Experts from NJBDA, Jim Samuel, Margaret Brennan, Marc Pfeiffer and Matthew Hale, along with professor Clint Andrews from Rutgers University and other research associates, have recently released the Garden State Open Data Index (GSODI) 2023 research report which identifies concepts, strategies, principles, and policies to enhance the “availability, accessibility, usability and governance of open data.
This project has two components: 1) The GSODI report on open data concepts, open data + AI and policy recommendations and 2) The GSODI index portal. This is expected to lead to enhanced and accelerated public informatics driven insights, discoveries and value creation.” The GSODI is a mechanism that presents an ‘integrated view’ and rich metadata on the information ecosystem in New Jersey and is globally extensible. The GSODI report provides recommendations for ‘improving the effectiveness and efficiency associated with open data initiatives’ by integrating metadata information on ‘open-data portals and open-data datasets in a cohesive manner’ under a new portal which is expected to be launched in 2023 – the beta version is currently available for viewing, please see links below.
The GSODI is designed to support research, decision making, planning, and reporting efforts and is expected to lead to more efficient insights-generation for an array of constituents across academic, media, governance, professional, social, and political domains. Open data and artificial intelligence (AI) are vital for future value creation. The value of aligning open data with AI development and deployment requirements has been elaborated upon in the Garden State Open Data Index (GSODI) 2023 report.
The GSODI research report also provides policy recommendations which can guide the development of open data ecosystems to maximize support for AI systems and applications. The searchable GSODI portal is expected to ‘serve as a complementary and collaborative mechanism to existing open data infrastructure’ and does not intend to host datasets or in any way replace the many open data portals. Instead, it is expected to augment these open data portals and increase the findability of open data. Furthermore, the GSODI framework possesses a simple and flexible indexing framework and can therefore be scaled into a universal open data index to integrate global open data. Future research is expected to focus on scoring and ranking mechanisms along with improved scalability leading to enhanced capabilities for supporting AI research, development, and deployment.