Odino

The Italian Open Government Data have not a really high intrinsic quality, moreover they usually are not linked and do not allow collaborative processes for data improvement.
In this context the outcome of project Odino, will be a feasibility study that deals with the challenges to face in order to implement users’ contributions and corrections for improving published data. Particularly the focus is on the incoherencies between real data and the data published in the datasets and the ways in which a user (a so called “maintainer”) could intervene to signal and correct these errors.

Around 70% of the Italian Open Government Data obtain 3 stars out of five in the Tim Berners Lee scale. It basically means that datasets are published online in an open and machine readable format, however they don’t have structured links that could highlight relations enhancing a combined used of datasets that would create value.

The majority of the published datasets, moreover, are affected by a series of issues that undermine direct reusability. The main barriers affecting reuse are:
1. Formats: even if formats are open and documented none of those is effectively standardized.
2. Data quality: usually published data are quite raw and don’t have a high intrinsic quality. Frequent problems are represented by: accuracy issues, duplication, missing values, timeliness issues.
3. Contributions and crowdsourcing: in the Italian Open Data publishing pipeline currently there are not evidences of collaboration processes to improve and integrate published data. A feedback procedure, and a versioning system to enable crowdsourcing (by means of forks and merges) would be beneficial.

With this feasibility study it will be possible to gather evidences about the realization of virtuous feedback procedures regarding Public Sector Information. Moreover, in the context of a future more broad-based project, some project’s partners will acquire the necessary know-how for realizing a prototype for aggregating and upkeeping geolocalized datasets on mobile devices.

As far as the objectives of the Nexa Center are concerned, we aim at analyze and define from a technical point of view (considering both technical processes and licensing issues):
1. Standard formats
2. Publishing procedures
3. Maintenance and data re-acquisition procedures

Nexa Center contributed to the project idea furnishing its concrete experiences in the field of Open Government Data reuse and publication.

The project has been focused on the tourism domain for defining feedback procedures. In this context focus groups with Public Sector bodies in the tourism sector have been organized in order to know what is the current state of art in the publication procedures. They took place in Politecnico di Torino on the 26th-29th of January.

Thanks to this project Lorenzo Canova with Simone Basso, Raimondo Iemma and Federico Morando, have already written and submitted a conference paper on Liked Data collaborative feedback loops on December 8, 2014.
The paper has been accepted and presented to the CeDEM15 conference that took place in Krems on the 20-21st of May 2015. The final version of the paper is available on the proceedengs of the conference at page 171: Link to proceedings.

At the end of January 2015, one of the cpore deliverable has been submitted. Nexa Center has given a fundamental contribution in this document, by describing feedback procedures using linked data (how to enable them and possible benefits) and describing the existing feedback procedures in public sector bodies.

For the final deliverable, the Nexa Center team has developed a mockup for enabling feedback procedures and versioning of linked data. The code of the the mockup is available on github . A video explaining how the mockup works is available on youtube (in Italian).

The project was successfully concluded at the end of July 2015.