Last month Rufus Pollock, Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, spoke at OpenTech 2009 in a session with Richard Stirling of the Cabinet Office and John Sheridan of the Office of Public Sector Information. His talk gave a blueprint for how to open up government data: Opening Up Government Data: Give it to Us Raw, […]
Back in June the Australian Minister for Finance announced a new Government 2.0 Taskforce. Part of the work of this new taskforce includes: increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information Paralleling recent initiatives such as the UK’s Power of […]
Open Plaques is a project to find and document all the UK’s blue heritage plaques, which commemorate sites where famous events occurred, or with a connection to notable historical figures. There are currently over 1700 plaques, which can be browsed by area, by person, by role or by organisation. Though the project is currently in […]
We’re currently organising a workshop on ‘open data and the semantic web’, which will take place in London this autumn. Details are as follows: When: Friday 13th November 2009, 1000-1800 Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QS. (See map) Wiki: http://wiki.okfn.org/SemanticWeb Participation: Attendance is free. If you are planning to come along […]
Openly Local is a recently launched “first draft of getting hold of and making accessible local government data in a consistent and useful form”. There is generally a lot of support for open data from central government in the UK – particularly from the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Cabinet Office and with […]
Earlier today the OKF’s Jordan Hatcher and Jo Walsh gave a tutorial on open data at the Repository Fringe 2009. There are some detailed notes on the JISC Datashare blog: Repository Fringe 2009: Afternoon Tutorial (Open Data) Jo gave an overview of the Open Knowledge Foundation – in particular focusing on four principles for developing […]
There have recently been several posts about what features are desirable in government data catalogues. The Sunlight Foundation recently announced they are planning to build on data.gov to allow “community participation so that people can submit their own data sources” (including support for adding data that is not open such as data with noncommercial restrictions). […]
Open dictionaries are excellent examples of open knowledge projects. Whether monolingual or bilingual, and whether dealing with definitions, etymology, translation or pronounciation – they can often be large, collaborative undertakings. Dictionary databases have a wide variety of potential applications – from education and research to machine translation and integration with software applications and services. We’ve […]
Harry Metcalfe and Richard Pope recently let us know about their new postcode lookup API, named after Ernest Marples, the Postmaster General who introduced the Postcode: http://ernestmarples.com/ More about the service: Post codes are really useful, but the powers that be keep them closed unless you have loads of money to pay for them. Which […]
Just over a week ago was the 2nd Communia Workshop, which took place in Turin. The theme was ‘Global Science and the Economics of Knowledge-Sharing Institutions’ – and there was a great line up of scientists, economists, and legal scholars, as well as representatives from various research bodies and NGOs. Papers, slides and audio will […]
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 […]
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: http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/dept/ We’ve also had confirmation from the […]
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 […]
We’ve just launched a new mailing list for those interested in open knowledge in development: http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/open-development As you may have seen we had a session on Open Knowledge for Development at OKCon 2009. There was also discussion of the value of sharing knowledge for development at the 5th Communia Workshop – particularly from Pierre Guillaume […]
Next Tuesday 2nd June the Working Group on Open Data in Science will have their first meeting. While the meeting will focus on the Working Group’s activities, anyone is welcome to participate. Details are as follows: When: 2nd June 2009, 1600 GMT Where: #okfn IRC channel on oftc.net (you can connect via Mibbit) Wiki: http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/science/1 […]
Last week there was some great news from Flickr: We are releasing all of the Flickr shapefiles as a single download, available for use under the Creative Commons Zero Waiver. That’s fancy-talk for “public domainâ€. They gave the following reasons for their decision: We want people (developers, researchers and anyone else who wants to play) […]
INSPIRE, the directive establishing a spatial data infrastructure for environmental information in Europe, is heading into UK law at last. DEFRA is doing a consultation on the transposition of the law and OKFN will hopefully co-submit a response by 26th May with the Open Rights Group, a summary of the responses is on the okfn-discuss […]
The US governments new data.gov site (which we blogged about last month) is now live! There are currently a selection of core datasets available – from information about World Copper Smelters to results from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. Raw data is available in XML, Text/CSV, KML/KMZ, Feeds, XLS, or ESRI Shapefile formats. As well […]
In the last couple of months we’ve had several threads on the okfn-discuss list about distributed storage for open data (see here and here). Last month 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 […]
Last week was the first European Open Data Summit in Brussels (which we blogged about here) organised by EU Transparency, who created farmsubsidy.org. The event 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. At the […]
Open Data Commons, a project we help host, has put out a v1.0 “Release Candidate” for their Open Database License (ODbL). As it states in the announcement: This updated version of the license incorporates a whole set of changes arising out of the earlier comments period and the main changes are summarized below. As the […]
The 5th Communia Workshop took place last month at the London School of Economics. It brought together researchers, policy-makers, stakeholders and representatives from across Europe, the United States and Australia for two days of talks and discussions about reusing public sector content and data. In the afternoon of the first day, participants co-drafted a simple […]
We’re currently working on a European Open Data Inventory: This is an inventory of EU-relevant datasets that is being compiled by EU Transparency, the NGO that made farmsubsidy.org and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It includes data that is already available, as well as data that we know exists but is not published – from budget […]
I just saw this transcript of US CIO Kundra’s first conference call where he states: VK: One of the things we want to do is embark on launching data.gov which would democratize data and give data access to the public and based on that challenge whether it is citizens, NGOs the private sector to help […]
We’re pleased to announce that Talis launched their Connected Commons for open data at OKCon 2009 on Saturday! The Talis Connected Commons scheme is intended to directly support the publishing and reuse of Linked Data in the public domain by removing the costs associated with those activities. The scheme is intended to support a wide […]
Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2009 will take place next Saturday 28th March – less than a week away! where: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, London when: 28th March 2009, 1030-1830 home: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/ register: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/ If you plan to attend, and haven’t registered yet – we encourage you to book your ticket now as space […]
As we announced in January the OKF has adopted the Open Data Commons project. As part of the project Jordan Hatcher has been working on a new Open Database License (ODbL) – which went into beta at the end of last month: The Open Database Licence (ODbL) is a licence agreement intended to allow you […]
We are pleased to announce the launch of a new Working Group on Open Data in Science. In the first instance, the group will aim to: Act as a central point of reference and support for people who think they are interested in open data in science. Identify practices of early adopters, collecting data and […]
We are pleased to announce that Christopher Corbin is now a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Advisory Board: Christopher Corbin is an independent researcher and advisor on the information society and the knowledge economy with specific interest in policy and its implementation with respect to public sector information. He is an openly selected expert […]
I was recently asked to write a piece for Berlin-based think tank Das Progressive Zentrum on public interest information policy in Germany: Wem gehört das Wissen? Informationspolitik in Deutschland (Shorter German version) Public Interest Information Policy in Germany (Longer English version) The piece finishes with three policy suggestions: Support legislation as well as licensing and […]
Here I briefly comment on the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data as the protocol strongly advocates a position of ‘PD’-only. As will be apparent from the earlier essay on Open Data: Openness and Licensing I do not entirely share this view. The Protocol gives 3 basic reasons for preferring the ‘PD’ approach […]
[This post is an addendum to the earlier essay on Open Data: Openness and Licensing] It is important to be clear that any IP ‘rights’ in data(bases) are not ‘rights’ in the facts those data represent but in the ‘data collection’ (or database). Here I try to explain the difference (fairly crudely) with some examples. […]
Last Saturday was BarCamp UKGovWeb at the Ministry of Justice. There were plenty of new faces in addition to the usual suspects! Three sessions that we found particularly interesting: Directgov and Innovation: Directgov have launched a new innovate part of their site, and are keen on supporting innovation around government data (mashups, services, etc.) from […]
Why does this matter? Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don’t matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress of human knowledge or the freedom to understand and share. However, open data is crucial to progress on these more fundamental items. It’s crucial because open […]
Jed Sundwall of Netsquared just published an interview with Rufus Pollock, co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The interview includes discussion about the distinction between price and value, about the Open Knowledge Definition, about CKAN, about decentralised approaches to working with large quantities of data, about packaging for knowledge and about ‘Shiny Front End Syndrome’. […]
