Vincenzo PatrunoA Bit of Nearly Everything

Ok, Guys! The speech is in Italian!

Here my presentation at International Marketing And Output Data Base Conference (IMAODBC) 2011.  (The Paper is coming)

All conference videos and slides available at http://www.digitalfestival.net/it/conferenze/open-data-siamo-davvero-pronti

Go to  1:39:00 to listen to my speech!

We often talked on this blog about “Data Dissemination” and “Data  Sharing”. This is because we have in mind a particular idea about  “Data Dissemination”, which looks beyond the “traditional” approach generally adopted by data producers as Institutions and Organizations. In fact, data producers usually still publish data on its Web site as downloadable files or data warehouses to query using a Web interface. But the Web is rapidly changing and is opening to new and exciting scenarios.

The continuing evolution of technology, the extraordinary growth of mobile devices but also the birth of new Internet users that play now an active role to disseminate, to share, to discuss and to promote digital contents in a Web more and more “Social”, are changing the traditional way to disseminate statistical data.

It becomes more strategic accessing social, economic, environmental, etc data timely. It becomes important above all to know the source of data as well as to access quality data. It is no easy task! People are drowning in a daily deluge of any sort of data. The consequence is an actual difficulty to find on Internet data they are interested in. And to know if data are the last available data and who and how data are produced.

It would be desirable to consume data in the same instant in which it is published by producers. Mission Impossible? Absolutely not, if we evolve our traditional model of “data dissemination” and we imagine to “connect” to data directly where they are produced and disseminated on the Net.

Let us stop for a while to see what is happening at the moment on the Web. We are witnessing a “widgetization” of digital contents, that is  a different way to produce and deliver contents, to use and to interact with them. Contents are in fact delivered through small applications called Widgets. These are applications that can take data and information directly where they are generated on Internet for delivering them to consumers, not forgetting to allow users to interact with them.

Widgets can easily be embedded whithin any Web Site and Blog and can  be executed simply using  a Web browser, but can also be  standalone applications on desktop or  standalone applications for mobile devices. In this case they are the kind of applications that people owns an iPhone or iPad download from an “App Store ” and that everybody call simply “App”.

We can say WordPress is at the moment the most successfull CMS in the world. There are hundreds of millions of sites in the world built with WordPress, including Web sites of famous enterprises and famous brands (and, of course, vincenzopatruno.org too), as reported in the post “21 Popular Brands That Are Using WordPress”. Designed especially for managing Blogs, last version 3.0 has just surpassed the 30 million downloads, and the trend is increasing. One of the features that made this CMS winning is the possibility to add functions to any website by writing additional plug-ins. This feature has worked so well that today the official plugins available are more than 13 000.

Among these there is a plugin that displays a very simple Widget that I made a couple of years ago and shows ISTAT’s data about italian population at the municipal, provincial and regional levels.

The installation is really simple. Login to your admin panel and search for the plugin “istat”.

After installing and activating it, click on “Widgets” to access the Widget panel and drag and drop the Widget “istat” on the sidebar.

At this point, you should insert the ISTAT code of the municipality that you want to display data. The code is six digits and is available from here, by entering the name of the municipality you want, but the plugin also displays regional or provincial data simply by entering the code of the province (three-digit) or the region (two digits), as shown in following figure.

The interesting thing is that data come in real time from the site demo.istat.it, the web system through which the Italian National Statistics Institute disseminates the official data about population. The Widget is in other words “connected” to data (via a Web Service) directly to the Web site that the producer, in this case ISTAT, uses to disseminate this kind of data. Therefore, when the new data will be available for 2010, they will be automatically displayed on all the blogs that in the meantime will install the plugin. Have fun!

*After publishing this article in Italian on segnalazionit.org, the Italian movement “Spaghetti Open Data” born to promoting Data Gov and Open Data asked me for the source code of the plugin. After a couple of hours, also a plugin for Drupal was released. Thanks Paolo for supporting us. An thanks Ligia for all your suggestions for this post.

This month, the Italian Statistical Institute released a short publication I wrote a while ago together with Daniele Frongia. This publication is in italian, so the title translated in english can be “Technologies and Services for Data Sharing”.

I know it! Youtube don’t use anymore the tags <object> and </objects>. But I wrote this paper in 2009, reviewing it in 2010 … I apologize for the inaccuracy of the following abstract.

Abstract:

“One of the factors that contributed most to the success of YouTube is in the portion of code within the tags <object> and </object> closed to each video. Copying and pasting these few lines of code into a web page has the effect to embed the video into any site or blog. This code as well as other technologies such as RSS feeds and APIs do offer the opportunity of sharing data both for users and for companies and institutions. For the latter, we will discuss the sharing model data within the Census Hub Project for the dissemination of results of the forthcoming 2011 Census. Besides, we will consider the experiences
of some international organizations such as OECD and the UN, confirming that the use of new technologies and online services can be an excellent opportunity to share information and to reach a more involved audience.”

During the tenth National Conference on Statistics organized by ISTAT last 15th and 16th December, I had the opportunity to talk about Data Sharing as a new opportunity for data dissemination. Here my presentation: