Write-up by Conrad Taylor (rapporteur)
The May 2015 meeting of the Network for Information and Knowledge
Exchange took Open Data as its subject. There was a smaller crowd than
usual, about 15 people in total, and rather than splitting into table
discussion groups halfway, as NetIKX meetings usually do, we kept
together for one extended conversation of about two and a half hours,
with Q&A sprinkled throughout.
The meeting had been organised by Steve Dale, who also chaired. As
first speaker he had invited Mark Braggins, whom he had met while
working on the Local Government Association’s Knowledge Hub project.
Mark was on the advisory board for that project, having previously
played a role in setting up the Hampshire Hub, which he later
described. Mark’s co-speaker was Steven Flower, an independent
consultant in Open Data applications with experience of the technical
implementations of Open Data.
The slide sets for the meeting can be found HERE and HERE
Introducing Open Data
Mark started with an introduction to and definition of Open Data:
briefly put, it is data that has been made publicly available in a
suitable form, and with permissions, so that anyone can freely use it
and re-use it, for any purpose, at no cost; the only constraint is
that usually the licence requires the user to acknowledge and
attribute the source of the data.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor the the Web, has suggested a five-star
categorisation scheme for Open Data, which is explained at the Web
site http://5stardata.info. The lowest level, deserving one star, is
when you make your data available on the Web in any format, under an
open licence; it could be in a PDF document for example, or even a Web
graphic, and it needs a human to interpret it. You can claim two stars
if the data is put online in a structured form, for example in an
Excel spreadsheet, and three stars if the data is structured but also
in a non-proprietary format, such as a CSV file.
If your data is structured as a bunch of entities, each of which has a
Uniform Resource Indicator (URI) so it can be independently referenced
over the Internet, you deserve a fourth star, and if you then link
your data to other data sources, creating Open Linked Data, you can
claim that fifth star.
Steve Flower came in at this point and explained that his experience
is that most organisations who are going down the Open Data road are
at the three-star level. Moving further along requires some technical
knowledge, expertise and resource.
Mark displayed for us a list of organisations which publish Open Data,
and some of them are really large. The World Bank is a leader in this
(see http://data.worldbank.org). The UK Government’s datastore is at
http://data.gov.uk, and that references data published by a wide
variety of organisations. Some local government authorities publish
open data: London has the London Data Store, Bristol has Open Data
Bristol, Manchester has Open GM, Birmingham has its Data Factory,
Hampshire has its Hub and the London Borough of Lambeth has Lambeth in
Numbers. A good ‘five star’ example is the Open Data Communities
resource of the Department for Communities and Local Government
(DCLG).
Asked how the notion of Open Data relates to copyright, Mark explained
that essential to data having Open status is that it must be made
available with a licence which explicitly bestows those re-use rights.
In the UK, for government data, the relevant license is usually the
Open Government License, OGL. Other organisations often use a Creative
Commons license.
A key driver for national government departments, and local government
too, to get involved in the world of Open Data is that these bodies
now operate under an obligation to be transparent, for example local
government bodies are obliged to publish data about each item of
expenditure over £500 and about contracts they have awarded. Similar
requirements are driving Open Data also in the USA.
Mark recommended that anyone with an interest in Open Data must take a
look at the Web site of Owen Boswarva (http://www.owenboswarva.com/)
which has a number of demo examples of maps driven by Open Data.
I asked if the speakers knew of example of Open Data in the sciences.
Steven said that in the Open Data Manchester meetings which he
organises, they had had an interesting talk from a Manchester academic, Prof Carole Goble about experimental data being made available ‘openly’ in support of a
transparent scientific process and reproduceability. (Open Data is one of the ‘legs’ of a wider project dubbed Open Science, in which one publishes not only conclusions but also experimental data.)
Some Examples
Mark then illustrated how Open Data works and what benefits it can
bring with a number of examples. His first example was a map
visualisation based on a variety of data sources, which was
constructed for the Mayor of Trafford to discover where it would make
most sense to locate some extra defibrillators in the community. A mix
of data sources, some open and some closed, were tapped to inform the
decision making: population densities, venue footfall, age profiles,
venues with first-aiders on the staff, ambulance call-out data.
Happily, there is now real proof that the defibrillators which were
distributed be means of this evidence have been used and have
undoubtedly saved lives.
Mark’s second example was from Hampshire. A company called Nquiring
Minds has taken Open Data from a variety of sources, and used a
utility to construct an interactive map illustrating predictions of
the pressure from users on GP surgeries, looking forward year by year
to the year 2020. You can see this map and interact with it by going
to http://gpmap.ubiapps.com. This kind of application can inform
public policy debates and planning. (incidentally, that project was
funded by Innovate UK, the former Technology Strategy Board).
Steven described another health-and-location-data project which
gathered together statistics about the prescribing of statin
medication by GPs, in particular looking at where big-name-pharma
branded statins were being prescribed, at some considerable expense to
the NHS and public purse, compared to surgeries where cheaper generic
statins were being prescribed.
Another example was about a database system whereby universities can
share specialised scientific equipment with each other. (Take a look
at this at http://equipment.data.ac.uk.) The project was funded by
EPSRC. Of course it was important that the participating institutions
agreed a standard for which data should be shared (what fields, what
units of measure etc); and establishing this standard was perhaps the
most time-consuming part of getting the scheme going.
A very attractive example shown was the global Wind Map created by
Cameron Beccario. Using publicly available earth observation and
meteorological data from a variety of sources, and using a JavaScript
library called D3 (http://d3js.org), he has constructed a Web site
that in its initial appearance animates a display of wind direction
and velocity in animated form for everywhere in the world.
The Wind Map site is at http://earth.nullschool.net and it is worth
looking at. You can spin the globe around and if you sample a point on
the surface you will get a readout of latitude, longitude, wind speed
and direction. In fact it’s more than a wind map because you can also
switch to view other forms of data such as ocean currents, temperature
and humidity for either atmosphere or ocean, and you can change from
the default rotatable globe to a variety of map projections. While you
are there you can see what data source is being accessed for each
display. (Thanks to a minimalist interface design this is not at all
obvious but if you click on the word ‘earth’ a control menu will
reveal itself.)
About the Hampshire Hub
Mark then turned to the example closest to his heart, the Hampshire
Hub (http://www.hampshirehub.net). This is a collaboration between 22
partnering organisations, including the County Council, three unitary
authorities and 11 district councils, the Ordnance Survey, the police
and fire services, the Department for Communities and Local
Government, the British Army and two national parks. A lot of the data
is ‘five-star’ quality. That’s not true of all the sources, for
example Portsmouth health data is posted as Excel spreadsheets, but
there is an ongoing process over time to try to turn as much as is
practical into Linked Open Data.
Together with these data components, the Hub site also hosts articles,
news, tweets etc. and other kinds of ‘softer’ and contextual
information.
The site gives access to Area Profiles, which are automatically
generated from the data, with charts from which one can drill down to
the original datasets.
Building new projects around the Hampshire Hub
Around these original data resources, new initiatives are popping up
to both build on the datasets and contribute back to the ecosystem
with an open licence. An example which Mark displayed is the Flood
Event Model, which combines historical data with current environmental
conditions to attempt predictions of which places might be most at
risk from a severe weather event. It has taken quite a bit of effort
to use historical data to elicit hypotheses about chains of causation,
then re-test those against other more recent datasets, and as new
datasets can be linked into such as from the Met Office and the
Environment Agency, a really useful tool can emerge. And this could
have very practical benefits for advising the public and planning
emergency response.
Another example project is Landscape Watch Hampshire, which is sharing
a rather complex type of data: aerial photography from 2005 and 2013.
To compare these with the aim of documenting changes to the landscape
and its use really requires humans, so the plan of Hampshire’s
collaboration with the University of Portsmouth and Remote Sensing
Applications Consultants Ltd is to crowdsource analytical input from
the public. This is explained in more detail at
http://www.hampshirehub.net/initiatives/crowdsourcing-landscape-change.
