Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

We’ve been working hard to set up instances of CKAN for open government data - most notably in data.gov.uk but also for open government data in Germany, France, Canada and elsewhere.

We are currently soliciting for feedback on how we can improve CKAN’s user interface and for suggestions for new features. We’re also in touch with other working on other open source platforms for open government data such as Peter Kranz’s opengov.se, the Open New Zealand Catalogue and the Sunlight Foundation’s new National Data Catalogue. The longer term vision is to have data catalogues that are interoperable, and to allow federated searching, sorting and querying of datasets. With CKAN we are also working on things like supporting semantic web technologies, machine automated manipulation of datasets via a command line interface, how to federate between different instance, and internationalisation (i18n).

This Thursday we are having a virtual session to discuss all these things and more! If you are interested in making a data catalogue in your country: whether for open government data, open data in science or otherwise, we’d love to hear from you! Details are as follows:

• When: Thursday 11th February 2010, 15-1800 GMT (16-1900 CET)
• Where: Skype + Etherpad + IRC backchannel (connect at #okfn on irc.oftc.net or via web browser)
• Participate: If you’d like to join, please drop us a line on the ckan-discuss list

For some background information and a list of existing catalogues, see the following post.

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Several of us from the Open Knowledge Foundation will be at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin after Christmas. The 26th Chaos Communication Congress takes place from December 27th to December 30th 2009. OKF Director Rufus Pollock will give a talk on ‘CKAN: apt-get for the Debian of Data‘. If you’re planning to attend, we’d love to hear from you. Just pop us a message!

We’ve started a page for the OKF on the CCC wiki:

• http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/OpenKnowledgeFoundation

In the next few months we’re also going to be working on a German version of CKAN, our open source registry for open data, as well as setting up OKF Germany.

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The project presentations from last month’s Visualizar seminar have now been posted online. This annual event brought together creative teams from a range of disciplines, with the objective of delivering workable presentations using freely available data resources. The theme for 2009 was Public Data - Data In Public. I was fortunate enough to attend on behalf of the Open Knowledge Foundation: you can find my presentation here [pdf].

The event opened with two days of lectures, papers and debate around the areas of public data re-use and visualization. Highlights included a review of works by the Sunlight Foundation, and an exciting presentation of green lifestyle applications in development for Helsinki’s City as Living Factory of Ecology project, as well as stimulating presentations by Ben Cerveny of Stamen Design, and artist Aaron Koblin.

Project presentations took the form of a market in which initiators laid out their ideas in order to recruit collaborators. During the next two days and the following weekend, working groups came together around each of the concepts, to be developed over the ensuing fortnight.

Outcomes

Experience shows that it’s very difficult to judge at the outset which of these projects will deliver the most interesting or usable results, when success depends on many diverse factors. So I was thrilled to see that two of the projects that seemed particularly viable at the start of the seminar yielded such interesting results.

The team working on Madrid’s Kultur-O-Meter produced a detailed poster showing how the city’s cultural budget is distributed. With so much emphasis on the interactive, it’s refreshing to see how a very simple static model can be used to present detailed information concisely and elegantly. I particularly like how the design shows very clearly where the uncertainties lie. Accompanying their presentation is an account of the challenging process of data gathering and analysis (in Spanish).

Piotr Adamczyk, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art developed a timeline framework for exploring the museum’s extensive collection, which could be a wonderful resource for visitors and curators when it’s done. Props also go to the team behind New Political Interfaces for their fun and well-designed toy for visualizing political discourse online.

Liz Turner is founder of visualization studio iconomical and designer of Where Does My Money Go?

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Last week we had a workshop on Open Data and the Semantic Web in London. There were some excellent talks, demos and discussions - and documentation is now online!

As a result of discussions we had at the workshop, we now have two new volunteer positions at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If you’re interested in either of these positions, please get in touch.

1. Editor for Linking Open Data Group on CKAN. As we announced a few weeks ago, we now have a Linking Open Data Group on CKAN, our open source registry of open data. We are looking for someone to help keep the collection of datasets up to date with the latest offerings from the LOD/semantic web community!
2. LOD/ODC Community Liason. Open Data Commons are looking for an member of the LOD/Semantic Web community to join their Open Data Commons Advisory Council with their role being to exchange information between the two communities (e.g., explaining about open data licensing to LOD community and taking licensing questions from community back to Open Data Commons).

A big thank you to Talis for sponsoring the event, to the London Knowledge Lab for donating the venue, and, of course to everyone who came and participated!

For photos, video and slides you can see:

• Agenda page on OKF wiki - including links to slides and videos
• Presentations and photos on the Internet Archive
• Photos from Paul Downey

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Last week we had a meeting about building a set of Public Domain Calculators for countries across Europe (which we blogged about earlier this month). The public domain calculators will help to determine whether or not a given work is in copyright in a given jurisdiction.

We started out by reviewing existing work on the calculators. We then put together first drafts of diagrams representing copyright law in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. We also started work on a tutorial to help others getting started in building public domain flow diagrams for other countries. Finally we shot some footage for a micro-short film introducing the project - so watch this space!

Documentation for the event is now available, including:

• Draft flow diagram for the United Kingdom (in PDF)
• Draft flow diagram for the Netherlands (in PDF)
• Source files for flow diagrams at the Internet Archive
• Main meeting page on wiki
• Draft questions for legal experts to help build calculators
• Photos:
  • From Paul Keller
  • From Mathias Klang

If you are interested in contributing to a calculator for your country - please contact us directly or join our pd-discuss list and introduce yourself!

The Public Domain Calculators meeting was organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge as part of Communia, the European policy network on the digital public domain.

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The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Proposals is now open!

