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by Sara Wingate Gray

Thoughts from the GLA’s Possibilities of Real Time Data conference

April 21, 2010 in CKAN, External, OKF, OKF Projects, Open Data, Open Government Data, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data, Working Groups

The following post is from David Read, a developer working on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN project. David attended the Greater London Authorities’ Possibilities of Real Time Data conference earlier this week.

London’s authorities have opened up lots of their data this year, kicking off in January with the launch of the London Data Store (which we blogged about here). You can download, mash-up and analyse stats about crime, housing, education, planning and so on, but the biggie that many developers are desperate to get their hands is transport information. The GLA and 4ip held a half-day conference on Monday at City Hall on this public data, and transport data got top billing.

Dr David Mountain at Placr described how he’s been screen scraping the London Underground departure boards. Although his results were somewhat predictable – that waiting times increased during peak hours, or when the line had a problem – there was obvious interest from the audience in knowing what to expect on unfamiliar lines, and comparison between particular stations.

It is incredible to think that bus and train companies don’t make their timetables open. Chris Osbourne from ITO World has an interesting way to automatically produce extremely helpful bus maps, yet only two small British areas allow it. He made the point that councils subsidise a massive number of bus services, yet the ‘bus barons’ hug their data and stifle the innovation that might actually increase their custom whilst improving their usefulness to society.

Titled “Possibilities of Real Time Data”, the conference was positioned to highlight the value of open data, but I was surprised that there was not a discussion to work through the problems faced. The room seemed to be a healthy mix of technologists, representatives from London boroughs and other public data holders including Transport For London. Only briefly did we glean an idea of the road blocks TFL and other providers see preventing them releasing bus, tube and rail information. Data Protection was mentioned and clearly there are many more areas to be discussed, but surely this needs to be discussed in public to move it forward?

The success of using more general data to closely monitor and improve performance was the theme of a CTO of a council in Washington DC. Bryan Sivak described how they have been publishing lots of public data for about 5 years now on their Data Catalog.

He had stories about improved snow clearing with residents reacting to the map of snow-ploughed areas. They’ve had a couple of years’ worth of application competitions, the widely copied ‘Apps For Democracy’, but they also felt a clear need to develop some themselves. He mentioned a couple of measurable successes of using data: increased rehousing of homeless and spotting trends in overtime use.

What was most interesting regards my involvement as a CKAN developer were Sivak’s future plans. Firstly he mooted “Data Catalog in a Box”, where they open-source all their code so other cities/countries can reap similar benefits. It is great to see another example of publicly funded software being given back to the public, rather than locked away for private use. And although there is sure to be plenty of overlap with CKAN, and competition is healthy, no doubt we can both learn from each other and it creates more options for organisations wanting to catalog their open data.

The other future plan for Washington DC that piqued my interest was their “OpenCity API”. They have linked up with 7 of the top cities in the US to agree on the same web API for ‘government service requests’. i.e. for filling pot holes, requesting snow clearing etc. All this openness of data, source and sharing of APIs is very promising – other governments take note!

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Avatar of Sara Wingate Gray

by Sara Wingate Gray

OKCon 2010 Nearly Here: 24th April 2010 in London

April 14, 2010 in Events, External, News, OKCon, OKF, Policy, Talks

It’s April, and in the UK the sun has, at last, been sighted! To add to the cheer, The Open Knowledge Foundation’s 5th Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) takes place in ten days time on Saturday 24th April in London.