Another initiative around the Hampshire Hub is to link open data
around planning applications. There is a major problem in keeping tabs
of planning applications because they are lodged with many different
planning authorities and in ways that don’t inter-operate, and if your
area is on the border between planning jurisdictions, it’s all the
more problematic. And this despite the fact that for example the
building of a hypermarket or the siting of a bypass has effects which
radiate for dozens of miles around.
Hampshire has taken the lead together with neighbour Surrey but also
with Manchester to determine what might be an appropriate standard
form in which planning data could be exported to be shared as Open
Data. The Open Data User Group (a ministerial advisory body to the
Cabinet Office) is building on this work.
Mark finished his part of the presentation by mentioning the Open
Data Camp event in Winchester, 21–22 February 2015 (including Open
Data Day). Over 100 people attended this first UK conference on Open
Data which he described as ‘super fun’. See http://www.odcamp.org.uk
where there are many stories and blogposts about the event and the
varied interests of participants in Open Data. Similar ‘camps’ coming
up are BlueLightCamp (Birmingham, 6–7 June), LocalGovCamp, UKGovCamp
and GovCamp Cymru.
The Open Data Ecosystem
Steven Flower spoke for a shorter time, and structured his talk around
the past, the present and our future relationship to Data; slightly
separately, the business of being Open; and the whole ecosystem that
Open Data works within. Steven is an independent consultant helping
organisations with implementing Open Data, many of then
non-governmental aid organisations, and indeed that morning he had had
a meeting with WaterAid.
When Steven has conversations with groups in organisations about their
data and how and why they want to make it ‘open’, often various kinds
of diagram are resorted to in order to articulate their ideas. Mostly
these are ‘network diagrams’, boxes and arrows, blobs joined by lines,
entities and their interrelationships. Sometimes the connected blobs
are machines, sometimes they are data entities, sometimes they are
people or departments.
In New York City their diagrams (which are quite pretty) show
‘islands’ or more properly floating clusters of datasets, mostly
tightly gathered around city functions such as transport, education,
the police; with other datasets being tethered ‘offshore’ and some
tied up to two or three such clusters. Some diagramming focuses more
on the drivers behind Open Data projects, and the kinds of people they
are meant to serve.
Past and present attitudes to data
Steven took us back with a few slides to the days when there were few
computers, and later when there were just 25 million Web pages. Now
the Internet has mushroomed almost beyond comprehension of its scope.
Perhaps when it comes to Open Data, we are still in ‘the early days’.
And data is something we are just not comfortable with. We struggle to
manage it, to exercise governance and security over it. We can’t
easily get our heads around it, it seems so abstract.
It seems that big companies get data, and they get Big Data. Tesco
aggregates, segregates and analyses its customers’ shopping
preferences through its Clubcard scheme. Spotify has been buying
companies such as The Echo Nest, whose software can help them analyse
what customers listen to, and might want to listen to next.
More and more people carry a ‘smartphone’, and these are not only the
means to access data: we continuously leak data whether deliberately
in the form of tweets, or unconsciously as GPS notes where we are.
People increasingly wear devices such as the FitBit which monitor our
personal health data. Sensors in people’s homes, smoke alarms and
security cameras for example, are being hooked up to the Internet
(‘the Internet of Things’) so they can communicate with us when they
are out.
People and organisations also worry about the ‘Open’ bit. Does it mean
we lose control of our personal data profile? If there is an
uncomfortableness about Open Data, why might we want to do this?
As an object to think about Steven offered us Mount Everest. It is
8,850 metres high (that is data). Digging deeper, Everest has a rich
set of attributes. Under the surface there is a complex geology, and
it is being pushed up by tectonic plate movements. Recently, one of
those movements resulted in an earthquake and thousands of deaths. To
help in this situation have come a number of volunteers from the Open
Streetmap community, who are working collaboratively to fill in the
gaps in mapping, something which can greatly benefit interventions in
disasters (the same community helped out during the Haiti earthquake).
Given a defined framework for location data, the task can be split up
into jobs, farmed out to volunteer teams and collected in a database.
Turning to his personal experience of Open Data projects, Steven gave
us a view of ‘past, present and future’. Around 2007, he was involved
in setting up a service called ‘Plings’ (places to go, things to do)
which merged data from various sources into a system so that young
people could find activities.
Moving to the present, Steven touched on a number of Open Data
projects with which he is involved. WaterAid is one of a number of
charities which believes strongly in transparency about how it works,
how it spends funds and so on. They are involved in an project called
the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which is building a
standard for sharing data about aid programmes. He showed us a
screenful of data about a WaterAid project in Nepal, structured in
XML.
Published as Open Data, this information can then be accessed and used
in a number of ways. Some of this is internal to the organisation so
they can make better sense of what they are doing, but because it is
Open Data it can also be visualised externally, and Steven showed us
some screens from the Development Portal (http://d-portal.org),
displaying IATI data sourced from WaterAid.
As data on situations requiring overseas aid and disaster
interventions is shared more transparently, it should become more
possible for use data as the basis of better aid delivery decisions.
The future generation, the future view
And what of the future? Well, in Steven’s immediate future, just a few
days ahead, he said he would be working with a group of schoolchildren
in Stockport, who have ‘Smart Citizen’ miniature computers in their
school, based on an Arduino board with an ‘Urban Shield’ board
attached. The sensors on this apparatus harvest data about
temperature, humidity, nitrous oxide and carbon monoxide emissions,
light and noise, and their data is uploaded and shared on the Smart
Citizen Web site (https://smartcitizen.me/). Thus the school is
joining a worldwide project with over a thousand deployed devices.
I personally know of a very similar project in South Lambeth, where a
school is collaborating with a school science project called Loop Labs
founded by Nicky Gavron, a member of the London Assembly. The Lambeth
project differs in a number of respects: it is focused only on the air
quality data, but rather that having a single sensor in the classroom
they have a number of ‘air quality egg’ sensors deployed to the
children’s homes to get local comparison data. Also, the Loop Labs
project is strongly linked to environmental health issues.
Where the Salford schools project looks like being really
adventurously pioneering is in the ways they aim to use the data
harvest locally. Spreadsheets is one option, but how cool are they?
Steven hope that the data can be sucked into the Minecraft environment
for building virtual items assembled from blocks, and maybe data
patterns can be made audible by transforming the values captured into
the code that programs the Sonic Pi music synthesiser software for
Raspberry Pi, Mac OS X and Windows (Google that, download the code and
play with it — great fun!).
The schoolkids have also used 3D printing to create a small fleet of
Cannybots — or rather, as I understand it, what you 3D print is a kind
of Airfix kit for the casing and then you install a small circuit
board with an ARM processor on it, plus Bluetooth communication for
control (see http://cannybots.com/overview.html). The next step will
be to use the data from their Citizen Science sensor to drive patterns
of behaviour in the mini robots. There is no guarantee that this will
work, but that is the nature of the future!
What does an Ecosystem need?
To be healthy, any ecosystem for Open Data absolutely require
standards, and the IATI standard is an example of that in action.
Steven is also working on a standard for a project called 360 Giving
(http://threesixtygiving.org/), which is a movement that encourages UK
grant makers and philanthropists to publish their grant information
online. It is a small beginning but currently 14 grant makers are
participating.
Steven’s also working on the international Open Contracting data
standard (http://standard.open-contracting.org/), where the Open Data
publishing pioneers are the Colombian and Mexican governments. With an
estimated US$9.5 trillion being spent every year on government
contracts, transparency in this area could help to hem in and expose
corruption and mismanagement.
A healthy Open Data ecosystem also requires feedback loops, and for
Open Data these should be super-responsive. The Citizens Advice Bureau
in the UK does this well; Steven showed us one of their Web pages
which in near real time shows which are the main topics people are
searching on from the CAB.
Finally, a healthy Open Data ecosystem needs the engagement of people.
