BODI: Bots for Open Data Interactions – Conversational Interfaces to facilitate the access to public data – Spanish R&D Proof of concept Project 2021-2023
More and more data is published online every day, coming from both the public and private sectors. As an example, the European data portal registers over 400,000 public datasets online.
Most of this data is available via some kind of (semi)structured format (XML, RDF, JSON, etc.) which, in theory, facilitates its consumption and combination. Indeed, the open data movement promises to bring to the fingertips of every citizen all the data they need, whether it is for planning their next trip, or for government oversight.
Unfortunately, this is still far from reality. Our society is opening its data but not building the technology and infrastructure required to empower citizens to access and manipulate it. Only technical people have the skills to consume the heterogeneous data sources while the rest is forced to depend on third-party applications or companies.
This project aims to change this: our goal is to empower all citizens to exploit and benefit from the open data. By removing the technical barrier of access to the data, BODI spreads this economic opportunity and increases its net value. To achieve this ambitious goal, the project proposes to leverage the latest technological advances in conversational interfaces (i.e., chatbots and voicebots) to enable citizens to ask any question they need in natural language. The BODI platform will then process the question and decompose it into a set of technical requests to the API-based open data sources available. At the end of the process, BODI will collect and combine the data to answer the user, also in plain natural language, ensuring a fluent communication.
To achieve this ambitious goal, the project will build on top of the original ODA project and extend it with the following key research contributions:
- Adaptation of the ODA project results on Open Data discovery and composition to the most popular formats in public open data sources at the national and European level.
- Integration of real-time open data sources (e.g., traffic information) to facilitate the application of BODI as part of Smart City initiatives.
- Automatic generation of chatbots tailored to specific combinations of open data sources to provide rich interactive conversations in natural language.
These results will be released as part of the open-source BODI platform, offering for free the technical infrastructure required to have open-data-based conversations. Besides, to maximize the reach and impact of BODI, we will also define a commercialization and exploitation strategy to define a number of offerings we can provide on top of BODI for those companies and institutions that may require customized services.
The results of this project will have a huge impact on our society by finally giving all citizens unrestricted access to the massive amounts of open data available online. This makes any citizen a direct consumer of information, helping her to make more informed decisions in her day-to-day activities. In the public sector, this is a necessary condition, for instance, for the success of initiatives on open governance or direct/liquid democracy, defending the idea of a more active participation of citizens in political aspects. In the private sector, this sudden increase in the number of consumers, i.e., potential clients, will boost the number of businesses built around open data, for instance, making viable the curation and publishing of open data sets focusing on smaller niches.