Linking open data: challenges and solutions

Abstract

Open data have been recognized as a way to advance citizen engagement, increase economic welfare and improve policy-making and public decision-making. The linking of all kinds of open data sets provides potentially many benefits. Yet the number of successful examples of combining datasets has been limited. Challenges can be found at the political, social, use, and technical level. In this half day workshop we discuss the challenges of open data and relate these to the needs for policies and infrastructures for processing data. Various ways of dealing with these challenges will be discussed and in particular we will present an infrastructure for processing open data. This infrastructure harnesses open data sources and methodologies for annotating, visualising and making open data available to scientists and citizens. Participants are asked to actively participate in discussion and are invited to provide feedback and suggestions for improvement.