Technology has become ubiquitous, a potential our society is rather ignoring at the moment. Think about it.
We spend most of our work day in front of a screen, some of our friends never stop to Twitter, most of them check their emails on their blackberry even when drunk, and now we grab the iPad on the weekend in our leisure time. But what does it really mean for our societies to be surrounded by this new digital technology? What chances lie there in being surrounded by computers? This is a question, we barely think about. Not good. At the moment, we can see some serious potential we are about to miss.
Conrad Wolfram pointed out some of them at the inspiring Computational Knowledge Summit in London as to know in the future will be a mix of knowledge and computation. “High power computation is now available for everyone”, he said. “We need to understand what that really means for life and knowledge and expertise. In the past high power computation had to be done by experts. What do we really need to learn, how has that changed?”
He was delivering the very important context to WolframAlpha, a knowledge engine that gives an idea about to where this thing with digitalisation could be taken. It is an approach to make available knowledge also accessible. Because what does open government data really mean today?
We all welcome that governments publish their data, but it is not enough to open a box. We have to take the data out. “Available doesn’t always equal democratised”, Conrad Wolfram said. A very true sentence.
In a world of information overload, available isn’t accessible anymore.
So how can we unlock the knowledge assets of digitalisation? One answer might be to re-think our publishing strategy. As Conrad Wolfram said, we should think about publish in applications, and not in publications. Here, designing a good interface is more important than ever to set a technical potential free. Think of the iPhone: The technology of the iPhone was there before Apple came to unlock it. It was curating and design, who brought smartphones to the masses and made the computer truly a mobile little thing.
Today, to develop and design an application is not anymore just a business. Shouldn’t we start to see it as a political contribution?
True. However, there is IMHO more than just publishing Apps rather than in publications. A good example for app-publishing with a big fail is the distribution of weather and environmental data in central europe: In difference to the USA, where both data and visualization apps are made public, in europe it is very hard to find actual (textual) data streams for e.g. ozone values. Not important, you may think as it is a welcome and easy way to just look at the flash-y (html5-y) visualizations of ozone or Particulate Matter distributions. But what if you want to start your own investigations and analysis of the data? Note that this data is collected by governmental organizations, i.e. with our very own money.
A good starting point for making such data available are the efforts of the European Environmental Agency ( http://www.eea.europa.eu/ ), which starts to make such environmental data accessible in near realtime. However, I found it rather disturbing that most data remains hidden behind flash animations and apps, such that they may only be consumed in the predefined (and well-shaped) ways, rather than are open for own interpretational approaches.