[Sorvi-admin] presentation at Share conference?

[Leo Lahti]

Dear Share organizers,

I saw your call for lectures/presentations at
http://www.shareconference.net/en/participate

We have been recently developing an open source algorithmic toolkit to
facilitate fluent programmatic access to open government data sets,
including retrieval, preprocessing, analysis, visualization and other
relevant features. The toolkit is based on R statistical programming
language and it allows efficient integration of data sets and analysis
tools from various sources. The project is aimed to enhance the
government openness and transparency and it was awarded the first
prize in the national Apps4Finland competition in Finland November,
2011 (http://apps4finland.fi/fi/en). The main developers include three
young computational scientist from Finland. The project website is
currently only in Finnish but are planning to include an English
summary in the close future: http://sorvi.r-forge.r-project.org/

Our project is focused on open government data in Finland, but we
would be willing to share our experiences with others working on
related topics. We also hope that the project would provide
inspiration for launching similar initiatives in other countries.
Therefore, we would be willing to give a presentation of the project
at Share conference if there is a chance. I attach below the
information you have asked for lecture/presentation proposals.

Thanks for arranging the inspiring and topical event - we will be
looking forward to hearing from You.


Title: soRvi - Algorithmic toolkit for open government data in Finland

Abstract: Increasing amounts of data regarding socio-economical
factors and democratic decision-making are available in
machine-readable format in the public domain. However, the lack of
programmatic tools for accessing and analyzing such data poses a
significant limitation to utilizing the full potential of these
information sources. Moreover, customization of the tools for the
local needs within each country or region is essential. The recently
introduced toolkit (soRvi: http://sorvi.r-forge.r-project.org/)
provides an example of such project in Finland. The project provides
open source tools to support fluent programmatic access to open
government data in Finland, including tools for retrieval,
preprocessing, analysis, visualization, and other relevant tasks. The
toolkit is based on R statistical programming language and it allows
efficient integration of data sets and professional computational
tools from versatile sources. The project is aimed to enhance the
government openness and transparency and it was awarded the first
prize in the national Apps4Finland competition in Finland November,
2011 (http://apps4finland.fi/fi/en). We hope that sharing our
experiences could provide inspiration for launching similar
initiatives in other countries, and help to setup a cross-border
network of similar, community-driven projects.

Short biography: The volunteer-driven project is aimed to enhance the
government openness and transparency and it was awarded the first
prize in the national Apps4Finland competition in Finland November,
2011. The main developers include three young computational scientist
from Finland: Leo Lahti (D.Sc.), Juuso Parkkinen (M.Sc.Tech), and
Joona Lehtomäki (M.Sc.), with backgrounds in computational biology,
social networks models, and ecological analysis. The lecturer at Share
conference, Leo Lahti (http://www.iki.fi/Leo.Lahti) has received a
doctoral degree in bioinformatics from the Dpt. Information and
Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland, and B.Sc. in practical
philosophy at the Faculty of Political Science, University of
Helsinki, Finland, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in
Wageningen University, Netherlands.

kind regards,
Leo Lahti,
http://www.iki.fi/Leo.Lahti/Contact