Recently we made some substantial improvements/additions to our Open Economics project including: Improved javascript graphing. Extend Millenium Development Goals package and added web interface. First efforts at ‘Where Does My Money Go’ Aim: Dig up govt finance info and visualize the results (online) http://okfn.org/wiki/projects/Where_Does_My_Money_Go More details on each of these can be found below. Also […]
Just over a year ago Open Data Commons was launched as a home for the new open data licenses such as the PDDL which had been developed by Jordan Hatcher and Dr Charlotte Waelde. From early on, Jordan, the legal expert and aficianado-of-openness and the main mover behind these efforts, had been talking with us […]
With the inauguration of US President-Elect Barack Obama later today – we thought we’d prepare a brief list of things he can do to promote openness in his new role. Open government data. Make core government data open (as in opendefinition.org) – so that it can be re-used in mashups, visually represented, used in semantic […]
You may have heard that lcsh.info – which explored how Library of Congress Subject Headings could be represented as a Semantic Web application – was closed down last month. The good news is that there are now two new projects publishing library-related open data: http://ckan.net/package/read/iconclass http://ckan.net/package/read/hud-library-usagedata The first, ICONCLASS, is “an experimental service that makes […]
Update (2009-02-23): registration for this workshop is now open. There is also a provisional programme. We are pleased to announce that the 5th COMMUNIA Workshop, “Accessing, Using and Reusing Public Sector Content and Data” will take place in London in March 2009. Details are as follows: When: 26-27th March 2009 Where: New Academic Building, London […]
In just over a week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will release a new version of their website – which will mostly be under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license. From the announcement: Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – […]
Biblios.net, “the world’s largest database of freely-licensed library records”, is now beta-testing. From their website: ‡biblios.net is a subscription-based, hosted version of the open-source ‡biblios metadata editor that we released earlier this year. In addition to the editor, ‡biblios.net includes some extended community features such as integrated real-time chat, forums, and private messaging. ‡biblios.net also […]
The Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources (cf. last week’s announce) took place on Saturday at the London Knowledge Lab. The day started with a discussion of various aspects of openness in educational and research materials – alluding to open access, open data and the Open Knowledge Definition. This was followed by brainstorming […]
As we announced earlier this month, tomorrow is our Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources. As a concrete outcome of the workshop, we hope to add more open scientific resources to CKAN, as we did last Saturday in the Workshop on Public Information and which we’ve blogged about in the past. So far, […]
On Saturday was the Workshop on Finding and Re-using Public Information (which we blogged about last week). We had very positive feedback from participants, and we’ll certainly consider doing something similar again in the future. There was representation from across the board – from local government to European policy analysts, from civic society to commercial […]
As we blogged a few weeks back we’re putting on a workshop on ‘Finding and Re-using Public Information’, co-organised with the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Power of Information (POI) Taskforce and mySociety. Its coming up this Saturday! Details are as follows: When: Saturday 1st November 2008, 1030-1600 Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 […]
We’re pleased to announce another OKF workshop in London this November – on ‘Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources’. As a concrete outcome of the workshop, we hope to add more open scientific resources to CKAN, which is something we’ve blogged about in the past. Details of the workshop are as follows: When: Saturday 8th […]
We are pleased to announce a workshop on ‘Finding and Re-using Public Information’, co-organised with the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Power of Information (POI) Taskforce and mySociety. Details are as follows: When: Saturday 1st November 2008, 1030-1600 Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QS. (See map.) Wiki: http://okfn.org/wiki/PublicInformation Participation: […]
GISTEMP is a crucial open data set, because it contains the historical global temperature record. Not very important right now, but in the medium term absolutely vital for the continuing functioning of our society given the likelihood of adverse climate change. Stations that measure temperature naturally do so at specific points in space, and the […]
One of the active Open Knowledge Foundation projects is Open Economics. A substantial part of that effort ends up being data acquisition and ‘cleaning’: getting hold of economic data, parsing it into (computer) usable form and adding it to the Store. (Wouldn’t it be nice if that data was already nicely packaged up or at […]
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