As some of you will know, Public Domain Works, a joint initiative of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Free Culture UK and the Open Rights Group, had its alpha launch back in August. The Public Domain Works Database is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. Since the project was first […]
Richard Wright, Archive Technology Manager at BBC Future Media & Technology, has asked us to mention his Libraries for Lesotho project which he is currently raising funds for. In summary: A million books for a thousand students – in Lesotho! Richard Wright, audiovisual archive technology manager at the BBC, is taking three months off to […]
Nick Holmes of Binary Law wrote to tell us about the Office of Public Sector Information’s forum for a new PSI re-use request service. His blog post about the forum is here. As noted in the forum description, the service is being built in response to recommendation 8 in the Power of Information Review by […]
The people behind AMEE, the ‘world’s energy meter’ (which we blogged about back in May), have been busy forging ahead into new areas of open service development. As well as ensuring AMEE conforms to the draft Open Service Definition (in short, open data plus open software) they’ve recently published a Memorandum of Understanding with terms […]
Jordan Hatcher (Open Content Lawyer) and Dr. Charlotte Waelde (University of Edinburgh) have just published the first draft of the Open Data Commons, or the Open Database License. The new license was inspired by the Talis Community License (a draft open license for data from 2006) and its development has been sponsored by Talis. The […]
DBpedia recently released the new version of their dataset. The project aims to extract structured information from Wikipedia so that this can be queried like a database. On their blog they say: The renewed DBpedia dataset describes 1,950,000 “thingsâ€, including at least 80,000 persons, 70,000 places, 35,000 music albums, 12,000 films. It contains 657,000 links […]
As some of you many have seen, Open Knowledge Foundation advisory board members Peter Suber and John Wilbanks recently wrote two interesting articles in CTWatch Quarterly. Peter Suber’s Trends Favoring Open Access is a broad-ranging overview of developments in publishing, research, and technology that look to support Open Access. As well as looking at how […]
The Eduserv foundation has funded a study, led by Jordan Hatcher, into the “current usage of Creative Commons (and other open content) licences by cultural heritage organisations in the UK”. The aim of the study is to try to build a snapshot of usage and plans for usage of open licenses for as broad a […]
Tomorrow is the first day of the Northern Summer of Content 2007. The Summer of Content is an initiative of WikiEducator and the One Laptop Per Child project. Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code, the programme aims to match creators with mentors and stipends to “develop open content and run free culture events throughout the […]
Yesterday Dr. David Wiley of Open Content published the Open Education License Draft. Before the text of the draft itself he relates some of his thoughts and experiences relating to open licenses from a decade of promoting open content. Though wary of the proliferation and politics of open licenses, he suggests that there is a […]
The Internet Archive has recently launched a beta version of The Open Library. A demo can be found here and the Open Library book can be read here. It is inspired by the idea of a “library that makes all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world”. Initially it will consist […]
Peter Murray-Rust of the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge, has recently been looking into the licensing practices and access policies of publishers of science journals. He has particularly focused on the publishers of chemistry journals who say they endorse Open Access publishing, or what has come to be known as ‘Open Choice’ publishing, whereby […]
Welcome to the second Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter. Scroll below for information about: Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) Guide to Open Data Licensing Open Text Book iCommons 2007 COMPREHENSIVE KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE NETWORK (CKAN) Last week we launched the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN for short) which you can find at: http://www.ckan.net/ CKAN is a registry […]
Welcome to the first Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter. Following is a glimpse of what we’ve been up to in recent months. OPEN KNOWLEDGE 1.0 Open Knowledge 1.0 took place on Saturday 17th March at Limehouse Town Hall in London. Over 70 people came to hear the panels and participate in the open space. There were […]
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