SXSW Interactive 2011 sessions about Open Data
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Open Data
Saturday 12th March 2011
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Why Visualizing Government Data Makes Taxpayers Happy
by Jeremiah Akin and Michael Castellon
The expectation of transparency is creating demand for government agencies to develop new ways to communicate complex data and trends to the public in easy-to-access and easy-to-understand formats.
Some agencies are turning to Google Maps and KML data to visualize raw information online and on mobile devices. Delivering data in more easily understandable formats not only boosts trust and confidence between government agencies and their publics, but also streamlines workloads among Data, Web, Editorial, and Customer Service teams.
The Texas Comptroller is the state’s chief revenue officer, tax collector, and treasurer. The agency uses public-facing maps to communicate data and economic trends across the state, editorial coverage, and to promote initiatives such as its Unclaimed Property initiative, which works to reunite taxpayers with about $2 billion in unclaimed money and property.
This discussion will focus on how agencies and other organizations can use free or inexpensive tools to deliver data to the public in both traditional online formats and mobile platforms, and how workflows can be arranged so that data visualization can be managed and administered by non-technical staff. We will also discuss how maps can be used internally to enhance strategic efforts.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Public Transit Data, APIs and City Governments
by Julie Blitzer, Michael Uffer and Jerry Jariyasunant
The centerpiece of the urban lifestyle is an extensive, reliable public transportation system. Transit riders are embracing smartphones, 3G, 4G and even tablets. These tools can help us get better information, faster. Learn what changes are giving information in real-time and for trip planning. The New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM) created NotifyNYC in 2009 "to enhance NYC's emergency public communications to the public." NotifyNYC allows NYC residents to sign up for transit notifications in a format of their choice, SMS, email, voice recording, Twitter or RSS for any or all boroughs. Numerous third-party applications exist in New York, including Exit Strategy NYC, which tells the user where to wait for the train so as to minimize station exit time upon arrival. San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) website offers developers a huge amount of resources including a comprehensive API with schedules, station information and real-time service updates. The BART site features third-party applications developed using the API for iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac and more. This panel will examine creative new projects that enhance our lives as city residents on the go, including how these websites and applications could reduce costs, bureaucracy and response time in public transit.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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All These Worlds Are Yours: Visualizing Space Data
by Douglas Ellison, Kevin Hussey, Miles O'Brien and Veronica McGregor
At the intersection of video gaming technology, open government and citizen science are new applications making it easier and more fun for the public to explore space data. Get an inside look at virtual environments incorporating real-time spacecraft data and images. Become an armchair astronaut and travel through the cosmos from your personal computer. Ride along with NASA spacecraft, hazardous asteroids and distant planets, or just experience the vastness and beauty of space. All these worlds are yours... including Europa.
LEVEL: Beginner
Sunday 13th March 2011
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Data-Driven Government: Improving the Citizen Experience [Cancelled]
by Aneesh Chopra, Matt Lira and Julie Germany
Over the past several years, there have been many discussions regarding how interactive technology can drive change in our nation’s politics – but of perhaps greater importance is how technology can improve the daily functioning of our nation’s government.
The discussion should not be a partisan one – this panel will bring together leading innovators from both parties to engage in a post-partisan discussion about how technology can improve the public’s interactions with their government.
This discussion should be about specifics – we can all agree on the broad principles that technology drives change – but we have all heard that conversation before. This panel will focus on the specific progress that has been made, the specific opportunities that exist in the near future, and the specific challenges that need to be addressed.
As citizens increasingly become on-demand consumers in their daily lives, it is clear that government needs to better utilize interactive technology or it will only be more radically disconnected from the public.
This is not a political conference, which is precisely why it should be where this conversation takes place – how can the innovations from the creative, marketing and interactive communities be applied to improving our nation?
Our government needs to modernize. We need to move forward and debate new ideas, focusing on how we can collectively make our government work smarter, faster and better for all citizens.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Health Data Everywhere: Not a Drop to Link?
by Aman Bhandari, Gilles Frydman, Indu Subaiya, Jamie Heywood and Roni Zeiger
The Health 2.0 and Open Gov movements have helped unlock large repositories of data - from user-generated data in hundreds of online communities to mobile devices to federal quality indicators to medical record data within provider organizations. But much remains to be done to connect these disconnected islands of data to generate information that's meaningful and actionable by end users. And what happens when you link informed patient communities with their health data? As Clay Shirky says, it gets weird. And interesting.