Tickets for OKCon 2010 are selling rapidly, so for those who’d like to ensure their place should register now:

http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/

The event will see a whole host of individuals descend on London for a full day of sessions and workshops spanning the Open Knowledge spectrum including:

  • State of the Nation Keynotes
    • Matthias Schindler, Wikimedia (Germany) on Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain
    • Glyn Moody, on the Post-Analogue World
    • Peter Murray-Rust, on Recent Developments in Open Science
    • Chris Taggart, on Open Local Government Data
    • Sören Auer, on Linked Open Data
    • Jordan Hatcher, on Open Licensing for Data
  • Ideas and Culture with talks on analyzing Dickens Letters and Making the Physical from the Digital
  • Open Bibliographic Information with talks on the Itinerant Poetry Library and the Journal Commons
  • Community Driven Research with talks on Climate data and Open Archaeology
  • Civic Information with talks on Using Open Government Data to Profile Politicians and the Straight Choice
  • Open Government Data and PSI in the EU which looks at the current state of play in France, Norway, Germany, the UK and elsewhere
  • Tools with talks on Large-scale data handling and revisioning with the Genome, Ontowiki, CKAN and more
  • Open Data and the Semantic Web with talks about South Korean DBPedia and Thesaurus Management Tool ‘Pool Party’

We’re also delighted to have a wide variety of short and lightning talks:

http://wiki.okfn.org/okcon/2010/lightning

And we’ve still got space for more, so if you’re interested in a giving a lightning talk sign up on that wiki page.

Full Programme information for OKCon 2010 is available at:

http://www.okfn.org/okcon/programme

More information:

We look forward to seeing people in a sunny London in April and making OKCon 2010 an event to remember!

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Avatar of Sara Wingate Gray

by Sara Wingate Gray

Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 14

March 12, 2010 in News, Newsletter, OKF

Welcome to the fourteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email, please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 14 – on our main okfn-announce list

OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 14

Contents:

  • Mapping open government data around the world
  • Launch of the Panton Principles for open data in science
  • Where Does My Money Go? The hunt for data
  • Release of Datapkg 5
  • Interested in open data for international development?
  • New features in CKAN!
  • Update on Open Shakespeare: annotations and word of the day
  • New working group on open data in archaeology
  • Draft of new attribution license for data
  • Other news in brief
  • Thanks to our volunteers!
  • Support the Open Knowledge Foundation
  • Further information

To support the OKF see: http://www.okfn.org/support

 MAPPING OPEN GOVERNMENT DATA AROUND THE WORLD

The Open Knowledge Foundation and Access Info are currently seeking information on open government data initiatives around the world, as part of a scoping paper supported by the Open Society Institute:

With major announcements from the UK and and the US in the past few months, and numerous open government data catalogues popping up around the world, there is a lot going on in the world of open government data at the moment. Hence we are putting out an open call for information about open government data around the world – including citizen-driven initiatives, official government polices and projects, mash up competitions, data sources and innovative reuses of open government data:

If you’d like to keep in touch with what we’re doing, or join the conversation, you can subscribe to our open government data mailing list

LAUNCH OF THE PANTON PRINCIPLES

We’re delighted to announce the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science were launched on February 19th.

The principles themselves state that legal status of scientific datasets should be made explicit and that content licenses are not appropriate for data. They strongly discourage non-commercial licenses and strongly encourage dedication to the public domain. You can endorse the principles at:

The first draft of Panton Principles was written in July 2009 by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks at the Panton Arms on Panton Street in Cambridge, UK, just down from the Chemistry Faculty where Peter works. They were then refined with the help of the members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Science.

We’d greatly appreciate any help in disseminating the principles – including blogging, microblogging and forwarding to relevant people!

WHERE DOES MY MONEY GO? THE HUNT FOR DATA

As you may have seen the prototype of our ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ project was launched in December.  We’ve had an excellent response to the launch – including quite a bit of press coverage in the UK and across the world – such as in the Guardian, BBC News, and the Telegraph. The prototype can be viewed at:

*http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype/.

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Lisa Evans has been hard at work acquiring and cleaning up more detailed data for the next stage of the project’s development – including via FOI requests, meetings with HM Treasury and converting existing material into more reusable formats.

If you would like to join the hunt and contribute to the project, we’d love to hear from you! You can drop Lisa and the team an email at wdmmg at okfn dot org.

