supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

spurring innovation with public sector data

A Creative Dublin Alliance project Supported and Powered by IBM Technologies

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

What is Dublinked?

An initiative of Dublin City Council, DunLaoghaire-Rathdown, South Dublin, Fingal County Councils, and NUI Maynooth, as part of the Creative Dublin Alliance

An innovation network focussed on economic development using public-sector data

A portal for the discovery of static and dynamic data about the Dublin Region, from public and private sources.

A single-point-of-contact for new companies and users who wish to engage with the public sector for data requests and project proposals

Supported also by the OSI, NTA, CSO, PSRA, Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Dublin BID, and many others

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

What is Dublinked?

Federated DataStores, with a unified discovery engineAll data to be directly machine accessible (RDF, URI)Usage supported by workshops and training events

Dublinked

SEARCHIndependentDataStores

MNCs, SMEsAcademia,

Public Sector,Citizens

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

What sort of Data is Available?

Most of our data is OPEN, and released under the PSI license

We have other data which cannot be released due to licensing constraints, and for these we have a single NDA for non-commerical use.

OPEN DATA

RESEARCH DATA

Arts & Culture, Citizen Participation, Demographics, Housing, Land UseTransportation, Road Networks, Education, Economy, Environment,

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

Need to keep it fresh and updated

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

Complements other Activities

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

The Commercial Tension

SMEs and Activists

The Activist: Publicly funded data should be free!!

SMEs don’t want to pay upfront to explore new ideas

Commercial Services

Mapping is expensive, Quality costs

Why should companies make all the money, and the public pay all the costs. That’s not fair!!

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

What is the role of GI?

Most of our users come to us with an ICT background, not a geography, mapping, or GI background.

They ask un-informed questions...

• Where are the roads in Dublin?

• What is the height of buildings in Dublin?

• where is there a free parking spot?

• where are the bus-stops?

• where are the playgrounds in Dublin?

Without GI, it is very difficult to extract value from the data

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

Planning Data – A use case

A good place to start as the data is already availableNormally hidden behind an API

In theory it should be easy, all 4 local authorities used the same system and captured similar data...

but

It took us at least 6 months to actually manage to produce a common output format. Problems arose such as

- projections (eg: WGS vs ITM)- export formats (eg: CSV vs SHP vs KML)- same content but different titles- different software versions causing problems

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

IBM SPUD – Semantic Processing of Urban Data

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

Lessons Learnt

Large companies research, startups develop

Data quality is critical and is difficult to achieve

The process of releasing data from organisations is slower than one would expect – often for perfectly valid reasons

The process of encouraging people to innovate with public-sector data is equally slow – an education process

Often data gets lost, or it’s not in a form that can be exported – it takes effort to extract it.

Unexpectedly many different forms of public sector data can offer diverse opportunities for new businesses!! (eg playgrounds)

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

Where do we go from here...

Targeting new areas – particularly fragmented sectors such as tourism and the social services.

Service Level Agreements – if companies depend on public sector data, who is going to guarantee that it will keep coming?

More support for startups – plan to work more closely with economic development units, enterprise boards and enterprise Ireland.

Crowd-sourcing – need to involve the citizen more in enhancing the datasets and the use cases

Better Search – provide more links and discovery mechanisms for data, particularly stuff hiding within other datasets.

Keep it Fresh – keep delivering more data, dynamic data, greater variety, more participants. Stale data = dead data.

supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

Delivering Economic Benefit – NEW JOBS