NYCpedia

From semantic-mediawiki.org
SMWCon Fall 2013
NYCpedia - from raw open data to actionable open knowledge using SMW
Talk details
Description: How SMW was used to create a knowledgebase from NYC's municipal open data
Speaker(s): Joel Natividad
Type: Talk
Audience: Everyone
Length: 20 minutes
Video: click here
Keywords: geospatial, open data, open knowledge
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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.