion group focused on the topic "What can we do to encourage and promote the exposure of Dutch Data as Linked Data ?" and was chaired by Ton Zijlstra and Ruud Stegers. The second discussion group, chaired by Rinke Hoekstra, though about the use cases for Dutch Linked Data. Notes from this animated discussion on use-case can be found here.
In addtion to these discussion sessions, two hacking sessions were formed focusing around publishing government data using Semantic Web standards. Starting with the resource page filled with pointers to public datasets and publications tools, the participants discussed technical considerations related to publishing data. The choice of a triple store to store the data and the choice of URIs to reference to resources proved to be important points of discussion. Importantly, the "hackers" made new technical contacts for future development.

Wrapping up

The event wrapped up with brief presentations from the leaders of each group and an audience wide discussion. A powerful testament to the need for open data was given by an Amsterdam firefighter who needed to go through layers of bueracracy to find the location of construction projects in Amsterdam so that he could devise a better way to get emergency scenes. The audience discussed a number of subjects including the role of researchers in opening government data, where semantic web technologies could help, and how to create momentum around publishing data. Finally, the audience agreed to meeting more regularly around the topic. A community log of notes around the event can be found on twitter under the hashtag : #dswm.

More information

More information can be found on the web page of the Dutch Semantic Web Meetups (short URI : short URI)