Demos for Democracy, featuring Ontodia

The GovLab presents Demos for Democracy, an ongoing series of live, interactive online demos featuring designers and builders of the latest innovative governance platforms, tools or methods to foster greater openness and collaboration to how we govern.

Ontodia: open data for all!

 On January 15, 2015 we had a conversation Ontodia’s co-founder, Joel Natividad. Ontodia provides solutions for unlocking the potential of Big Open Data, for governments of all sizes, and sectors that utilize open data – going beyond data publishing, to creating actionable insights.

They do this by democratizing data publishing using CKAN – the world’s leading open-source data portal technology, aiming to do what GitHub did for Git, for CKAN, with http://OpenData.city. They go further by geotemporally contextualizing open data, allowing users to immediately glean useful information, using its PediaCities KPI platform that’s pre-integrated with OpenData.city, allowing their clients to quickly create Decision Dashboards. These products were soft-launched Nov 2014.

What: Watch our video to find out what Ontodia is, how it works, the process of its design and how can the platform be used for social good.

About Joel: Joel Natividad is co-founder of Ontodia – a civic tech startup born out of Open Data.  Even before winning NYCBigApps for the second time, Joel and his long-time friend and collaborator, Sami Baig, quit their jobs, convinced that Open Data – data about us, for us, and paid by us, has the Biggest impact.  Not only will it improve and enable Gov 2.0, it will enable new business and business models that will maximize returns to society profitably.

Joel is a civic hacker and entrepreneur who did not finish his MS in Computer Science, an active open source contributor to multiple open source projects including CKAN, charter member of the Open Semantic Data Association Steering Committee, and infrequent speaker at several Semantic, Open Data, and Civic Tech gatherings.

Before Ontodia, he headed the Knowledge Engineering Practice of a small consultancy, TCG, creating knowledge systems for Fortune 100 companies in lifesciences and finance.

Twitter handle: @jqnatividad