Aid Transparency Barcamp: Linked data and Semantic Web Technologies for Aid Transparency

August 4, 2011 at 1:43 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged aid transparency, linked data, Semantic web

Just came back from the Aid Transparency Barcamp, Kathmandu. I had a talk on Linked data and Semantic Web Technologies for Aid Transparency. It was a mixed group of audience, with both developers and non-technical people. I guess that the presentation was a bit too much for the non-technical side (sorry for that :-P).
There are many things in the slides, so sharing them here for everyone’s reference. The developers may play with the tools and datasets. Perhaps someone could use Tim’s linked data and demonstrate some interesting app. (Thanks Tim ;-))

Some major questions/concerns from the audience –
* This seems too technical, does the user need to understand all this? (No)
* What will the user see as linked data, web pages? or something different? (ya basically web pages, but driven by data from different linked sources)

But most importantly,
* What problem does linked data address? (Thanks Simon for helping me answer this .. you can put complex queries which need data from across various sources, further you can reuse/link to existing data and similarly others can reuse/link to your data)
Towards the end Simon pointed out that we still need small concrete example applications (in aid transparency) to really convince people (at different levels) to provide (linked) open data, not just demos or visualizations. Agree.
Perhaps the developers/industry can build something really useful for some stakeholder to prove the potential of linked open data.

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