Krems Workshop: Papers & Slides

Thorsten Skalla, IBM Austria

Open Data is right here, right now. Many grassroots initiatives are actively using open (government) data to enable benefits for government and society. But where is the big business that has been expected years ago? Is open government data really a locational factor for businesses yet? How can commercial enterprises benefit from open data, big time? How can these benefits be measured? What has already been implemented, what is yet to come? We share IBM's position and role as an open data consumer, publisher and enabler.

Anneke Zuiderwijk, Iryna Susha, Yannis Charalabidis, Peter Parycek, Marijn Janssen

The development of applications and services utilising open data and open web services provided by the public administration or the private sector is gaining momentum, worldwide. Among citizens, one of the most promising groups for turning research ideas into a startup business is that of students at pregraduate, postgraduate or PhD levels.

However, academic communities can make use of targeted help in their first steps to become company owners, and this is where University Accelerators (or Incubators) come into place, providing training, mentorship, seed financing or workspace for the startups. In this session we want to present, discuss and reach conclusion on the following topics:

• What are the main activities and services of an academic business accelerator?
• What are the key relations to other entities from business, academia and administration?
• What are the various challenges such an academic accelerator faces, especially when working on open data?
• What can be a set of Best Practices that can assist a University Business Accelerator be successful in generating sustainable startups?

Swimming against the tide - turning data back into information, Peter Bainbridge-Clayton, CTO Kompany.com

Whilst initiatives such as PSI rightly seek to allow reuse of and access to public sector information, this information is generally held in very context-specific silos amongst the holders of that information. Once released from these silos the context becomes diluted, especially when different sources are combined, and this problem is further magnified by local, regional and national differences in terminology, meaning, etc. The result is a sea of data which can be very difficult to understand. This presentation will outline techniques and tools we have developed at kompany to allow end users to safely navigate the sea of open data and turn it back into useful information.

Uldis Bojars, Renars Liepins, Latvian Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science

"Textual and natural language resources form a part of the open data (PSI) made available by public sector organizations (including cultural heritage organizations: libraries, archives, museums).

Examples of unstructured or semi-structured text resources include digitized newspaper archives at libraries, public procurement award information (if published as a text document or web page) or other documents already published on government or municipality websites.

The aim of this session is to discuss the value of extracting information from textual open data resources and the participant's experience in using such information.

From data publisher's point of view this approach allows them to provide data consumers with richer structured data. From a business point of view it is an opportunity to provide tools that help to extract knowledge from textual open data resources.

Expected session outcome is a collection of participant's thoughts and experience in extracting knowledge from textual open data, including a summary of types of data, tools and approaches used.

Intended audience:

This session may be organized either as a panel-led discussion (with each participant of the panel giving a short summary of their experience, followed by a discussion by all session participants) or a round-table discussion.