ANALYSIS: EXCLUSIVE Open innovation Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt Executive Chairman and Co- founder, Open Data Institute

A revolution is underway in terms of knowledge sharing on the . Open data and the sematic web promise untold benefits to society, some of which are already being felt, explains Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt in an exclusive interview

Since we last spoke in 2013, what developments have there been and what key achievements have been made at the Open Data Institute (ODI)?

One of the things we do is help incubate startups in the open data arena. Our first 10 companies have passed through the incubation programme, so we now have alumni of the ODI. These alumni are enterprises that joined us through our startup incubator. We are on our second intake of companies now.

A central aim of the ODI is to help startups, but we’ve also been conducting training in open data capability – our training numbers for 2013 and 2014 are 450 to date. Based on open data skills, these courses range from Open Data in Practice through to Open Data, Law and Licensing, and Finding Stories in Open Data which is a course on Data Journalism. Topics include the art of gathering open data, publishing it effectively, licensing it appropriately and generally understanding how you can make use of it. Our delegates come from public and private enterprises large and small, and include government civil servants from the UK and around the world.

Another significant development is that we now have an international set of nodes, about 20, that are essentially franchises of the ODI with various grades of membership, from people who just use the brand and the badge to communicate our success through to country nodes, which actually represent the ODI at a national level, much as we do here in the UK. They each sign up to a charter with a certain set of values, and use various software and standards to promulgate open data.

We now have around 80 members, representing various levels of engagement with us, from top-tier partners with whom we work closely on specific projects and who pay around £70,000 a year including in-kind support, through to startups, SMEs, universities and non-profits who are paying a few hundred pounds to associate themselves with the networks

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and events we run. We’ve also been contributing to policy in the UK, and that’s actually harvested and presented using a range of semantic assisting government departments and also corporations in order to help web capabilities. Similarly, Facebook’s open graph provides rich ways of them develop their own open data strategy and policy. So we’ve been busy! describing information that uses semantics.

What was the purpose of the ODI Summit 2013? Another interesting example is schema.org. Although little known, this facility is a standard way in which major search engines such as Bing, It was about the mission of the ODI and assessing the various states of Yahoo! and Google are collaborating on a simple semantic open data maturity, both in the UK and also internationally. Taking place schema. Through this schema, a user won’t have to go to a government on 29 October 2013 in the Museum of London, it was extremely effective portal to find data. Essentially they can just search for data using a search in bringing together a whole range of protagonists from the open data engine and find it as an actual resource, much as you find a webpage at space. Due to the success of the event, we are hosting the second ODI the moment. Summit on 3-4 November this year. Although these developments are relevant to all data, scientific data Is open data becoming more common in scientific research? tends to be a bit more research-orientated because computer geeks tend to use these tools before commercial or widespread adoption. In areas There’s been an interesting set of developments in this area. One move like the description of data in scientific experiments using semantic web that’s happening with research data, particularly with publicly funded techniques to describe and link information, I think real progress is being research now in a number of countries, is towards the requirement that made in everything from genomics through to aircraft design. some of this should be available as open data. The Royal Society has convened a group to look at this issue in the UK. Are you collaborating with the Consortium (W3C) on open data and the move towards the semantic web? People are talking about what research data should or shouldn’t be open. There’s a long tradition of this in genomics; for example, the Human W3C have a number of initiatives around semantic web standards, and Genome Project where all of that data was made absolutely open actually, they’ve had them on some open data standards as well. Some and available. of our key personnel sit on W3C committees; for example, our Technical Director Jeni Tennison, OBE is also a member of the W3C’s technical How do you see the semantic web changing the scientific world and advisory group that directs policy. We share a lot of intelligence around indeed society more generally? standards and approaches.

It’s not as if all the data published in the open data world is nicely linked Could you offer an insight into some of the interesting research being using semantic web standards, but we are seeing increasing interest and undertaken by the ODI? developments in science, and generally on the web. The best example I can use is Google: the knowledge graph they have created means when One thing that we have been working hard on – a simple idea really, but you search your name or my name, you get a little panel of information, one that needs a lot of research – is how you certify open data as being fit

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About the ODI

In a 2013 interview with International Innovation, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt explained why he and Sir Tim Berners-Lee set up the Open Data Institute and what they were hoping to achieve

Can you provide an insight into what is entailed by your role as We now have a fantastic team, led by our CEO Gavin Starks, which has Executive Chairman and Co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI)? been working for us since October 2012, and we formally launched the ODI in December. It is clear that we had the right idea at the right time The ODI came from an idea that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the and in the right place. World Wide Web, and myself had thought about for some time. What are the key aims of the ODI? We worked on the opening of UK public data with the previous UK Government, and have continued this work under the current coalition We aim to create an open data ecosystem – this is not something Government. During this time, open data release really gained we can do on our own, but we can break this down into a number of momentum, with an increasing number of countries, cities and regions tasks. We are keen to help to improve the supply of open data, not around the world setting up open data portals and releasing data. We just from the public sector, but we are talking to business about where realised that an open data institute could help develop, extend and opening their data would create benefits to them; for example, through exploit all of this activity. open innovation.