At the moment, the Open Data system does tend to look like this: young
men, at a weekend, gathered around laptops and with pizza. What the
scene needs is greater diversity. That is one reason that Steven is
involved in the Manchester CoderDojo project, which monthly gathers
large numbers of young people to engage with coding and data. You can
find out more about that here: http://mcrcoderdojo.org.uk/ Five years
ago, the average participant was age 15; now, it is age 10!
In discussion: where does the data come from?
One of our number (Stuart) said that in the presentations, almost all
of the ‘supply’ side had come from the public sector (or NGOs). What
was the private sector contributing? Mark said that this is generally
true; but the UK Department for International Development (DfID) now
require all of their international contractors to publish IATI open
data about their contract work: the contracting firm Capita is a case
in point.
The Open Contracting programme is also interesting here, and the
biggest driver in that is the World Bank, plus very large contracting
organisations such as IBM who think they will benefit from
transparency.
In discussion: Open and Big Data
Graham Robertson wondered what intersect there was between Open Data
and Big Data. Steven said that personally he works with organisations
publishing small datasets, but through their openness they do connect
into something larger. Steve Dale thought that ‘Big Data’ has a
meaning that is hard to pin down; one organisation’s Big might be
another’s Small.
Graham wondered if the huge volumes of data now processed in weather
forecasting provide an example of Big Data. I think they do, and even
larger volumes are processed in the supercomputers of the Hadley
Centre for Climate Change which is co-located in Exeter. Developing,
testing and running climate change prediction models also benefits
increasingly for Open Data, as nearly 90 countries and as many
international organisations now share sensor data and observations
from platforms from the ocean bed to outer space, through GEOSS (the
Global Earth Observation System of Systems).
In discussion: privacy issues
We did along the way have a discussion about the interrelation between
the openness of data, and the privacy of individuals on whom that data
is based: health data being a particularly sensitive case. To what
extent can data really be anonymised, when location information is
also implicated, or anything else which might identify a data subject?
I described some recent voluntary work for Tollgate Lodge Health
Centre in Stoke Newington, in which I examined demographics data from
the Census about family size and age profiles of the population in
Hackney. At a Borough level, age data can be obtained at single-year
granularity; at Ward level, the population is aggregated into age
bands; and the bands are even coarser ond more aggregated if
geographically you go down to Super Output Areas.
Steve came up with an example of how Open Data about taxi journeys in
New York had been collated by someone with tweets by celebrities about
their taxi journeys, leading to the possibility of figuring who had
made what journeys. It’s worth remembering that potentially we are
shedding flakes of data all the time, like dandruff.
In discussion: a skill gap?
From his experience of the data sector in Manchester, Steven said that
business complains that they can’t find people with the relevant
skills, and why can the schools address this better? But on the other
hand, industry is also unclear about what skills it will need in five
years’ time. Perhaps we would do well to think about ‘data literacy’,
and he feels pretty sure that the kids with whom he was about to start
working might not know how to interpret a graph or a data map.
Steve Dale referred back to the previous NetIKX meeting (see blog post
here: https://netikx.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/seek-and-you-will-find-wednesday-18th-march-2015/)
and observations made by the speaker Tony Hirst. Tony has said that
people these days tend to trust too much in algorithms without asking
what it does or who made it; from that it follows that excessive trust
is placed in the output of those algorithms. The pre-election
predictions of the pollster algorithms certainly went wrong!
Stuart Ward (Forward Consulting) thought that driving Open Data and
gaining organisational advantage from it, requires information
officers to be encouraged to be pro-active in contacting their peers
in other organisations, actively looking for opportunities to
collaborate (as indeed does seem to have been happening in local
government).
Steven reported on an interesting collaboration between WaterAid and
JPMorgan. The latter has an undergraduate programme to find the best
talent and recruit them, and they set these people to work on
WaterAid’s open data, e.g. to produce visualisations; thus they could
spot the best people to employ in their business.
In discussion: miscellaneous thoughts
As for me, I wondered if too great a concentration on the value of
data in research might have the unfortunate effect of further
sidelining qualitative forms of enquiry in the social sciences and in
knowledge management. Both forms of enquiry have their value, and it
is interesting to note approaches which link narrative enquiry to
big-data scale, as is possible using Cognitive Edge’s SenseMaker
software and methods (See explanation by Dave Snowden at
http://www.sensemaker-suite.com/)
How well is the UK placed in a ‘league table’ of countries doing Open
Data? Our speakers thought pretty much at the top, followed by the
USA; Steve Dale though France had claimed the lead. The 2014 index
maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation, for what it is worth,
ranks UK first at ‘97% open’, France third at 80%, and the USA in
eighth place at 70% open (see http://index.okfn.org/place/).
In Britain there has been an interesting history of struggle over
barriers that haven’t been present in the USA: for example, their
postcode data has always been open-access, whereas it took a bit of a
battle to get Royal Mail to open it up. People who want to know more
about the history and status of address data in the UK would do well
to read the report and listen to the MP3 podcasts from the recent
‘Address Day’ conference organised by the BCS Location Information
Specialist Group.
Twitter
A certain amount of tweeting was done through the afternoon — the
hashtag was #netikx73
;
Connecting Knowledge Communities – 23 September 2015
/in Developing and exploiting information and knowledge, Netikx/by AlisonSyndicate session in progress
The aim of this meeting was to bring together at least some of the UK communities concerned with knowledge and informatin management. These communities and organisations have different emphases, different modes of operation and even different approaches to membership. Some have regular meetings and a paid membership, while others are virtual and have no formal status or funds. Between these two extremes, there are many variants. In addition, different communities draw their members from different groups, both in terms of occupation and of industry.
NetIKX invited a range of such communities and organisations based in the UK, but mainly in London, to give short presentations on their genesis, membership and operation.
Communities that accepted this invitation and those who spoke on their behalf were:
Claire Parry spoke on behalf of NetIKX itself.
In addition, although not able to make a presentation at the meeting, David Gurteen and SLA Europe (the European Chapter of the Special Libraries Association) indicated that they were happy to support and be associated with the event. LIKE (London Information and Knowledge Exchange), CILIP and TFPL Connect-Ed also expressed interest in this initiative.
Each speaker described (in different ways) how their organisation came into being, how it operates and who its members are. The presentations, including one on NetIKX itself, were divided into pairs, each followed by the usual NetIKX syndicate session, within which there was discussion of individual experience of networking groups and whether there is scope for these groups to collaborate and, if so, how it might be done.
While not leading directly to any future cooperation, this meeting provided a basis upon which there could be future developments. In the mean time, all those who attended have a better idea of the organisations that meet the needs of the knowledge and information communities and how they operate.
September 2015 Seminar: Connecting Knowledge Communities
/in Events 2015, K and I sharing: networking, Knowledge and information sharing, Previous Events/by Netikx EventsSummary
The aim of this meeting was to bring together at least some of the UK communities concerned with knowledge and information management. These communities and organisations have different emphases, different modes of operation and even different approaches to membership. Some have regular meetings and a paid membership, while others are virtual and have no formal status or funds. Between these two extremes, there are many variants. In addition, different communities draw their members from different groups, both in terms of occupation and of industry.
NetIKX invited a range of such communities and organisations based in the UK, but mainly in London, to give short presentations on their genesis, membership and operation.
Communities that accepted this invitation and those who spoke on their behalf were:
In addition, although not able to make a presentation at the meeting, David Gurteen and SLA Europe (the European Chapter of the Special Libraries Association) indicated that they were happy to support and be associated with the event. LIKE (London Information and Knowledge Exchange), CILIP and TFPL Connect-Ed also expressed interest in this initiative.
Each speaker described (in different ways) how their organisation came into being, how it operates and who its members are. The presentations, including one on NetIKX itself, were divided into pairs, each followed by the usual NetIKX syndicate session, within which there was discussion of individual experience of networking groups and whether there is scope for these groups to collaborate and, if so, how it might be done.
