WEOD: International Workshop on Engineering Open Data

Have you ever thought how effective and practical use of open data might change our societies empowering citizens into smart citizens?

We (Roberto Rodriguez Echeverria and Javier Cánovas) are organizing the first edition of the International Workshop on Engineering Open Data (WEOD), co-located with the International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE) 2018, which will be held on June 5.

This workshop mainly focuses on the Open Data movement, which has been pushing public and private entities to publish their data. As an example, a number of public indicators and reports, available at the European Data Portal, register the rapid expansion of open data initiatives: over 400,000 public datasets online, an 87% of european countries posess active open data portal initiatives, and a 71% of them have deloped open data politics. Moreover, its economic impact keeps on increasing: € 325 Billion direct market size for the perios 2016-2020.

However, there is still a clear lack of technologies to facilitate the access to this data since only 2.7% of the organizations involved in open data are enablers (i.e., organizations that facilitate the supply or use of open data). Furthermore, most initiatives are basically based on the provision of open data portals acting as datasets repository and providing a limited number of visualizations and use of them. In summary, although massive datasets have been made public in the last years, the required technological infrastructures are still not ready to allow any citizen to consume them according to her specific necessities, becoming a smart citizen  (this is in fact, the main goal of our Open Data for All project).

Our main goal with this workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, practitioners, stakeholders and users of Open Data, which may collaborate with us to bridge the existing gap between data publication and effective consumption. We are aware there a lot of different issues to overcome but we are really enthusiastic on finding new ways of open data consumption to help citizens become smart citizens. Therefore, we are really interested on practical engineering approaches to design and develop means for promoting the consumption of Open Data and to design and develop composition mechanisms that help combining Open Data sources.

A non-exclusive list of topics follows:

• Development of techniques to promote the access to Open Data
• Schema discovery and composition
• API development for Open Data
• End-user development to facilitate the consumption of Open Data
• Existing Open Data initiatives and ecosystems
• Monetization strategies for Open Data
• Discussion about how to publish Open Data
• Visualization techniques for Open Data
• Data analytics for Open Data

If you share our vision and goals, we are looking forward to joining us at WEOD 2018.

For more information about submission types and deadlines, consult the webpage of the workshop