Creating an Understanding of Data Literacy for a Data-driven Society

Society has become increasingly reliant on data, making it necessary to ensure that all citizens are equipped with the skills needed to be data literate. We argue that the foundations for a data literate society begin by acquiring key data literacy competences in school. However, as yet there is no clear definition of what these should be. This paper explores the different perspectives currently offered on both data and statistical literacy and then critically examines to what extent these address the data literacy needs of citizens in today’s society. We survey existing approaches to teaching data literacy in schools, to identify how data literacy is interpreted in practice. Based on these analyses, we propose a definition of data literacy that is focused on employing an inquiry-based approach to using data to understand real world phenomena. The contribution of this paper is the creation of a common foundation for teaching and learning data literacy skills

Urban Data in the primary classroom: bringing data literacy to the UK curriculum

As data becomes established as part of everyday life, the ability for the average citizen to have some level of data literacy is increasingly important. This paper describes an approach to teaching data skills in schools using real life, complex, urban data sets collected as part of a smart city project. The approach is founded on the premise that young learners have the ability to work with complex data sets if they are supported in the right way and if the tasks are grounded in a real life context. Narrative principles are used to frame the task, to assist interpretation and tell stories from data and to structure queries of datasets. An inquiry-based methodology organises the activities. This paper describes the initial trial in a UK primary school in which twelve students aged 9-10 years learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, by interpreting existing visualisations of smart meter data and data obtained from aerial survey. Additional trials are scheduled with older learners which will evaluate learners on more challenging data handling tasks. The trials are informing the development of the Urban Data School, a web-based platform designed to support teaching data skills in schools in order to improve data literacy among school leavers

Smart Geographic object: Toward a new understanding of GIS Technology in Ubiquitous Computing

One of the fundamental aspects of ubiquitous computing is the instrumentation of the real world by smart devices. This instrumentation constitutes an opportunity to rethink the interactions between human beings and their environment on the one hand, and between the components of this environment on the other. In this paper we discuss what this understanding of ubiquitous computing can bring to geographic science and particularly to GIS technology. Our main idea is the instrumentation of the geographic environment through the instrumentation of geographic objects composing it. And then investigate how this instrumentation can meet the current limitations of GIS technology, and offers a new stage of rapprochement between the earth and its abstraction. As result, the current research work proposes a new concept we named Smart Geographic Object SGO. The latter is a convergence point between the smart objects and geographic objects, two concepts appertaining respectively to

A study of existing Ontologies in the IoT-domain

Several domains have adopted the increasing use of IoT-based devices to collect sensor data for generating abstractions and perceptions of the real world. This sensor data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been proposed in the literature to tackle problems related to interoperability of sensor data. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for drawing inferences. In this paper, we survey these existing semantic ontologies to provide an overview of the recent developments in this field. We highlight the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensor-capabilities and context-awareness) required for an IoT-based application, and survey the existing ontologies which include these concepts. Based on our study, we also identify the shortcomings of currently available ontologies, which serves as a stepping stone to state the need for a common unified ontology for the IoT domain.Comment: Submitted to Elsevier JWS SI on Web semantics for the Internet/Web of Thing