While not leading directly to any future cooperation, this meeting provided a basis upon which there could be future developments. In the mean time, all those who attended have a better idea of the organisations that meet the needs of the knowledge and information communities and how they operate.
Speakers
See report above
Time and Venue
2pm on 23rd September 2015, The British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8YS
Pre Event Information
None
Slides
None
Tweets
#netikx75
Blog
See our blog report: Connecting Knowledge Communities
Study Suggestions
None
Hillsborough : Information Work and Helping People – July 21 2015
/in Harnessing the web for information and knowledge exchange, Managing information and knowledge, Netikx, Protecting information and knowledge/by AlisonJan Parry , CILIP’s President, gave a talk to NetIKX at the British Dental Association on the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989 and her role with the Hillsborough Independent Panel set up in 2009 to oversee the release of documents arising from the tragedy in which 96 people lost their lives at an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest held at Hillsborough, the home ground of Sheffield Wednesday FC. It was a very thought provoking talk which was received in near silence. Jan began by outlining the previous signals of potential disaster that had occurred in the 1980’s when serious ‘crushing’ incidents took place in the “pens” – standing areas in front of the West Stand accessed by gates on Lepping Lanes. She then talked about the day in question where Liverpool fans arrived late after being delayed by roadworks on the M62, traffic flowed along Leppings Lane until 38 minutes before the kick off and there was no managed queues at the turnstiles. The “pens” were full 10 minutes before the match started. There was a lack of signs and stewarding to direct fans to other standing areas. At 3:00pm crowds were still outside the turnstiles and the police Chief Superintendant in charge – who had been appointed to oversee policing on the day a little before the semi-final event itself – gave an order to open the gates. There was a rush of fans towards the “pens” – people at the front were pushed forward, crushing and fatalities took place quickly. At 3:06pm the game was stopped. Then there was a Police Control Box Meeting at 3:15pm. The gymnasium became a temporary mortuary and witness statements started to be taken.
Official investigations began – Lord Justice Taylor (1990); West Midlands Police investigated South Yorks Police (1990); The Inquest (1990); Lord Justice Smith Scrutiny (1998). On the 20th anniversary memorial Andy Burnham (then a government minister) called for the early release of all documents. The Hillsborough Independent Panel was set up. Jan’s role was to undertake research and families disclosure :- oversee document discovery; manage information; consult the families. It began with finding family information – there were 3 established groups of families and all the other families as well.
There were lots of issues. Significantly, there had been a big impact on the mental health of the families involved in the tragedy. Also, regarding documents – that is, getting hold of them, it needed real persuasion to obtain them. Following on from that the documents had to be scanned, digitised, catalogued and redacted on a secure system. This called for researchers with medical knowledge too. What came out of this great exercise ?
In essence, the last valid safety certificate for the football stadium was issued in 1979; the code word for a “major incident” was never used; there was poor communication between ALL agencies; there was minimal medical treatment at the ground; witness statements had been changed; information on “The Sun’s” notorious leading article was obtained. Having achieved so much a disclosure day was put in the calendar – 12th September 2012. Again, the families were put first and informed that 41 victims could have lived.
On Disclosure Day itself PM David Cameron publicly apologised for the tragedy. The report was put on the website. Note that this website is a permanent archive for the documents : http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk Disclosure had quite an impact – Sir Norman Bettinson (Chief Constable of South York at the time of the tragedy) resigned; the original inquests were quashed. Now there are new inquests and inquiries. Lord Justice Golding started a new Inquest in March 2014. There is an IPCC investigation and a Police investigation into misconduct or criminal behaviour by police officers post-tragedy. Coroners Rules 1984 have been tightened up regarding consistency of classes of documents. Police Force records have been put under legislative control. Crucially, for the families and Information Professionals records discovery and information management delivered the truth.
Jan showed a couple of video clips during her talk these are available from the Report pages online but you need to scroll down to the bottom of the page :
http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/report/main-section/part-1/page-4/
http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/report/main-section/part-1/page-7/
Rob Rosset
July 2015 Seminar: Hillsborough – Information Work and Helping People and NetIKX AGM
/in Developing and exploiting information and knowledge, Events 2015, Previous Events/by Netikx EventsSummary
We welcomed Jan Parry, President of CILIP, to talk about her role in the Hillsborough Inquiry. This meeting was preceded by the NetIKX AGM. Jan Parry explained how, after 23 years, records and information revealed the truth about the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster. She was the only Information Professional on the secretariat of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose report in 2012 revealed what was found in over 450,000 documents they reviewed.
Jan took us through the events and moments leading to the tragedy and its aftermath, including video footage, and talked about the formation of the Panel and its work, together with the work of the information professionals involved in the background. The work has led to two new ongoing inquiries and a new inquest.
Speakers
Jan Parry is CILIP’s current President and she is also Chair of the Network of Government Library and Information Specialists (NGLIS). Jan had a long library and information career within the Civil Service. She started in the Health and Safety Executive working in the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate Library. She managed two libraries and then moved on to top-level government work, implementing a Whitehall wide ministerial briefing system. She joined the Home Office in 2001 and worked on various programmes and projects, including the Tackling Gangs programme, Home Office Reform and developing an Information Centre out of the Home Office Library. In 2009 Jan was asked be part of the secretariat of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, where she had to find all the bereaved families of the 96 who died at the disaster and plan the final Panel disclosure at Liverpool Cathedral.
Time and Venue
2pm on 21st July 2015, The British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8YS
Pre Event Information
Learning Objectives
. Recognising the role of records discovery and records management
. Appreciating the significance of information management and advocacy
. Understanding the importance of planned public disclosure
Slides
Not currently available
Tweets
#netikx74
Blog
See our blog report: Hillsborough : Information Work and Helping People
Study Suggestions
You may want to read more by Jan Parry:
http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/report/main-section/part-1/page-4/
http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/report/main-section/part-1/page-7/
NetIKX meeting about Open Data (14th May 2015)
/in Data, Netikx/by AlisonWrite-up by Conrad Taylor (rapporteur)
The May 2015 meeting of the Network for Information and Knowledge
Exchange took Open Data as its subject. There was a smaller crowd than
usual, about 15 people in total, and rather than splitting into table
discussion groups halfway, as NetIKX meetings usually do, we kept
together for one extended conversation of about two and a half hours,
with Q&A sprinkled throughout.
The meeting had been organised by Steve Dale, who also chaired. As
first speaker he had invited Mark Braggins, whom he had met while
working on the Local Government Association’s Knowledge Hub project.
Mark was on the advisory board for that project, having previously
played a role in setting up the Hampshire Hub, which he later
described. Mark’s co-speaker was Steven Flower, an independent
consultant in Open Data applications with experience of the technical
implementations of Open Data.
The slide sets for the meeting can be found HERE and HERE
Introducing Open Data
Mark started with an introduction to and definition of Open Data:
briefly put, it is data that has been made publicly available in a
suitable form, and with permissions, so that anyone can freely use it
and re-use it, for any purpose, at no cost; the only constraint is
that usually the licence requires the user to acknowledge and
attribute the source of the data.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor the the Web, has suggested a five-star
categorisation scheme for Open Data, which is explained at the Web
site http://5stardata.info. The lowest level, deserving one star, is
when you make your data available on the Web in any format, under an
open licence; it could be in a PDF document for example, or even a Web
graphic, and it needs a human to interpret it. You can claim two stars
if the data is put online in a structured form, for example in an
Excel spreadsheet, and three stars if the data is structured but also
in a non-proprietary format, such as a CSV file.
If your data is structured as a bunch of entities, each of which has a
Uniform Resource Indicator (URI) so it can be independently referenced
over the Internet, you deserve a fourth star, and if you then link
your data to other data sources, creating Open Linked Data, you can
claim that fifth star.
Steve Flower came in at this point and explained that his experience
is that most organisations who are going down the Open Data road are
at the three-star level. Moving further along requires some technical
knowledge, expertise and resource.
