Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 11
July 2nd, 2009
Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 11 has just been sent out:
Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 11
Welcome to the eleventh Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter!
Contents:
- The OKF turns five and we need your support!
- Open Database License (ODbL) goes 1.0
- European Open Data Inventory + Summit
- Launch of the Open Data Grid
- New developments on Public Domain Works
- Other news in brief
- Thanks to our volunteers!
- Support the Open Knowledge Foundation
- Further information
THE OKF TURNS FIVE - AND WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT!
This month the Open Knowledge Foundation is five years old. Over those last five years we’ve done much to promote open access to information — from sonnets to stats, genes to geodata — not only in the form of specific projects like Open Shakespeare and Public Domain Works but also in the creation of tools such as KnowledgeForge and the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, standards such as the Open Knowledge Definition, and events such as OKCon, designed to benefit the wider open knowledge community. (To find out more about what we’ve been up to in the last year, you can read our latest annual report [1]).
While we have achieved a lot, we believe we can do much, much more. We are therefore reaching out to our community and asking you to help us take our vision further.
Our aim: at least a 100 supporters committed to making regular, ongoing donations of £5 (EUR 6, $7.50) or more a month.
These funds will be essential in expanding and sustaining our work by allowing us to invest in infrastructure and employ modest central support. To pledge yourself as one of those supporters all you need to do is take 30 seconds to sign up to our “100 supporters” pledge at:
We will always be a not-for-profit organization, built on the work of passionate volunteers. But with these additional funds, we believe we can make our efforts go much, much further. Please consider becoming a supporter and help us take our work forward.
OPEN DATABASE LICENSE (ODbL) GOES 1.0
Open Data Commons, an OKF affiliated project, has now released v1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL) after 6 months of consultation. The Open Database License (ODbL) is an open share-alike license for data and databases.
This license, the first of its kind, is a major step forward for open data as there are few license currently available which are appropriate to data and databases and none which provide for share-alike (existing share-alike licenses such as the GPL, GFDL and CC By-SA are all unsuitable for data).
This work has been led by an OKF Board Member, Jordan Hatcher, and has benefited over the last 6 months of consultation from extensive comments and feedback from the open data community, especially those in the Open Street Map project.
EUROPEAN OPEN DATA INVENTORY + SUMMIT
The First European Open Data Summit in Brussels brought together journalists, researchers, civic hackers, and representatives from European institutions for two days of documenting and building on documents and datasets from European institutions and member states. Work from the event received coverage from the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times.
We presented our work on the European Open Data Inventory, which includes just under 150 packages. You can see these under the ‘eutransparency’ tag on CKAN:
For each package we looked for legal information and whether or not items could be downloaded in bulk - providing direct download links where possible. Data includes everything from budget information to statistics to postcode databases.
LAUNCH OF THE OPEN DATA GRID
We started a distributed storage project, aiming to provide distributed storage infrastructure for OKF and other open knowledge projects. After researching various technical options, we’ve launched an Open Data Grid based on Allmydata’s open-source “Tahoe” system. Anyone can store open data on the grid, or start running a storage node.
NEW DEVELOPMENTS ON PUBLIC DOMAIN WORKS!
We have now completed a major load of data into the Public Domain Works database. There are now 125318 persons, 12840 items and 299141 works in the database. The data we have there comes primarily from two sources: people and book data from Philip Harper’s NGCOBA and recordings data from the online discographies provided by KCL’s CHARM project.
We also have a load more sound recordings data (~ 600k items) almost ready to go courtesy of Edward Betts and the Open Library. (And we are yet to even get started on the BBC GRAMS data …).
Also work on the public domain calculators is still ticking over. Gisle Hannemyr recently put together a first draft of a copyright flowchart for Norway.
OTHER NEWS IN BRIEF
- Talis launches ‘Connected Commons’ for open data at OKCon 2009
- 5th Communia Workshop: Post-Event Information + Statement
- CKAN 0.8 Released
- Cornell University Library keeps reproductions of public domain works in the public domain
- Virtual Meeting for Open Textbooks
- Data.gov goes live!
- Flickr put shapefiles in the public domain
- Virtual meeting for Working Group on Open Data in Science
- New mailing list for open knowledge in development
- Two new board members: James Casbon and Paula Le Dieu!
- KForge v0.16 Released
- French translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
- New developments on ‘Where Does My Money Go?’
