1. spurring innovation with
public sector data
A Creative Dublin Alliance project Supported and Powered by IBM Technologies
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

2. What is Dublinked?
An initiative of Dublin City Council, DunLaoghaire-
Rathdown, South Dublin, Fingal County Councils, and NUI
Maynooth, as part of the Creative Dublin Alliance
An innovation network focussed on economic
development using public-sector data
A portal for the discovery of static and dynamic data
about the Dublin Region, from public and private sources.
A single-point-of-contact for new companies and users
who wish to engage with the public sector for data
requests and project proposals
Supported also by the OSI, NTA, CSO, PSRA, Dublin
Chamber of Commerce, Dublin BID, and many others
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

3. What is Dublinked?
Dublinked
MNCs, SMEs
Independent
Academia,
DataStores SEARCH
Public Sector,
Citizens
Federated DataStores, with a unified discovery engine
All data to be directly machine accessible (RDF, URI)
Usage supported by workshops and training events
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

4. What sort of Data is Available?
Arts & Culture, Citizen Participation, Demographics, Housing, Land Use
Transportation, Road Networks, Education, Economy, Environment,
OPEN DATA
RESEARCH DATA
Most of our data is OPEN, and released under the PSI license
We have other data which cannot be released due to
licensing constraints, and for these we have a single NDA for
non-commerical use.
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

5. Need to keep it fresh and updated
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

6. Complements other Activities
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

7. The Commercial Tension
SMEs and Activists Commercial Services
The Activist: Publicly Mapping is expensive,
funded data should be Quality costs
free!!
Why should companies
SMEs don’t want to pay make all the money, and
upfront to explore new the public pay all the costs.
ideas That’s not fair!!
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

8. What is the role of GI?
Most of our users come to us with an ICT background, not a
geography, mapping, or GI background.
They ask un-informed questions...
• Where are the roads in Dublin?
• What is the height of buildings in Dublin?
• where is there a free parking spot?
• where are the bus-stops?
• where are the playgrounds in Dublin?
Without GI, it is very difficult to extract value from the data
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

9. Planning Data – A use case
A good place to start as the data is already available
Normally hidden behind an API
In theory it should be easy, all 4 local authorities used the
same system and captured similar data...
but
It took us at least 6 months to actually manage to produce
a common output format. Problems arose such as
- projections (eg: WGS vs ITM)
- export formats (eg: CSV vs SHP vs KML)
- same content but different titles
- different software versions causing problems
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

10. IBM SPUD – Semantic Processing of Urban Data
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

11. Lessons Learnt
Large companies research, startups develop
Data quality is critical and is difficult to achieve
The process of releasing data from organisations is slower
than one would expect – often for perfectly valid reasons
The process of encouraging people to innovate with public-
sector data is equally slow – an education process
Often data gets lost, or it’s not in a form that can be
exported – it takes effort to extract it.
Unexpectedly many different forms of public sector data
can offer diverse opportunities for new businesses!! (eg
playgrounds)
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

12. Where do we go from here...
Targeting new areas – particularly fragmented sectors such as
tourism and the social services.
Service Level Agreements – if companies depend on public
sector data, who is going to guarantee that it will keep coming?
More support for startups – plan to work more closely with
economic development units, enterprise boards and enterprise
Ireland.
Crowd-sourcing – need to involve the citizen more in enhancing
the datasets and the use cases
Better Search – provide more links and discovery mechanisms for
data, particularly stuff hiding within other datasets.
Keep it Fresh – keep delivering more data, dynamic data, greater
variety, more participants. Stale data = dead data.
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region

13. Delivering Economic Benefit – NEW JOBS
supporting data-driven innovation in the Dublin region