Mark displayed for us a list of organisations which publish Open Data,
and some of them are really large. The World Bank is a leader in this
(see http://data.worldbank.org). The UK Government’s datastore is at
http://data.gov.uk, and that references data published by a wide
variety of organisations. Some local government authorities publish
open data: London has the London Data Store, Bristol has Open Data
Bristol, Manchester has Open GM, Birmingham has its Data Factory,
Hampshire has its Hub and the London Borough of Lambeth has Lambeth in
Numbers. A good ‘five star’ example is the Open Data Communities
resource of the Department for Communities and Local Government
(DCLG).
Asked how the notion of Open Data relates to copyright, Mark explained
that essential to data having Open status is that it must be made
available with a licence which explicitly bestows those re-use rights.
In the UK, for government data, the relevant license is usually the
Open Government License, OGL. Other organisations often use a Creative
Commons license.
A key driver for national government departments, and local government
too, to get involved in the world of Open Data is that these bodies
now operate under an obligation to be transparent, for example local
government bodies are obliged to publish data about each item of
expenditure over £500 and about contracts they have awarded. Similar
requirements are driving Open Data also in the USA.
Mark recommended that anyone with an interest in Open Data must take a
look at the Web site of Owen Boswarva (http://www.owenboswarva.com/)
which has a number of demo examples of maps driven by Open Data.
I asked if the speakers knew of example of Open Data in the sciences.
Steven said that in the Open Data Manchester meetings which he
organises, they had had an interesting talk from a Manchester academic, Prof Carole Goble about experimental data being made available ‘openly’ in support of a
transparent scientific process and reproduceability. (Open Data is one of the ‘legs’ of a wider project dubbed Open Science, in which one publishes not only conclusions but also experimental data.)
Some Examples
Mark then illustrated how Open Data works and what benefits it can
bring with a number of examples. His first example was a map
visualisation based on a variety of data sources, which was
constructed for the Mayor of Trafford to discover where it would make
most sense to locate some extra defibrillators in the community. A mix
of data sources, some open and some closed, were tapped to inform the
decision making: population densities, venue footfall, age profiles,
venues with first-aiders on the staff, ambulance call-out data.
Happily, there is now real proof that the defibrillators which were
distributed be means of this evidence have been used and have
undoubtedly saved lives.
Mark’s second example was from Hampshire. A company called Nquiring
Minds has taken Open Data from a variety of sources, and used a
utility to construct an interactive map illustrating predictions of
the pressure from users on GP surgeries, looking forward year by year
to the year 2020. You can see this map and interact with it by going
to http://gpmap.ubiapps.com. This kind of application can inform
public policy debates and planning. (incidentally, that project was
funded by Innovate UK, the former Technology Strategy Board).
Steven described another health-and-location-data project which
gathered together statistics about the prescribing of statin
medication by GPs, in particular looking at where big-name-pharma
branded statins were being prescribed, at some considerable expense to
the NHS and public purse, compared to surgeries where cheaper generic
statins were being prescribed.
Another example was about a database system whereby universities can
share specialised scientific equipment with each other. (Take a look
at this at http://equipment.data.ac.uk.) The project was funded by
EPSRC. Of course it was important that the participating institutions
agreed a standard for which data should be shared (what fields, what
units of measure etc); and establishing this standard was perhaps the
most time-consuming part of getting the scheme going.
A very attractive example shown was the global Wind Map created by
Cameron Beccario. Using publicly available earth observation and
meteorological data from a variety of sources, and using a JavaScript
library called D3 (http://d3js.org), he has constructed a Web site
that in its initial appearance animates a display of wind direction
and velocity in animated form for everywhere in the world.
The Wind Map site is at http://earth.nullschool.net and it is worth
looking at. You can spin the globe around and if you sample a point on
the surface you will get a readout of latitude, longitude, wind speed
and direction. In fact it’s more than a wind map because you can also
switch to view other forms of data such as ocean currents, temperature
and humidity for either atmosphere or ocean, and you can change from
the default rotatable globe to a variety of map projections. While you
are there you can see what data source is being accessed for each
display. (Thanks to a minimalist interface design this is not at all
obvious but if you click on the word ‘earth’ a control menu will
reveal itself.)
About the Hampshire Hub
Mark then turned to the example closest to his heart, the Hampshire
Hub (http://www.hampshirehub.net). This is a collaboration between 22
partnering organisations, including the County Council, three unitary
authorities and 11 district councils, the Ordnance Survey, the police
and fire services, the Department for Communities and Local
Government, the British Army and two national parks. A lot of the data
is ‘five-star’ quality. That’s not true of all the sources, for
example Portsmouth health data is posted as Excel spreadsheets, but
there is an ongoing process over time to try to turn as much as is
practical into Linked Open Data.
Together with these data components, the Hub site also hosts articles,
news, tweets etc. and other kinds of ‘softer’ and contextual
information.
The site gives access to Area Profiles, which are automatically
generated from the data, with charts from which one can drill down to
the original datasets.
Building new projects around the Hampshire Hub
Around these original data resources, new initiatives are popping up
to both build on the datasets and contribute back to the ecosystem
with an open licence. An example which Mark displayed is the Flood
Event Model, which combines historical data with current environmental
conditions to attempt predictions of which places might be most at
risk from a severe weather event. It has taken quite a bit of effort
to use historical data to elicit hypotheses about chains of causation,
then re-test those against other more recent datasets, and as new
datasets can be linked into such as from the Met Office and the
Environment Agency, a really useful tool can emerge. And this could
have very practical benefits for advising the public and planning
emergency response.
Another example project is Landscape Watch Hampshire, which is sharing
a rather complex type of data: aerial photography from 2005 and 2013.
To compare these with the aim of documenting changes to the landscape
and its use really requires humans, so the plan of Hampshire’s
collaboration with the University of Portsmouth and Remote Sensing
Applications Consultants Ltd is to crowdsource analytical input from
the public. This is explained in more detail at
http://www.hampshirehub.net/initiatives/crowdsourcing-landscape-change.
Another initiative around the Hampshire Hub is to link open data
around planning applications. There is a major problem in keeping tabs
of planning applications because they are lodged with many different
planning authorities and in ways that don’t inter-operate, and if your
area is on the border between planning jurisdictions, it’s all the
more problematic. And this despite the fact that for example the
building of a hypermarket or the siting of a bypass has effects which
radiate for dozens of miles around.
Hampshire has taken the lead together with neighbour Surrey but also
with Manchester to determine what might be an appropriate standard
form in which planning data could be exported to be shared as Open
Data. The Open Data User Group (a ministerial advisory body to the
Cabinet Office) is building on this work.
Mark finished his part of the presentation by mentioning the Open
Data Camp event in Winchester, 21–22 February 2015 (including Open
Data Day). Over 100 people attended this first UK conference on Open
Data which he described as ‘super fun’. See http://www.odcamp.org.uk
where there are many stories and blogposts about the event and the
varied interests of participants in Open Data. Similar ‘camps’ coming
up are BlueLightCamp (Birmingham, 6–7 June), LocalGovCamp, UKGovCamp
and GovCamp Cymru.
The Open Data Ecosystem
Steven Flower spoke for a shorter time, and structured his talk around
the past, the present and our future relationship to Data; slightly
separately, the business of being Open; and the whole ecosystem that
Open Data works within. Steven is an independent consultant helping
organisations with implementing Open Data, many of then
non-governmental aid organisations, and indeed that morning he had had
a meeting with WaterAid.
When Steven has conversations with groups in organisations about their
data and how and why they want to make it ‘open’, often various kinds
of diagram are resorted to in order to articulate their ideas. Mostly
these are ‘network diagrams’, boxes and arrows, blobs joined by lines,
entities and their interrelationships. Sometimes the connected blobs
are machines, sometimes they are data entities, sometimes they are
people or departments.
In New York City their diagrams (which are quite pretty) show
‘islands’ or more properly floating clusters of datasets, mostly
tightly gathered around city functions such as transport, education,
the police; with other datasets being tethered ‘offshore’ and some
tied up to two or three such clusters. Some diagramming focuses more
on the drivers behind Open Data projects, and the kinds of people they
are meant to serve.