THANKS TO OKF VOLUNTEERS!
As usual, a big thank you to our volunteers and to our extended virtual community for all of their valuable input!
SUPPORT THE OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION
A donation to the Open Knowledge Foundation would greatly help us with our overhead costs, including hosting (currently around £1000/year) and project development. To find out more about supporting our work, please visit:
FURTHER INFORMATION
If you would like to know more about what we are up to, please take a look at our active projects page.
If you are interested in participating in any of the OKF’s projects, please see our participate page, or join the OKF discuss list.
For further news and comments, see our blog:
You can follow us on Identi.ca or Twitter at:
The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organization. It is incorporated in the United Kingdom as a company limited by guarantee with company number 5133759. The registered office is 37 Panton Street, Cambridge, CB2 1HL, UK.
Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 Released
June 29th, 2009
Open Data Commons have released v1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL), a share-alike license for data and databases.
This is really big news for anyone working on open data as there are very few open data licenses available and none that provide for share-alike.
From the announce:
We are delighted to announce the release of v1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL):
http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
The Open Database License (ODbL) is an open license for data and databases which includes explicit attribution and share-alike requirements.
This license, the first of its kind, is a major step forward for open data. There are currently very few licenses available suited to data and databases and none which provide for share-alike (existing share-alike licenses such as the GPL, GFDL and CC By-SA are all unsuitable for data).
The development of the ODbL, has been a major effort extending over more than one and half years with an intensive consultation and review period for the last 6 months. We’d like to express our thanks to the communities and individuals who have contributed during this time.
Thanks for all the fish (data)!
June 24th, 2009
EUTransparency, who created FarmSubsidy and organised the European Open Data Summit have launched a new site with data on payments made under the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. From the press release:
Today sees the launch of fishsubsidy.org, a new transparency website from the farmsubsidy.org stable. It presents data on 97,260 payments totalling 8.5 billion euro from 1994 to 2006 under the European Union’s common fisheries policy.
They had to do significant work to clean up and harmonise the data:
The data was provided by the European Commission and since the first disclosure in 2007, we have received a further three versions of the data, each time a little bit cleaner and with fewer mistakes. It has been a long process to obtain and verify the data and there are still errors and anomalies (for example misspellings, errors in location and date information and some completely blank fields). The data also fails to identify the owners of the vessels receiving subsidy or the companies and organisations who receive non-vessel fisheries subsidies. It is by no means a perfect data set but we think now is the right time to publish it on fishsubsidy.org.
Also, they express concern over the way in which the data is currently collected and published - which makes it difficult to get an overview of where money disbursed under the European Union’s common fisheries policy is going:
We intend to update the database with new data for subsequent years but it is a major cause for concern that from 2007 onwards, the data on fisheries subsidies is to be made available in a highly fragmented way – each member state having responsibility for the disclosure of its own data. This is an unwelcome departure from the previous arrangements where the Commission played a co-ordinating role and compiled data from all member states to release to us. The fragmented future system of discloser will make it much more difficult to locate, extract and compile the data and as a consequence, much harder to achieve a genuinely pan-EU overview of what is going on.
We’ve created a CKAN package at:
New developments on ‘Where Does My Money Go?’
June 22nd, 2009
We’ve been doing some more work on Where Does My Money Go?. The project, will provide an interactive represention of UK public finance using maps, timelines, and best of breed visualisation technologies.
We’ve now put together a basic visualisation based on data we’ve cleaned up from the Treasury:
We’ve also had confirmation from the Cabinet Office that there will be some funding available to develop a prototype of the project. We’ve been talking about what to do next on the project on our discussion list. If you have any suggestions or comments - let us know!.
French translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
June 19th, 2009
We’ve just added a French translation of the Open Knowledge Definition thanks to Caroline Ker and Séverine Dusollier at the University of Namur, Belgium!
If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info (at) the OKF’s domain name.
New developments on Public Domain Works!
June 18th, 2009
We have now completed a major load of data into the Public Domain Works database:
There are now 125318 persons, 12840 items and 299141 works in the database. The data we have there comes primarily from two sources: people and book data from Philip Harper’s NGCOBA and recordings data from the online discographies provided by KCL’s CHARM project.
We also have a load more sound recordings data (~ 600k items) almost ready to go courtesy of Edward Betts and the Open Library. (And we are yet to even get started on the BBC GRAMS data …).
