Opendata.ch/2018 Conference

The start-up workshop was hugely impressed by WeGaw, a tourism platform from the incubator of the École hôtelière de Lausanne, supported by the European Space Agency. WeGaw combines up-to-date satellite data with open geodata, weather data and public transport data, and can thus determine the conditions of individual ski, bike and hiking tours in advance. We are all very excited to see it in use in the first Swiss tourist destinations!

The Open Data Science track focussed on showcasing four concrete projects working with, or fostering the development and use of, open data for scientific purposes.

Marcel Salathé demonstrated the open data science challenge platform crowdAI (https://www.crowdai.org/) developed at EPFL, which connects data science experts and enthusiasts with open data to solve specific problems, through challenges. Oleg Lavrovsky spoke about the need of containerization formats for open data, and introduced Frictionless Data (https://frictionlessdata.io/) which addresses this issue through simple specifications and software. Donat Agosti spoke about Plazi (http://plazi.org/), addressing the need of transforming scientific data from publications, books, and other unstructured formats into a persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature. Finally, Rok Roškar introduced the Swiss Data Science Center and its Renku platform, a highly scalable & secure open software platform designed to foster multidisciplinary data (science) collaborations (https://datascience.ch/renku-platform/).

This workshop addressed the question of what contribution open government data (OGD) can make to the development of smart cities. In a Smart City 3.0, the population is at the centre – not technology – as the concrete experience of the Smart City St. Gallen also shows. In the spirit of open government, OGD play an important role as the basis for transparency, participation and collaboration. But OGD must not be an end in itself; it must be suited to solving the real challenges of the smart city and its inhabitants in order to improve quality of life and of the location. It is essential that administrations live and consistently implement the OGD philosophy and are aware of the challenges of dealing with OGD. It also becomes clear that OGD can only indirectly benefit the population, through the refinement of the data by third parties. Opening up as many datasets as possible (our data) may be able to protect us from the dominance of international data corporations. (for further reading: Smart City: Strategie, Governance und Projekte)

Open Government Vienna has one blockchain pilot up and running, which saves the hashes of datasets on the blockchain (here’s a presentation explaining that project). Plus, they are currently working on a new pilot to give food vouchers for employees based on blockchain. Orvium is developing a blockchain platform that allows users to win back the control over their data and to sell or freely provide their data if they want to.

The speakers agreed that there are not many areas that can really benefit from the blockchain technology and many projects are rather searching for a blockchain user case instead of truly requiring blockchain.

Anyhow, benefits of the technology are:

• clear provenance / certainty about the origin of each transaction
• trust / self-verification by users
• affordable micro payments
• financing of big visions

The barriers and limitations are:

• usability for end users
• finding qualified programers
• difficult scalability
• developing and finding know-how
• GDPR is limiting the saving of personal data on the blockchain
• energy usage of this technology

Potential user cases and interesting sectors for blockchain applications that might foster open data are:

• Gratitude tokens for data gatherers & sharers with micropayments
• Tracking and sharing air-quality data
• Tracking and sharing energy usage data
• Securing notarization data
• Gathering and sharing Internet of Things data

In the Linked Data track, we had a great group of practitioners talking
about the domain of RDF and SPARQL in the real world. Jean-Luc Cochard
of the Swiss Federal Archive talked about the LINDAS project and
explained how it will be replaced by a larger infrastructure in 2019.
Pasquale Di Donato from Swisstopo talked about his experience with
publishing Swisstopo data as Linked Data, we can expect Linked Data for
each address in Switzerland soon! Marcel Fröhlich from eccenca explained
how Linked Data is used in the industry by the example of EU GDPR
integration within companies. And Jerven Bolleman from Swiss Institute
of Bioinformatic talked about his 10 years of experience in running the
largest public SPARQL endpoint with 40 billion triples and gave great
examples of how SPARQL encourages a social aspect in data integration
and usage.

Here you can find the Twitter thread about the topic.

Mobility is not only public transport, which is why, besides Rahel Ryf and Christian Trachsel of SBB, Raoul Stöckle of Smide and Matthias Schönenberger of PostBus also shed light on the topic of smart mobility with data. PostBus is testing various business models with on-demand mobility and the SmartShuttle. With PubliBike, PostBus has just made a big start in Bern and Zurich. There will be open data on the use of the bikes. Smide currently offers fast e-bikes in Zurich, filling the gap between the car and public transport within the city. Despite the station-less system, you never have to walk more than 300 metres to the nearest Smide bike.

From public transport, participants would particularly like more information in the event of disruptions, on supersaver tickets (when/on which routes they are available), on where exactly local transport stops, on how the means of transport are used (occupancy) and on fares. Bike rental companies already provide APIs for their locations today.