Event Data.Gov.in

The workshop on Inclusive Web Programming– Programming on the Web with Open Data for Societal Applications (IWP 2014) is based on three themes – open data, web programming and the need to provide better analytics over the web with open data to citizens to promote better quality of life.

Open Government Data is a recent and rapidly growing phenomenon. Governments are increasingly taking initiatives to make their data available online in open formats and under licenses that allow use, reuse & redistribution of government data. More than two hundred open data catalogs exist for cities, state and federal governments that have made their data publicly available. Prominent among them are London (UK), Chicago (USA), Washington DC (USA), Dublin (Ireland), USA (data.gov), India (data.gov.in) and Kenya (opendata.go.ke‎). Some of these agencies have also opened up their data as a platform encouraging development of applications for public good. There is a World Wide Web Consortium’s working group on Government Linked Data (W3C GLD WG) specifically to promote usage of open data programmatically with web standards.

The second theme is web programming. Services Oriented Architecture technologies like Web Services have simplified application integration across organizations and over the web in the past (2003-2008). However, their adoption in practice was somewhat limited due to plethora of middleware technologies to assemble such services (SOAP, JMS, UDDI, .Net). Recently, this has seen a shift with mass-scale adoption of web standards (HTTP, JSON, REST) for integration leading to reduction of the entry barrier. Consequently, web application development has become democratized with more situational applications being developed by non-programmers at higher levels of abstractions. Specifically, applications are being developed (composed) from available services with the aim to quickly prototype a capability following standard patterns of data (resource) access. If the application is found useful, a new application is built with more robust constituent services by the same or more trained developer later. Sites like programmableweb.com are promoting such simplified web-programming model.

The third theme is sustainability as a domain to build useful and analytical applications that improve citizens’ quality of life. As human population increases and resources become scarce, there is an increasing challenge faced by governments about how to promote better usage of what we have. The scientific community has responded to these challenges by promoting the computational sustainability vision where resources consumed by a city, such as water, energy, land, food and air, can be monitored to know the accurate present picture and then optimized for resource efficiency without degrading quality of services it provides -traffic movement, water availability, sanitation, public safety, etc. Industry has joined the vision with a “smart” or “intelligent” prefix for cyber-physical systems, which involve sensing the data through physical instruments, interconnecting and integrating them from multiple sources and analyzing them for intelligent patterns.