Three steps from data desert to a thriving data ecosystem

Isolated data is information dryland. Data needs to be rooted in its context to blossom and if we want it to thrive, data needs to live in a networked ecosystem.

First step: Let the data sprout

For data to sprout, it has to be available to everyone to access, use and share. At TWIST2018 we work with Open Data. And we want to work with you, to find innovative ways to analyse, visualise and combine data. To think out of the box, the data has to get out of the box as well.

Second step: Cultivating the data ecosystem

Metadata is the solid ground, where data lives on. Together with connections to other data sources it forms the data ecosystem. But linking different data sources can be a pain. Linked Open Data (LOD) are the painkillers without side effects. This technology is not new at all. A great deal of energy is currently being invested by various Swiss administrative units to publish their data as LOD. The City of Zurich, for example, is working intensively to transform all data in its Statistical Yearbooks into Linked Open Data. By the end of August, over 30 million data triplets will be queryable via SPARQL and linkable to other data sources. As participant of TWIST2018 you will be among the first to work with these new LOD!

Third step: Nurture data literacy

In order to work with data, we need a set of skills that enables us to find, extract, read, analyse and visualize data. All this skills together are called data literacy. At TWIST2018 we have experts in all these fields. We learn from you, you learn from us.

The thriving data ecosystem future

Imagine a future, where data from statistical offices, metadata from opendata.swiss, information from wikipedia, maps from swisstopo and layers from OpenStreetMap all work together to make the world a better place. The future is already here:

https://beta.observablehq.com/@mmznrstat/a-thriving-data-ecosystem

This is an observable notebook, “an interactive, editable document defined by code. It’s a computer program, but one that’s designed to be easier to read and write by humans.” (Mike Bostock) If you want to know more about observable notebooks, you can start with reading this short introduction: https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/introduction-to-notebooks.