The primary purpose of the ODI is to find the value in open data. That Critically, we are also working to increase the demand for open data. We value can be realised in economic, environmental and social terms. With want public and private sector organisations, new and existing businesses the help of the Government, we prepared a proposal to the Treasury to be actively and routinely using open data. Such vibrant demand and were awarded £10 million of public funding through the Technology is crucial – not least because organisations using open data will hold Strategy Board in November 2011, to be matched by private funding over providers to account if that data is missing or of poor quality. five years. We are also interested in training. Technical skills are needed to use and Along with Berners-Lee, my role was to establish the idea and fight for exploit data, and it is also important to enhance policy understanding its approval, and write a substantial business plan for the Technology and the business models that go with publishing data. We have unearthed Strategy Board. As that evolved, it became clear that the ODI needed to a number of distinct business models that allow organisations to make be a non-profit, independent institute with a strong mission and strategy. money from open data. Therefore, as co-founders, Berners-Lee became President and I took up the role of Executive Chairman. Underpinning all of these aims is communication: we need to provide evidence of how open data is making a difference. Since then, we have been ensuring the viability of our business plan. I spent a substantial part of last year pushing the idea around UK public To read International Innovation’s 2013 interview with Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, and private sector bodies. Then we had to find a location and recruit staff. please visit: www.research-europe.com/magazine/HEALTHCARE2/EX11/index.html.

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for purpose. Open data certifi cation is a piece of software that takes you I think we’re seeing that with our startups, which are now making through a process that attributes metadata to the dataset – describing businesses like TransportAPI that takes all the transport open data in where it came from, how it’s licensed, what its technical formats are, how the UK and provides a cleaned up, integrated set of data, offering users often it’s refreshed, whether it uses linked data, whether it is web-aware – advanced passenger information (API). Its service allows access to all this a whole load of information you’d want to know about the quality of the data in a much more usable way – rather than having to navigate through data. From this, it provides a level of certifi cation for that data as open all the different bits of rail, coach, train and underground data, they data, and embeds all of that information inside the description of the provide it as a set of API packages. dataset itself, so that it is machine-readable. This has turned out to be a very successful piece of research that also leads to a very useful piece of I think there are businesses to be built out there, and my general view on functionality. Working with the UK Government, they have agreed that all this is that there is a lot still for governments to do, there’s more data to of its datasets will be subject to open data certifi cation. release and a lot more expertise required to put it out in a useful way. Government needs to learn how to consume its own open data for best We have also conducted a piece of work where we looked at an actual effect when it comes to delivering public services. The private sector can open data problem for ourselves, focusing on the development of open use this open data to create real economic value. Companies both big and data tools for policy making. In our ODI Summit last year, we offered a small need to think about whether they can actually fi nd much more value striking example. The Mayor of London had been talking about closing fi re from some of their own data by opening up and enjoying the benefi ts of stations and had made some proposals. From this, we actually produced open innovation. I think it’s actually going to be a very signifi cant part of a visualisation tool that uses open data on time to attendance, where the economy. the fi re stations were and telephone data from Telefónica about average footfall by people in different parts of the city. The tool allows you as a citizen to switch off different fi re stations to look at the effect on time to attendance (http://london-fi re.labs.theodi.org/explore/). Essentially, we were asking people to make a decision about which stations they would close, asking them whether they could make the situation better or worse. What people weren’t expecting was that the Mayor’s proposals actually seemed to be not too bad. That was an interesting piece of applied research both in the use and deployment of open data.

How long do you foresee it taking before an open data culture pervades society?

I think the time for open data has come in the sense that it’s not just about the data being open, it’s about licensers’ standards being open, and the real goal – the real value – is what I think of as open innovation. The information out there, with lots of people able to utilise it, leads to all sorts of innovations and collaborations that wouldn’t have happened if it had been kept locked down or unavailable. http://theodi.org

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