11 Aug 10

Open Data Is Not Web 2.0

A colleague of mine tweeted today that “There are 3 types of Web 2.0 in Government: Social Media, Collaborative Tools & Open Data”.  I’m not sure if I agree with him. Since my thoughts are longer than 140 characters, so I’ll blog about it instead.

The Wikipedia definition of Web 2.0, which I think is accurate, says:

“The term Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design,[1]  and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site gives its users the free choice to interact or collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumer) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumer) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them.”

By this definition, Social Media is Web 2.0, Collaborative Tools are Web 2.0, but open data is not.

Open data is published information.  It is intended to be used by an audience, not in a collaborative fashion on the hosting website, but elsewhere, for analysis in other applications. These applications may be designed specifically for use with that dataset (like TaxiCity), or they could be an existing everyday application (MS Excel, for example) used to analyze a dataset.

One could argue that open data is user-generated content, and this would be correct, depending on the dataset.  I don’t think it’s enough though to generalize it under the term Web 2.0.

“In Government”: The original tweet did specify that there are 3 types of Web 2.0 in government.  It may be worth noting that providing open data is new the direction that government (at least in Canada) is heading with their web publishing. The timing of this happens to coincide with their use of collaborative tools and social media.  In my opinion, it is a separate action though – grouped with transparancy and open government, not Web 2.0.

Thoughts?

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  • DB

    as the next iteration of the web, Open Data falls under the definition.
    Also considering Open Data’s web 2.0-enabling possibilities (mashups, web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration), it can qualify as a ‘type’ of Web 2.0 for government in its considerations.

    That is, presuming that Web 2.0 even exists.
    http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ip-telephony/web-20-it-doesnt-exist/805

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  • Robert Giggey

    I think you’re right in that strictly speaking opendata is not web 2.0, but it does facilitate two way interactions and I’m thinking that it might develop into opendata 2.0, i.e. government collecting data from the crowds to support service delivery?

  • mary beth

    1. Isn’t open data supposed to be unpublished information? The unpublished state of data means it’s not copyrightable. There has been a lot of confusion and blurring of the definition of Open Data and what should be considered Open Data.

    2. I’m not sure I agree that it’s user-generated content, the content generators are for the most part service providers (i.e. governments, corporations, researchers) and they have developed expertise and the authority to gather this information. The existence of users and their participation in the system of government allows the data to be generated. Without central bodies this information wouldn’t be aggregated. New Open Data user interest means the information is more valuable – so here is where the interaction of Web 2.0 and newer ways of thinking become important – governments start to value the results of sharing this information in the same way their users/citizens do.

    Also, I think Open Data could be considered Web 2.0 because its existence acknowledges the need for information to be shared more widely (politics and power are democratized when the information is shared). I’m not a big fan of the term Web 2.0 because I don’t necessarily think it connotes new actions or approaches (see David Eaves introduction and discussion of “Money Ball” from the Ottawa U tech Law conference), but I do think in the definition you cite, Open Data is a part of Web 2.0.

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  • http://twitter.com/CameronC_Wilson Cameron Wilson

    Open data is the foundation of Web 2.0, or as O’Reilly puts it, “it is the Intel inside Web 2.0″. I don’t fully agree with the Wikipedia definition as it does not differentiate between the data / information / knowledge stack and effectively ignores “authoritative data”. In this context, information is built from data and knowledge. This we have witnessed first hand at various developer and change camp forums where web 2.0 developers applications are effectively useless unless they can access data in machine readable format, preferably in near real time via an API. For example, where would bus apps be without gov’t publishing the transit data?

  • http://www.shawnhooper.ca/ Shawn

    Thanks for your reply Mary Beth.

    1. I’m not sure I understand your statement that “Isn’t open data supposed to be unpublished information?”. The point of open data is to publish data, in formats that are machine readable. The problem today is that not enough information is being published.

    2. I agree, user-generated content is not the core of open data. It was only brought up in the context of this post because it could be the “next generation” of open data. Users are participating more and more in generating content on the web. The ones that interest me, in terms of “open data 2.0″ are the sites that allow the exporting of the user-generated content.

    3. The core of open data, as Cameron noted in his comment, is “authoritative data”.

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