A number of communities have cropped up to promote access to medical data and the integration of user-reported and behavioral data within the clinical decision stream including healthdatarights.org, #healthapps, #health2dev, #73cents, #getupandmove and #WhyPM. With the opening up of health datasets, platform APIs and increasingly sophisticated analytic engines to make user-generated health data clinically relevant, we can finally unleash the wider developer community to build robust and integrated tools to improve health and healthcare.
This session brings together some of the leading voices in the Health 2.0 movement to discuss and demo technologies that help access, mine, display and distribute control of health information across a wide variety of interfaces and devices. We will also hear how government is opening healthcare datasets for access by the developer community and how patients are increasingly becoming "n of 1" platforms.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Finding Music With Pictures: Data Visualization for Discovery
by Paul Lamere
With so much music available, finding new music that you like can
be like finding a needle in a haystack. We need new tools to help
us to explore the world of music, tools that can help us separate
the wheat from the chaff.In this panel we will look at how visualizations can be used to
help people explore the music space and discover new, interesting
music that they will like. We will look at a wide range of
visualizations, from hand drawn artist maps, to highly interactive,
immersive 3D environments. We'll explore a number of different
visualization techniques including graphs, trees, maps, timelines
and flow diagrams and we'll examine different types of music data
that can contribute to a visualization.Using numerous examples drawn from commercial and research systems
we'll show how visualizations are being used now to enhance music
discovery and we'll demonstrate some new visualization techniques
coming out of the labs that we'll find in tomorrow's music
discovery applications.LEVEL: Advanced
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How Open Health Data Can Improve America's Health
by Todd Park
LEVEL: Intermediate
Monday 14th March 2011
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Our Media: Building An API For Public Media
by Kavita Pillay, John Bracken, Jake Shapiro, Kinsey Wilson and Robert Bole
Open APIs are sweeping through public media, just like the rest of the world, but folks at NPR, PBS and others are thinking even bigger. Public media is in an unprecedented project to build an open API called the Public Media Platform (PMP) that will help developers create applications that bring personalized public media content to new platforms. Come learn from the leaders of the PMP on how this project is rolling out, where it is headed and how it can benefit you. We will be discussing how public media is creating the right technology layer, as well as balancing business rules to build new opportunities for our media to be For, By and Of the People.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Big Data for Everyone (No Data Scientists Required)
by Philip Flip Kromer, Steve Watt, Eric Sammer, Matt Pfeil and Stu Hood
Big Data solutions, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Cassandra, are growing up and are in the process of moving out of a grassroots movement to widespread adoption. Unfortunately, the majority of the technical expertise still lies in the hands of the open source project contributors and most solutions are tackled from the bottom up, starting with the technical problems. The collateral that is presently available is largely from the social media giants that tout solutions built using 10,000 node clusters that process petabytes of data a day. The reality? The average person just cannot relate or intuitively draw parallels to their own business problems.
While Big Data solutions are worthwhile far before you reach petabyte scale data, just getting started can be a challenge in itself. New open source projects are being regularly released that tackle a variety of issues related to Big Data, some of which are just slightly different to existing technologies. Just how does one navigate the plethora of technologies to design workable solutions to business problems? What if you only have gigabytes or terabytes of "medium" data on a small cluster? This panel features Solution Architects from a variety of key companies in the Big Data space which will provide deep dive technical discussions on real solutions we've employed for our customers, across a variety of industries, starting with the business problems.
LEVEL: Intermediate
Tuesday 15th March 2011
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Innovating & Developing with Libraries, Archives & Museums
by Danielle Plumer, Deborah Boyer, Jon Voss and Michael Edson
For centuries, libraries, archives, and museums have been creating structured data, organizing information, and managing metadata in order to organize and share cultural artifacts and knowledge with the public. Unfortunately, the bulk of these systems have evolved in isolation, long before the advent of the World Wide Web. However, the convergence of developments in culture and technology are resulting in exciting new ways for individuals and developers alike to interact directly with unprecedented amounts of structured data, historical photos and archives, and more.
Expert developers and project managers in this field will lead a discussion focused on the question: How can developers leverage open data from libraries, archives and museums being made available to the public? Panelists will review new developments and highlight examples, considering use cases with Linked Data, Flickr Commons, Smithsonian Commons, mobile apps, and scalability.
LEVEL: Intermediate
