Space-Time Research this week launced a new program called the Open Data Initiative at the International Statistical Institute (ISI) 2009 conference in Durban.
What is the Open Data Initiative?
The Open Data Initiative is a Web 2.0 site for disseminating public data. Users discover and explore data in a rich, interactive, and intuitive application, rather than browse or read large documents of published tables and charts. The end user can select and visualize any combination of data. It can be exported, printed, linked to, and shared in collaboration environments.
The Open Data Initiative is a freely available online service for the creation and dissemination of data for public consumption. You have the data; we have the service to disseminate it to the public.
The Open Data Initiative is hosted on the Google AppEngine Cloud, enabling providers of public data to create engagingand rich Web 2.0 experiences built on top of Space‐Time Research’s SuperVIEW product suite. This provides transparent, lightning‐fast web traffic responsiveness, scalability and built in redundancy no matter where in the world you are.
Data types suitable for the Open Data Initiative: Health, Transport, Education, Agriculture, Population Statistics, Labour Force, etc.
How do I sign up?
Key Benefits. The Open Data Initiative:
- Is Cost and Time Efficient — Reduces the workload on your data analysts and researchers.
- Provides Data that is Complete — Why compromise on providing a subset of the data? Maximize the ability of the public to self‐service data of personal interest.
- Provides Data as Service — Now you can provide a new online data service to the public.
- Protects the Relevance of Your Brand — Provide an engaging and rewarding experience for the public. This reinforces the relationship of trust they have in your organization.
- Delivers Data Integrity — Have confidence that the public are seeing the right numbers, graphs, and maps, andreaching the correct interpretation and understanding behind those numbers.
- Delivers Data Responsiveness — Minimize the time between data collection and data dissemination to ensure maximum relevancy of the data to the audience.
- Creates Communities of Users — Ensure the online experience can be captured and shared by the public incollaborative environments from Blogs to Twitter.
Frequently asked questions coming from some of our early adopters:
A. This is a free service and as such it has business model restrictions for customers - they cannot charge a fee for access to their created sites. It must be public and not sit behind authentication or payment gateways. We have a paid service available that overcomes these restrictions but this is a good way to test drive the technology and the dissemination approach using the free service initially. Alternatively customers can purchase a paid SuperVIEW software license and implement their own business model around a deployed SuperVIEW.
Q. What about confidentiality?
No confidentiality capabilities are offered with the free SuperVIEW. The Open Data Initiative will host all data in the Cloud so by it's nature data provided should not contain confidential information. We can provide a confidential Cloud based service using our Hybrid connector, but this becomes a paid solution engagement.
Q. How do statistical boundaries get loaded?
We will detail this in the data collection process over the next week with people that sign up to our early adopter program, but think it will be along the lines of providing a shapefile (with some size limits -- i.e. pre-simplified and for particular areas) or KML to us.
Q. How does the application get integrated with the data providers website.
Option 1 -> provide a link that takes the user from the data provider website to the Open Data Initiative website.
Option 2 -> use an IFRAME to embed the Open Data Initiative hosted site into their website.
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