Past and present attitudes to data
Steven took us back with a few slides to the days when there were few
computers, and later when there were just 25 million Web pages. Now
the Internet has mushroomed almost beyond comprehension of its scope.
Perhaps when it comes to Open Data, we are still in ‘the early days’.
And data is something we are just not comfortable with. We struggle to
manage it, to exercise governance and security over it. We can’t
easily get our heads around it, it seems so abstract.
It seems that big companies get data, and they get Big Data. Tesco
aggregates, segregates and analyses its customers’ shopping
preferences through its Clubcard scheme. Spotify has been buying
companies such as The Echo Nest, whose software can help them analyse
what customers listen to, and might want to listen to next.
More and more people carry a ‘smartphone’, and these are not only the
means to access data: we continuously leak data whether deliberately
in the form of tweets, or unconsciously as GPS notes where we are.
People increasingly wear devices such as the FitBit which monitor our
personal health data. Sensors in people’s homes, smoke alarms and
security cameras for example, are being hooked up to the Internet
(‘the Internet of Things’) so they can communicate with us when they
are out.
People and organisations also worry about the ‘Open’ bit. Does it mean
we lose control of our personal data profile? If there is an
uncomfortableness about Open Data, why might we want to do this?
As an object to think about Steven offered us Mount Everest. It is
8,850 metres high (that is data). Digging deeper, Everest has a rich
set of attributes. Under the surface there is a complex geology, and
it is being pushed up by tectonic plate movements. Recently, one of
those movements resulted in an earthquake and thousands of deaths. To
help in this situation have come a number of volunteers from the Open
Streetmap community, who are working collaboratively to fill in the
gaps in mapping, something which can greatly benefit interventions in
disasters (the same community helped out during the Haiti earthquake).
Given a defined framework for location data, the task can be split up
into jobs, farmed out to volunteer teams and collected in a database.
Turning to his personal experience of Open Data projects, Steven gave
us a view of ‘past, present and future’. Around 2007, he was involved
in setting up a service called ‘Plings’ (places to go, things to do)
which merged data from various sources into a system so that young
people could find activities.
Moving to the present, Steven touched on a number of Open Data
projects with which he is involved. WaterAid is one of a number of
charities which believes strongly in transparency about how it works,
how it spends funds and so on. They are involved in an project called
the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which is building a
standard for sharing data about aid programmes. He showed us a
screenful of data about a WaterAid project in Nepal, structured in
XML.
Published as Open Data, this information can then be accessed and used
in a number of ways. Some of this is internal to the organisation so
they can make better sense of what they are doing, but because it is
Open Data it can also be visualised externally, and Steven showed us
some screens from the Development Portal (http://d-portal.org),
displaying IATI data sourced from WaterAid.
As data on situations requiring overseas aid and disaster
interventions is shared more transparently, it should become more
possible for use data as the basis of better aid delivery decisions.
The future generation, the future view
And what of the future? Well, in Steven’s immediate future, just a few
days ahead, he said he would be working with a group of schoolchildren
in Stockport, who have ‘Smart Citizen’ miniature computers in their
school, based on an Arduino board with an ‘Urban Shield’ board
attached. The sensors on this apparatus harvest data about
temperature, humidity, nitrous oxide and carbon monoxide emissions,
light and noise, and their data is uploaded and shared on the Smart
Citizen Web site (https://smartcitizen.me/). Thus the school is
joining a worldwide project with over a thousand deployed devices.
I personally know of a very similar project in South Lambeth, where a
school is collaborating with a school science project called Loop Labs
founded by Nicky Gavron, a member of the London Assembly. The Lambeth
project differs in a number of respects: it is focused only on the air
quality data, but rather that having a single sensor in the classroom
they have a number of ‘air quality egg’ sensors deployed to the
children’s homes to get local comparison data. Also, the Loop Labs
project is strongly linked to environmental health issues.
Where the Salford schools project looks like being really
adventurously pioneering is in the ways they aim to use the data
harvest locally. Spreadsheets is one option, but how cool are they?
Steven hope that the data can be sucked into the Minecraft environment
for building virtual items assembled from blocks, and maybe data
patterns can be made audible by transforming the values captured into
the code that programs the Sonic Pi music synthesiser software for
Raspberry Pi, Mac OS X and Windows (Google that, download the code and
play with it — great fun!).
The schoolkids have also used 3D printing to create a small fleet of
Cannybots — or rather, as I understand it, what you 3D print is a kind
of Airfix kit for the casing and then you install a small circuit
board with an ARM processor on it, plus Bluetooth communication for
control (see http://cannybots.com/overview.html). The next step will
be to use the data from their Citizen Science sensor to drive patterns
of behaviour in the mini robots. There is no guarantee that this will
work, but that is the nature of the future!
What does an Ecosystem need?
To be healthy, any ecosystem for Open Data absolutely require
standards, and the IATI standard is an example of that in action.
Steven is also working on a standard for a project called 360 Giving
(http://threesixtygiving.org/), which is a movement that encourages UK
grant makers and philanthropists to publish their grant information
online. It is a small beginning but currently 14 grant makers are
participating.
Steven’s also working on the international Open Contracting data
standard (http://standard.open-contracting.org/), where the Open Data
publishing pioneers are the Colombian and Mexican governments. With an
estimated US$9.5 trillion being spent every year on government
contracts, transparency in this area could help to hem in and expose
corruption and mismanagement.
A healthy Open Data ecosystem also requires feedback loops, and for
Open Data these should be super-responsive. The Citizens Advice Bureau
in the UK does this well; Steven showed us one of their Web pages
which in near real time shows which are the main topics people are
searching on from the CAB.
Finally, a healthy Open Data ecosystem needs the engagement of people.
At the moment, the Open Data system does tend to look like this: young
men, at a weekend, gathered around laptops and with pizza. What the
scene needs is greater diversity. That is one reason that Steven is
involved in the Manchester CoderDojo project, which monthly gathers
large numbers of young people to engage with coding and data. You can
find out more about that here: http://mcrcoderdojo.org.uk/ Five years
ago, the average participant was age 15; now, it is age 10!
In discussion: where does the data come from?
One of our number (Stuart) said that in the presentations, almost all
of the ‘supply’ side had come from the public sector (or NGOs). What
was the private sector contributing? Mark said that this is generally
true; but the UK Department for International Development (DfID) now
require all of their international contractors to publish IATI open
data about their contract work: the contracting firm Capita is a case
in point.
The Open Contracting programme is also interesting here, and the
biggest driver in that is the World Bank, plus very large contracting
organisations such as IBM who think they will benefit from
transparency.
In discussion: Open and Big Data
Graham Robertson wondered what intersect there was between Open Data
and Big Data. Steven said that personally he works with organisations
publishing small datasets, but through their openness they do connect
into something larger. Steve Dale thought that ‘Big Data’ has a
meaning that is hard to pin down; one organisation’s Big might be
another’s Small.
Graham wondered if the huge volumes of data now processed in weather
forecasting provide an example of Big Data. I think they do, and even
larger volumes are processed in the supercomputers of the Hadley
Centre for Climate Change which is co-located in Exeter. Developing,
testing and running climate change prediction models also benefits
increasingly for Open Data, as nearly 90 countries and as many
international organisations now share sensor data and observations
from platforms from the ocean bed to outer space, through GEOSS (the
Global Earth Observation System of Systems).
In discussion: privacy issues
We did along the way have a discussion about the interrelation between
the openness of data, and the privacy of individuals on whom that data
is based: health data being a particularly sensitive case. To what
extent can data really be anonymised, when location information is
also implicated, or anything else which might identify a data subject?
I described some recent voluntary work for Tollgate Lodge Health
Centre in Stoke Newington, in which I examined demographics data from
the Census about family size and age profiles of the population in
Hackney. At a Borough level, age data can be obtained at single-year
granularity; at Ward level, the population is aggregated into age
bands; and the bands are even coarser ond more aggregated if
geographically you go down to Super Output Areas.
Steve came up with an example of how Open Data about taxi journeys in
New York had been collated by someone with tweets by celebrities about
their taxi journeys, leading to the possibility of figuring who had
made what journeys. It’s worth remembering that potentially we are
shedding flakes of data all the time, like dandruff.
In discussion: a skill gap?
From his experience of the data sector in Manchester, Steven said that
business complains that they can’t find people with the relevant
skills, and why can the schools address this better? But on the other
hand, industry is also unclear about what skills it will need in five
years’ time. Perhaps we would do well to think about ‘data literacy’,
and he feels pretty sure that the kids with whom he was about to start
working might not know how to interpret a graph or a data map.
Steve Dale referred back to the previous NetIKX meeting (see blog post
here: https://netikx.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/seek-and-you-will-find-wednesday-18th-march-2015/)
and observations made by the speaker Tony Hirst. Tony has said that
people these days tend to trust too much in algorithms without asking
what it does or who made it; from that it follows that excessive trust
is placed in the output of those algorithms. The pre-election
predictions of the pollster algorithms certainly went wrong!
Stuart Ward (Forward Consulting) thought that driving Open Data and
gaining organisational advantage from it, requires information
officers to be encouraged to be pro-active in contacting their peers
in other organisations, actively looking for opportunities to
collaborate (as indeed does seem to have been happening in local
government).
Steven reported on an interesting collaboration between WaterAid and
JPMorgan. The latter has an undergraduate programme to find the best
talent and recruit them, and they set these people to work on
WaterAid’s open data, e.g. to produce visualisations; thus they could
spot the best people to employ in their business.
In discussion: miscellaneous thoughts
As for me, I wondered if too great a concentration on the value of
data in research might have the unfortunate effect of further
sidelining qualitative forms of enquiry in the social sciences and in
knowledge management. Both forms of enquiry have their value, and it
is interesting to note approaches which link narrative enquiry to
big-data scale, as is possible using Cognitive Edge’s SenseMaker
software and methods (See explanation by Dave Snowden at
http://www.sensemaker-suite.com/)
How well is the UK placed in a ‘league table’ of countries doing Open
Data? Our speakers thought pretty much at the top, followed by the
USA; Steve Dale though France had claimed the lead. The 2014 index
maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation, for what it is worth,
ranks UK first at ‘97% open’, France third at 80%, and the USA in
eighth place at 70% open (see http://index.okfn.org/place/).
In Britain there has been an interesting history of struggle over
barriers that haven’t been present in the USA: for example, their
postcode data has always been open-access, whereas it took a bit of a
battle to get Royal Mail to open it up. People who want to know more
about the history and status of address data in the UK would do well
to read the report and listen to the MP3 podcasts from the recent
‘Address Day’ conference organised by the BCS Location Information
Specialist Group.
Twitter
A certain amount of tweeting was done through the afternoon — the
hashtag was #netikx73
May 2015 Seminar: Open Data – Products, Services and Standards.
/in Events 2015, K and I sharing: open data, Knowledge and information sharing, Previous Events/by Netikx EventsSummary
25 years ago, Sir Tim Berners Lee set out his vision for the World Wide Web by proposing a set of technologies that would make the Internet more accessible and useful. Since then, the web has transformed our global community by allowing us to freely share information with each other. When open and accessible for all to use, data has driven change in government, business and culture. Businesses use open data to innovate and to build trust with their customers through greater transparency. Governments are opening up their data to improve their efficiency, and so that citizens can hold them to account.
However, the open data ecology is still evolving. Standards have yet to be widely accepted and implemented. Accuracy, quality and availability of open data; the specialist skills needed to support and maintain it, and concerns about privacy, are all issues that have so far limited faster growth in this market.
But the future looks bright. This seminar looked at the progress being made in delivering value-added products and services in both government/public and private sectors. We were privileged to have two expert speakers and open data advocates, Mark Braggins and Steven Flower, who both have many years experience in delivering data products and services. They discussed a number of case studies and innovative solutions that are delivering value through open data applications.
Speakers
Mark Braggins is a ‘digital innovator’ who founded ‘Hampshire Hub’ – Hampshire’s local information system and evolving open data ecosystem. Mark is the lead organiser for Open Data Camp – the unconference and networking event for the UK Open Data Movement, the first of which was held in Winchester in February 2015. He is a co-organiser of BlueLightCamp – the annual unconference and open data hack for the Emergency Services community, and is a member of British APCO’s Executive Committee. Mark has a background delivering, managing and exploiting technology across a variety of sectors, including financial services, retail, computer services and most recently, research and intelligence in local government.
Steven Flowerhas a long and varied history in “civic technology”. Whether building open data platforms for community events or standardising information on international aid, Steven has always worked alongside organisations and institutions that strive for societal benefit. As well as open data initiatives, Steven also organises the monthly Manchester CoderDojo – a youth group for coders and makers. In April 2015, Steven co-founded the Open Data Services Co-Operative – an organisation dedicated to assisting those that wish to publish and/or use open data.
Time and Venue
2pm on 14th May 2015, The British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8YS
Pre Event Information
Learning Objectives
To understand what is meant by the term ‘open data’, where to find open data and how it is being used to create value-added products and services
To recognise the benefits and potential risks in using open data products and services
To be able to apply relevant standards and protocols for the publication and support of open data
Slides
Currrently not available
Tweets
#netikx73
Blog
See our blog report: NetIKX meeting about Open Data
Study Suggestions
None
Seek and you will find? Wednesday 18th March 2015
/in Developing and exploiting information and knowledge, Harnessing the web for information and knowledge exchange, Managing information and knowledge, Netikx/by AlisonWe had two excellent speakers for our Seminar on 18th March, entitled “Search and you will find?” Karen Blakeman and Tony Hirst. The question mark in the title was deliberate, since the underlying message was that search and discovery might sometimes throw up the unexpected.
Learning objectives for the day were:
Karen Blakeman delivered an informative and thought-provoking talk about our possibly misplaced reliance on Google search results. She discussed how Google is undergoing major changes in the way it analyses our searches and presents results, which are influenced by what we’ve searched for previously and information pulled from our social media circles. She also covered how EU regulations are dictating what the likes of Google can and cannot display in their results.
Amongst many examples that Karen gave of imperfect search results, this one of Henry VIII’s wives stood out – note the image of Jane Seymour, where Google has sourced the image of the actress Jane Seymour.
This is an obvious and easily spotted error, others are far subtler, and probably go unnoticed by the vast majority of search users. The problem, as Karen explained, is that Google does not always provide attribution for where it is sourcing its results, and where attribution is provided, the user must (or should) decide whether this is a reliable or authoritative source. Users beware if searching for medical or allergy symptoms; the sources can be arbitrary and not necessarily from authoritative medical websites. It would appear that Google’s algorithms decide what is scientific fact and what is aggregated opinion!
The clear message was to use Google as a filter to point us to likely answers to our queries, but to apply more detailed analysis of the search results before assuming the information is correct.
Karen’s slides are available at: http://www.rba.co.uk/as/
Tony Hirst gave us an introduction into the world of data analytics and data visualisation and challenges of abstracting meaning from large datasets. Techniques such as data mining and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) use machine learning and powerful statistics to help us discover new insights from ever-larger datasets. Tony gave us an insight into some of the analytical techniques and the risks associated with using them. In particular, if we leave decision making up to machines and the algorithms inside them, are we introducing new forms of bias that human decision makers might avoid? What do we, as practitioners need to know in order to use these tools in a responsible way?
As Tony explained, the most effective data analysis comes down to discovering relationships and patterns that would otherwise be missed by looking at just one dataset in isolation, or analysing data in ranked lists. Multifaceted data analysis, using – for example – datasets applied to maps, can give unique visualisations and more insightful sense making.
