Author Archives: Tracey Lauriault

Putting public data to work and putting the I back in IT

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The Silicon Republic is “Ireland’s No 1 resource for technology news”.  Along with delivering the news about technology innovation in Ireland they orchestrate fantastic industry events to amplify emerging discussions of importance with the irish indigenous and foreign technology sectors.  Tracey P. Lauriault has attended three of their events to date, and participated in their latest, the Irish Data Forum.  Their events feature a cross section of industry, academic and public sector experts to discuss trends, issues and innovations. The discussions are frank and audience participation is skillfully moderated by Ann O’Dea CEO, Editor-at-large of the paper.

The Irish Data Forum Putting “I” back in “IT” discussed cloud, big data, data analytics, open data, data science and public data.  It also examined the data revolution and how Ireland can be at its heart.

Below is a selection of media from the event.

Panel 2 Part 1 Video

Panel 2 Part 2 Video

Silicon Republic Panel: Extracting Value from Big Data for Business, Government and Society

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I am looking forward to participating in the Silcon Republic panel about putting data to work at the Irish Data Forum on Friday morning with:

  • Phil Townsend, Director of Communications, Manchester United
  • Stephen Moffatt, Cloud Computing and Business Analytics Leader, IBM
  • Andrew Maybin, Managing Director, Tibus

AAG 2014 Paper – A genealogy of data assemblages: tracing the geospatial open access and open data movements in Canada

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The following paper has been accepted for presentation at the AAG 2014 Data-based living: peopling and placing ‘big data session organised by Matt Finn (Durham University, UK), in Florida.

A genealogy of data assemblages: tracing the geospatial open access and open data movements in Canada

Authors: Tracey P. Lauriault and Rob Kitchin, NIRSA, NUI Maynooth

The field of geomatics has for decades concerned ‘big data’ about people and places, and the monitoring and managing of population, resources and territory.To better carry out this function global, regional, national and sub-national spatial data infrastructures have been built. SDIs are defined as the institutions, policies, technologies, processes and standards that direct the who, how, what and why geospatial data are collected, stored, manipulated, analyzed, transformed and shared.They are also inter-sectoral, cross-domain, inter-departmental, distributed and interoperable authoritative large biopolitical systems. As part of these projects a loose coalition of highly skilled actors have sought to open such geospatial data from state bodies for wider use.Some of these actors have been joined by a nascent open data movement.To date, however, the complex unfolding of the geospatial open access to/data movement has not been charted.In this paper we provide such a genealogical analysis, tracing the open access/data movement in Canada over the past three decades, unpacking the various overlapping, co-evolving and oppositional data assemblages.We conceive a data assemblage as a complex socio-technical system consisting of a number of inter-related elements — systemsof thought; forms of knowledge; finance; political economy; governmentalities; materialities and infrastructures; practices; organisations and institutions; subjectivities and communities; places; and marketplaces — that work together to frame how data are produced, managed, analyzed, shared and used. We suggest that such a conception and approach has utility in understanding and contextualizing the wider changing data landscape.

Open Data Jurisdictions & Initiatives in Ireland

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Dominic Byrne, of Fingal County Council, in his presentation at last week’s open data seminar pointed to these open data initiatives.  Fingal Open Data was the first to do so.

Additionally, there are some open data civil society initiatives such as:

And an academic / private sector / government partnership portal:

As part of this activity, the government announced at the Open Government Partnership this month that it will soon launch a national open data portal as part of its open government strategy.

There are also other data sharing / data access initiatives ongoing in Ireland, and to name a few:

And also some research projects are examining this topic. Here are a couple:

This is not a comprehensive list, but it is a start, and as research progresses, I will make more resources available.  If you hear or know of more, do not hesitate to let us know!

Presentation slides from 'Open Data and Evidence Informed Decision Making' seminar

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The 1st Programmable City Seminar filled the house with Ireland open data advocates, NUIM Students, NIRSA & NCG & StratAg & AIRO researchers, Media Studies Faculty, Computer Science Faculty, geographers, public servants, the folks at Dlublinked, technology media, the project team and others.  The audience reflected the trans-disciplinary nature of the Programmable City Project.

You can access presenter bios here and we will soon release the video recording of the event.

Stay tuned for the 2nd Seminar in January 2014.

Presentations are in order of appearance:

ProgCity to Visit INSIGHT at NUIG

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Programmable City PI, researchers and students along with the Director All Island Research Observatory (AIRO) at NUI Maynooth will be making a trip to NUI Galway to visit with the INSIGHT Director, researchers and students on Nov. 8, 2013

We hope to have a fruitful information exchange about all of the projects, and explore collaboration opportunities with a focus on work in areas of open data, smart cities, geo-data and infrastructures.