Notes from a GCamp brainstorming session on "How to encourage and enable data sharing between organizations?" (Corner One - 13:00-14:00, Day 2) Revised and extended from an original version at GCamp@RUPP 2009 website. Thanks all the session participants for their insights and sharings :)

Aspects, considerations, and issues in data sharing:

• Politics: policy, inter- and intra-organization conflicts of interest on data sharing, sensitive data, panic, national security, law & regulations, econo-political accessibility
• Standards: information standards, common terminology/vocaburary/ontology, different survey methodologies, interpretation of data, difficulities in merging/fusing data from different sources (with different data definition), machine-readability, technological accessibility
• Technology: text recognition, OCR, information structure recognition, the use of un- or semi-structured information
• Information Life Cycle: spatial and temporal aspects of information, expiry date/best used by

Terms and projects mentioned in, or related to, the session:

• ProMED-mail - global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases & toxins
• Opening and linking the data available on the Web
  • LinkedOpenData
  • Open Data
  • Linked Data
• Community annotation, making use of un- and semi-structured data
  • Semantic Wikipedia - an idea for semantic-annotated Wikipedia
  • Semantic MediaWiki - an extension of MediaWiki, adds semantic annotations to the wiki
  • DBPedia - extract structured information from Wikipedia to RDFs (Linked Data)
• Making use of non-textual/non-electronic (yet) data
  • tesseract-ocr - an open source OCR engine
  • OCRopus - an open source text layout analytic engine
• Data collection and terminology
  • International Household Survey Network (IHSN)
  • WHO Global Health Observatory
  • WHO Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe)
  • WHO International Classification of Diseases (ICD)
  • Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED)
  • International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation - an organization who drives SNOMED CT (a SNOMED-systematically organized computer processable collection of medical terminology)
  • FAO Terminology - common terminology, in various languages, used by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
• more on Twitter, hashtag #gcamp
• a related case - Data.gov
• a related idea on ideas.in.th, proposes all public-funded organizations to open their data - หน่วยงานสาธารณะ ต้องเปิดเผยข้อมูลทั้งหมดสู่สาธารณะ ในรูปแบบที่สาธารณะเข้าถึงได้

The second day of GCamp is about brain storming, gathering ideas how to achieve the goal of predict and prevent outbreak before it happens.

Our idea is about citizen surveillance, making a bunch of data which is aggregated from various sources to be more usable and accessible by the use of existed, everyday-life, technology.

From Phnom Penh

Even if you're not physically geographically (well, this event is really about maps) here at Royal University of Phnom Penh, you still can participate GCamp. Just follow #gcamp hashtag on Twitter to get a gist. Your questions and insights, with #gcamp hashtag marked, are very welcome and they could be spotted by other campers :)

And, well, Opendream's twitter account is @opendream :=3