  RELEASE OF DATAPKG 0.5

Part of our long term vision for the ecosysem of open data is one in which we can work with large datasets in increasingly automated ways. Hence we are pleased to announce the release of v.0.5 of Datapkg, a user tool for distributing, discovering and installing data (and content). This is a key part of making data sharing automatable.

By packaging the data its metadata becomes standardised and can be placed within a repository, such as CKAN, whereby it becomes significantly easier to find, retrieve and use: as an end-user tool it allows automated  (command-line or scripted) discovery, installation and sharing of data “packages” either standalone or via interaction with a registry like CKAN.

For further information, and documentation on Datapkg 0.5 see:

OPENING UP INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT DATA

We’re soliciting another round of feedback for the draft of a working paper on opening up data related to international development. The report covers how to legally and technically open up aid data, as well as recommendations for how to make aid data easier to find and reuse. It now has a dedicated website at:

We’re actively soliciting for comments on the paper. In particular there’s a list of questions we’re looking for input on.

CKAN 0.11 Released

The release of version 0.11 of the CKAN software, our open source registry of open data used in ckan.net and data.gov.uk is our biggest release so far, with lots of new features and improvements. This release also saw a major new production deployment with the CKAN software, powering data.gov.uk – which had its public launch on January 21st.

We’re very proud that data.gov.uk is using CKAN, our open source registry of open data, to list official UK government datasets (as we announced in October) and we’ve been working closely with the Cabinet Office team to get this out the door. Consequently, over 2500 datasets have now been released via the site!

Take a look at some of the datasets and access CKAN at:

*http://ckan.net/

OPEN SHAKESPEARE ANNOTATIONS AND WORD OF THE DAY FEATURES

OKF’s Open Shakespeare project team members have been hard at work recently. The Open Shakespeare website is part of the The Open Shakespeare package – a set of materials and tools for exploring Shakespeare’s life and works in more creative, interesting, and most importantly, open ways.

We’re delighted to announce that two new features are now live on the site. These include the annotations tool, which provides users with the ability to annotate specific text within individual plays. For an example of how this works, see:

*http://www.openshakespeare.org/work/annotate/hamlet

We’re very excited about this development, as it opens us a whole new world of collaboration in the use of Shakespeare’s works and enables in-depth information sharing within the texts themselves.

Additionally, the ‘word of the day’ feature is now live and operational on Open Shakespeare. You can see it in action on the home page or indeed, the direct link to our current Word of the Day, ‘baker’.

There are, of course, plenty of improvements to each feature that we’ll continue to work on behind the scenes, but please do feel free to start annotating away if you’ve a burning addition to make! Select a text to annotate here.

WORKING GROUP ON OPEN DATA IN ARCHAEOLOGY

To better understand archaeological research processes and to encourage others to open up archaeological knowledge, a few weeks ago we started a new Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology.

We’ve also started a group on CKAN, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s registry of open data.

If you’d like to get involved with any of this, we encourage you to join our open-archaeology mailing list and introduce yourself.

Stefano Costa from the University of Siena, the Working Group Coordinator, recently wrote about the importance of ‘opening up’ archaeology on the OKF blog.

DRAFT OF OPEN DATA COMMONS ATTRIBUTION LICENSE

Early January 2010 saw the release of an Open Data Commons draft of the new attribution license, specifically aimed at data and databases. We would warmly welcome feedback on the new draft, and all and any help in circulating it to relevant parties (including legal experts, prospective users and so on)! The draft is available here.

A commentable version of the text is available at:

Meanwhile, for anyone who is interested, we’ve recently started a CKAN group for public finance data packages:

There are 26 packages listed so far, and as well as the group we’ve started a ‘reading list’ for key official documents and secondary sources on UK Government finance on the OKF wiki.

OTHER NEWS IN BRIEF

Other news items in brief from the open knowledge community…

If you have an item of news that you’d like us to include in the next newsletter, please let us know!

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!

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.

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