SMWCon Fall 2013/NYCpedia

NYCpedia is the SMW-based knowledgebase component of the pediacities platform. It collates NYC-related data from disparate data sources. It aims to take Open Data from disconnected datasets sitting in various open data catalogs to actionable hyperlocal knowledge.

With Open Data gaining traction around the world, a lot of raw datasets are being released with open licenses by governments. However, this data is largely 3-star quality at best, in Sir Tim Berners-Lee's 5-star Open Data scale further contributing to the disconnected data silo phenomenon as data portals are largely used as extended FTP servers. And with governments dealing with large, legacy IT investments, upgrading the data to 5-star Linked Data won't be easily achievable as publishing the data in its current format is already a heavy lift for governments.

Also, 5-star data may not be enough as even TBL himself concedes. Metadata is often incomplete or missing altogether.

In this talk, I'll go over the state of Open Data and its challenges, our solution, pediacities' architecture and demo the platform.