Amongst many other techniques, Tony discussed Concordance Correlation, Lexical Dispersion, Partial (Fuzzy) String Matching and Anscombe’s Quartet.
Tony’s slides will be available at: http://www.slideshare.net/psychemedia
Following the keynote presentations from Karen and Tony, the following questions were put to the delegates:
The delegates moved into three groups to discuss and respond to these questions (one group per question). The plenary feedback as follows:
Group 1 – How can organisations ensure their staff is using (external) search engines effectively?
Group 2 – How do you determine the value of search in terms of accuracy, time, and cost?
Group 3 – If I wanted to know how to use data visualisation and data analysis tools, where do I go? Who do I ask?
Lastly, we’d like to thank our speakers and the delegates for making this such an interesting, educational and engaging seminar.
Karen Blakeman (@karenblakeman) is an independent consultant providing a wide range of organisations with training, help and advice on how to search more effectively, how to use social and collaborative tools for research, and how to assess and manage information. Prior to setting up her own company Karen worked in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, and for the international management consultancy group Strategic Planning Associates. Her website is at www.rba.co.uk <http://www.rba.co.uk/> and her blog at www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/<http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/>.
Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) is a lecturer in the Department of Computing and Communications at the Open University, where he has authored course material on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Information Skills, Data Analysis and Visualisation, and a Data Storyteller with the Open Knowledge School of Data. An open data advocate and Formula One data junkie, he blogs regularly on matters relating to social network analysis, data visualisation, open education and open data policy at blog.ouseful.info
Steve Dale
20/03/15
March 2015 Seminar: Seek and You will Find?
/in Events 2015, K and I retrieval: Search technology, Knowledge and information retrieval, Previous Events/by Netikx EventsSummary
Karen explained how Google is undergoing major changes in the way it analyses our searches and presents results, so that more people are using their biased, social media circles as sources of information; and an increasing amount of error-laden data is being made available free of charge. Karen delivered an insightful and informative talk about how information is being manipulated by search engines and social networks, and she challenged some commonly held assumptions that the information we obtain from search results is accurate and complete.
Tony talked about the opportunities and challenges of abstracting meaning from large datasets. Nowadays it seems as if we can collect and store as much data as we want, but how do we make sense of it and put it to actionable use? Techniques such as data mining and knowledge discovery (KDD) use machine learning and powerful statistics to help discover new insights from ever-larger datasets. Tony explained what such techniques involve and what practitioners need to know in order to use these tools in a responsible way?
Google is undergoing major changes in the way it analyses our searches and presents results; more people are using their biased, social media circles as sources of information; and an increasing amount of error-laden data is being made available free of charge. And, to make matters worse, EU regulations are now dictating what the likes of Google can and cannot display in their results.
The presentations by Karen Blakeman and Tony Hirst will discuss the implications of this in how we interpret data from search engines and how we can abstract information from ‘big data’, together with the implications for the skills and educational needs of information professionals.
Speakers
Karen Blakeman is an independent consultant providing a wide range of organisations with training, help and advice on how to search more effectively, how to use social and collaborative tools for research, and how to assess and manage information. Prior to setting up her own company Karen worked in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, and for the international management consultancy group Strategic Planning Associates. Her website is at www.rba.co.uk and her blog at Karen Blakeman’s Blog | News and comments on search tools and electronic resources for research (rba.co.uk)
Tony Hirst is a lecturer in the Department of Computing and Communications at the Open University, where he has authored course material on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Information Skills, Data Analysis and Visualisation, and a Data Storyteller with the Open Knowledge School of Data. An open data advocate and Formula One data junkie, he blogs regularly on matters relating to social network analysis, data visualisation, open education and open data policy at blog.ouseful.info.
Tony will talk about the opportunities and challenges of abstracting meaning from large datasets and discuss how we might meet the educational needs and skills requirements of ‘data-ready’ information professionals.
Time and Venue
2pm on 18th March 2015, The British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8YS
Pre Event Information
This will be an insightful and informative talk about how information is being manipulated by search engines and social networks and will challenge some commonly held assumptions that the information we obtain from search results is accurate and complete.
Learning Objectives
• An understanding of the commercial, social and regulatory influences that have (or will) influence Google search engine results
• The ability to apply new search behaviours that will improve accuracy and relevance of search results
• An appreciation of data mining and data discovery techniques and the risks involved in using them, as well as the education and skills required for their disciplined and ethical use
Slides
Karen’s slides are available at: http://www.rba.co.uk/as/
Tweets
#netikx72
Blog
See our blog report: Seek and you will find?
Study Suggestions
None
January 2015 Seminar: Auditing your KIM Skills Gap
/in Events 2015, K and IM: Skills and competencies, Knowledge and information management, Previous Events/by Netikx EventsSummary
This was a joint seminar of the Network for Information & Knowledge Exchange and TFPL Connect-ed. The start of the new year is a great time to take stock, reflect on the achievements of the last year and plan your objectives for the upcoming twelve months … The workshop was aimed at anyone with skills … and we all have them!
Auditing your KIM Skills Gap will include:
• How to identify your skills and their value
• What skills are trending in the KIM marketplace
• Marketing your skills
• Making an impact
Included within this session were refreshers on how to write the all-important CV and application form. ‘Making an impact’ presented practical tips on ways to shine at interview – and plenty of time was allowed for questions and lively discussion, helping to facilitate an invaluable environment for learning and development.
Speakers
Jayne Winch has worked with TFPL since 1999 initially as part of the contract team and is now a generalist recruiter handling permanent roles within the areas of Information/Knowledge/Records Management/Research and Insight across the UK for the commercial sector. Jayne also enjoys delivering workshops and presentations on an ad hoc basis both on site for TFPL candidates as well as for external audiences on the topic of CVs, interviews and career options within our specialist field.
Suzanne Wheatley has worked in information recruitment since 2002 and at Sue Hill Recruitment since 2006, where she now manages the knowledge & information management team. She enjoys helping jobseekers progress in their careers and working with employers to find the right person to continue the success of their service offering. An advocate of recognising and utilising your own skills, Suzanne enjoys facilitating workshops and networking, believing that shared personal experiences in the workplace are invaluable for learning and development. She can also be found writing articles, blogs and tweeting.
Time and Venue
2pm on 27th January 2015, The British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8YS
Pre Event Information
It gives both NetIKX and TFPL Connect-ed great pleasure to announce our first joint workshop: Auditing your KIM Skills Gap, followed by drinks, nibbles and networking.
You are warmly invited to attend this practical workshop session run by Jayne Winch from TFPL and Suzanne Wheatley from Sue Hill Recruitment.
Slides
None
Tweets
#netikx71
Blog
None
Study Suggestions
None
November 2014 Seminar: Wider horizons for information audit
/in Corporate knowledge and information management, Events 2014, Organisational K and IM: information audit, Previous Events/by PerrineSummary
It was wonderful to have Sue Henczel as one of our speakers as she had recently flown in from Australia. She joined with Graham Robertson, a NetIKX Committee member to discuss with us the value of information audits. Sue took the lead to update us on recent developments in the field, and Graham introduced the River Diagram and talked us through its practical applications. This was followed by our own attempts to apply the concepts to our own organisations in small group discussions.
Speakers
Sue Henczel is the owner of Infase Training (Australia) Pty., Ltd. Sue’s company provides training and consulting services to libraries, information organizations and professional associations. She specializes in strategic and project planning, information and knowledge audit, impact assessment, statistical frameworks, performance measurement, service review and social research.
Graham Robertson is Principal Associate of Bracken Associates. Graham’s company focuses on change management, knowledge management, information management and requirements analysis.
Time and Venue
November 2014, 2pm The British Dental Association, 64 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8YS
Slides
No slides available for this presentation
Tweets
#netikx62
Blog
Blog not available
Study Suggestions
Sue Henczel has written extensively on KM for example: Information auditing report and tool kit 2007 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275716755_Information_Auditing_Report_and_Toolkit