Call for Participation

"Analysts believe an open data strategy should be a top priority for any organization that uses the Web as a channel for delivering goods and services. Open data strategies support outside-in business practices that generate growth and innovation."

— Press release "Gartner Says Big Data Makes Organizations Smarter, But Open Data Makes Them Richer", August 2012

Whether your business has an open data strategy today, or you want to learn from global experts how to publish or consume open data, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Open Data Institute and the Open Knowledge Foundation invite you to join a discussion about realizing the promise of open data. Participants will help prioritize W3C's agenda in the area of data on the Web at a time when a number of working groups have either completed or are close to completing their charters. The Workshop, hosted by Google, is open to all and will take place in the heart of London’s Tech City of Shoreditch.

Main Topics

From Toronto to Taipei, from Washington to Wellington via Westminster, data hubs are being created by public bodies from single cities through to supra national organizations like the European Union and the World Bank. But it's not only public bodies. Away from the public sector there are community efforts like Open Signal and Open Street Map and, in retail, thousands of online retailers mark up their Web pages using the Good Relations Ontology creating a substantial pool of structured open data. schema.org has frameworks to incorporate health and medical data, events and creative works too. Linked Science is publishing scientific data and the campaign to see clinical trial data published is gaining significant support. Look for a camp site using PitchUp.com and you'll be able to see how they use a variety of data sources, some of which are open … the list goes on

As well the promises of government transparency and efficiency, the claim that is made most frequently of open data is that it is the "new oil" that is driving the digital economy. At this workshop, participants will discuss their experiences of realizing this aim and identify what's needed to make it easier. The main topics of the Workshop will be:

• discoverability;
• transformation (to other formats);
• combinations of data from different models (e.g. linked data and CSV);
• quality assessment and self-description;
• extracting human-readable "stories" from data.

Learn more about these and other Workshop topics.

Participate in the Workshop

The Program Committee is chaired by Phil Archer (W3C), Jeni Tennison (the ODI), Rufus Pollock (Open Knowledge Foundation), and Dan Brickley (Google/schema.org).

Learn more about how to participate and who should participate.

This workshop is designed to appeal to developers and entrepreneurs using or wishing to use open data in their products and services, as well as publishers interested in learning more about how their data is used and the potential for further use. Specifically it targets:

• developers and software companies with experience of success in using open data (how did you do it);
• developers and software companies with experience of failure in using open data (what went wrong, what needs to change);
• data publishers (what are your expectations?);
• data owners considering publishing their data (what are your fears?);
• data visualization specialists (what's your wish list?);
• journalists, civic hackers and other end users.