Also work on the public domain calculators is still ticking over. Gisle Hannemyr recently put together a first draft of a copyright flowchart for Norway.
Join the pd-discuss list to get involved!
ODC Open Database License (ODbL) Release Candidate 2 is Out
June 15th, 2009
Open Data Commons, a project we help host and run, has put out its second and final “Release Candidate” of the Open Database License (ODbL).
As it states in the announcement:
The Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 “Release Candidate 2″ is now available at:
http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
As expected there haven’t been many changes from the first Release Candidate. The two main alterations are:
- Removal of section 4.7 related to reverse engineering. This may be reintroduced in later versions but has been left out here in order to remove any possible concerns about license compatibility on Produced Works.
- Explicit statement that derivative databases used in the creation of Publicly Available Produced Works are also subject to share-alike.
With the completion of this second round of comments we believe this text is now in final “1.0″ form. In order to allow interested individuals and communities time to review the latest set of changes, as well as to provide an opportunity to catch any last minute “bugs” we are going to provide a one final, brief, comment period closing on Friday 19th of June at 1200GMT. Full details on how to comment can be found on the ODbL home page.
In preparation for the 1.0 release we have also continued to improve the FAQs as well as providing a new open data guide. Any feedback on these is also very welcome.
KForge v0.16 Released
June 10th, 2009
Another release (v0.16) of KForge is now out. It’s amazing to think this will mark KForge’s 4th anniversary!
KForge is the software behind our KnowledgeForge service and the code is now very stable — we plan for the next release to be our official “1.0″. On this occasion there are the following changes worthy of note:
- Clean-up of authentication system
- Eliminate annoying and subtle svn 1.5 bug (svn add did not work under svn 1.5)
- Deployment under virtualenv for sandboxed installations
- Increase compatibility across external libs (e.g. django 1.0)
- Variety of other minor but important fixes as we prepare for the release of v1.0
Download it from the python package index here:
Two new board members: James Casbon and Paula Le Dieu!
June 4th, 2009
We are pleased to welcome two new members to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Board of Directors:
The first is James Casbon, a bioinformatics programmer:
James Casbon has been working with open knowledge throughout his professional career. He has been responsible for analysing and managing large scale data sets in genomics, aerospace and finance. He is currently working on a project to enable parallel resequencing of the human genome at Population Genetics Technologies. He is looking forward to contributing to the Foundation’s work on an open data grid and on open data in science.
The second is Paula Le Dieu, a new media expert and OKF Advisory Board member:
Paula Le Dieu is a new media executive and advisor. Paula has worked with the BBC, Guardian, Fairfax, Ofcom and Creative Commons as well as online content and activism communities such as iCommons and the international documentary community. Her experience spans advising on the future of public service media, open culture theory and practice, the role of archives in the digital age, leading international communities of volunteers, building e-commerce solutions and sitting on the executive board of the leading European Documentary Festival - Sheffield Doc/Fest…amongst other things. More information at ledieu.org.
The OKF Turns 5 - And We Need Your Support
June 2nd, 2009
This month the Open Knowledge Foundation is five years old.
Over those last five years we’ve done much to promote open access to information — from sonnets to stats, genes to geodata — not only in the form of specific projects like Open Shakespeare and Public Domain Works but also in the creation of tools such as KnowledgeForge and the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, standards such as the Open Knowledge Definition, and events such as OKCon, designed to benefit the wider open knowledge community. (More about what we’ve been up just over the last year can be found in our latest annual report).
While we have achieved a lot, we believe we can do much, much more. We are therefore reaching out to our community and asking you to help us take our vision further.
Our aim: at least a 100 supporters committed to making regular, ongoing donations of £5 (EUR 6, $7.50) or more a month.
These funds will be essential in expanding and sustaining our work by allowing us to invest in infrastructure and employ modest central support. To pledge yourself as one of those supporters all you need to do is take 30 seconds to sign up to our “100 supporters” pledge at:
http://www.pledgebank.org/support-okfn/
And if you want to act on the pledge right now (or make any other kind of donation), please visit: http://www.okfn.org/support/
We are and will remain a not-for-profit organization, built on the work of passionate volunteers but these additional fund are essential in maintaining and extending our effort. Become a supporter and help us take our work forward!
