Linked Open Data presented in the US

Since our IT Director Florian Bauer has returned from DC, he has recollected some of the most important points of the Linked Open Data workshop on November 12^th.  NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) and REEEP had teamed for this much-anticipated event in Washington DC.  The 26 attendees at Linked Open Data for Clean Energy came from a wide variety of organizations working in the clean energy and development sector.

Speakers presented some of the potential benefits of using Linked Open Data:

• Reduce duplication
• Find more relevant data for your needs
• Provide instant data
• Future proofing / ensuring data longevity
• Adopting standards & enabling platforms to talk to each other
• Not losing data – make it deployable

Successful reegle.info and openEI.org collaboration

 NREL and REEEP have been successfully  cooperating using Linked Open Data (LOD) principles and technologies  for several months now. Their online information platforms reegle.info and openEI.org use each other’s data and information to enrich both websites – for the benefit of their users.

Martin Kaltenböck from LOD2 has interviewed Jon Weers (NREL) and Florian Bauer (REEEP) and asked how this collaboration has profited them:

Question: And why are you using LOD mechanisms for this approach: where do you see the potentials and benefits of using LOD in the area of clean energy information?

Hosting an Open Data workshop

As a regular follower of this blog and reegle in general, you will have noticed our shift to linked open data over recent months. What does it mean for you? All our data sets are here for your taking and integration into your websites via the developer’s portal for free. And for us this means that are have been able to bring your new features such as our country energy profiles where we consume information from the Open Data cloud, merge it and present datasets from sources like UN, World bank, Open EI und Wikipedia in our comprehensive overview.

Because we feel strongly about the whole philosophy of open data, reegle is now hosting a one-day Open Data workshop for decision makers in clean energy organizations alongside the 2012 World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. This event is scheduled for the 18^th of January at Masdar Institute.