We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to:

• This blog post
• Main CFP page
• Plain text announce (wrapped at 72 characters)
• Identi.ca post
• Twitter post

Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010: Call for Proposals

• where: London, UK
• when: Saturday 24th April, 2010
• www: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
• last year: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/2009/
• cfp: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/cfp/ (due: Jan 31st 2010)
• hashtag: #okcon

Introduction

OKCon, now in its fifth year, is the interdisciplinary conference that brings together individuals from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of presentations and workshops.

Open knowledge promises significant social and economic benefits in a wide range of areas from governance to science, culture to technology. Opening up access to content and data can radically increase access and reuse, improving transparency, fostering innovation and increasing societal welfare.

This is a time of great change. In addition to high profile initiatives such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the Human Genome Project, there is enormous growth among open knowledge projects and communities at all levels. Moreover, in the last year, governments across the world have begun opening up huge amounts of their data.

And it doesn’t stop there. In academia, open access to both publications and data has been gathering momentum, and similar calls to open up learning materials have been heard in education. Furthermore this gathering flood of open data and content is the creator and driver of massive technological change. How can we make this data available, how can we connect it together, how can we use it collaborate and share our work?

Join us to discuss all of this and more!

Topics

We welcome proposals on any aspect of creating, publishing or reusing content or data that is open in accordance with opendefinition.org. Topics include but are not limited to:

Technology

• Semantic Web and Linked Data in relation to open knowledge
• Platforms, methods and tools for creating, sharing and curating open knowledge
• Light-weight, adaptive interaction models
• Open, decentralized social network applications
• Open geospatial data

Law, Society and Democracy

• Open Licensing, Legal Tools and the Public Domain
• Open government data and content (public sector information)
• Open knowledge and international development
• Opening up access to the law

Culture and Education

• Open educational tools and resources
• Business models for open content
• Incentive and rewards open-knowledge contributors
• Open textbooks
• Public domain digitisation initiatives

Science and Research

• Opening up scientific data
• Supporting scientific workflows with open knowledge models
• Open models for scientific innovation, funding and publication (’open-access’)
• Tools for analysing and visualizing open data
• Open knowledge in the humanities

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: January 31st 2010
• Notification of acceptance: March 1st
• Camera-ready papers due: March 31st
• OKCon: April 24th 2010

Submission Details

We are accepting three types of submissions:

1. Full papers of 5-10 pages describing novel strategies, tools, services or best-practices related to open knowledge,
2. Extended talk abstracts of 2-4 pages focusing on novel ideas, ongoing work and upcoming research challenges.
3. Proposals for short talks and demonstrations

OKCon will implement an open submission and reviewing process. To make a submission visit:

• http://www.okfn.org/okcon/submit

Depending on the assessment of the submissions by the programme committee and external reviewers, submissions will be accepted either as full, short or lightning/poster presentations.

Proceedings of OKCON will be published at CEUR-WS.org. If you want your submission to be included in the conference proceedings you have to prepare a manuscript of your submission according to the LNCS Style.

Programme Committee

• Sören Auer, AKSW/Universität Leipzig
• Christopher Corbin, UK Advisory Board on Public Sector Information (APPSI)
• Adnan Hadzi and Andrea Rota, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London
• Claudia Müller-Birn, Carnegie Mellon University
• Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge
• Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation and Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
• John Wilbanks, Science Commons

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The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Jordan Hatcher recently co-led a workshop on Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web at the 8th International Semantic Web Conference. He was joined by Leigh Dodds and Tom Heath of Talis, and Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons.

You can now see:

• Jordan’s slides - Open Data and the Law (PDF)
• Leigh’s slides - Rights Statements on the Web of Data (PDF)
• Tom’s slides - Licenses and Waivers in Practice (PDF)
• Kaitlin’s slides - Data Sharing: Social and Normative (Slideshare)
• The wiki page for the tutorial

If you’re in the UK and you’d like to catch up with Jordan, Leigh and Tom about open data and the semantic web, you can also come to the Open Data and Semantic Web Workshop in London on the 13th November 2009!

Jordan Hatcher at ISWC 2009 by Tom Heath

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There is often a tendency to talk of ‘the public domain’ and of works falling out of copyright and ‘into the public domain’ - as though there is a single set of works which are out of copyright all over the world. In fact, of course, there are different national laws about the nature and duration of copyright in different types of works - and hence what is in the public domain is different in different countries.

We’re currently coordinating work to build a series of public domain calculators - which will help to determine whether or not a given work is in copyright in a given jurisdiction. At the time of writing we have been in touch with groups and individuals interested in helping to build the calculators in 17 jurisdictions.

In November, the Open Knowledge Foundation in association with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge are hosting a meeting of European experts on copyright and the digital public domain as part of the Communia project. The purpose of the workshop is to produce materials such as legal flow charts and public domain “algorithms” which will help with the representation of different national copyright laws and the determination of public domain status.

Details of the meeting are as follows:

• When: 10-11th November 2009
• Where: Emmanuel College, University Cambridge
• Wiki: http://wiki.okfn.org/PublicDomainCalculators/Meeting
• Participate: Free but space is limited. If you are interested in coming, email the organizers at: info@okfn.org

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Jonathan recently wrote about the availability of open dictionaries. In a recent comment to that post someone pointed us to Macmillan’s “Open” Dictionary (the reasons for the quotes will soon be apparent).

With a sense of excitement I followed the link: “Could it be”, I thought, “That a mainstream dictionary producer has decided that open is the way to go?”

Sadly, the answer is no: Macmillan’s “Open Dictionary” isn’t open — at least not in any way we mean by that term.

Their “open” means letting you give them information for free (by submitting word suggestions) but getting nothing back — as the terms and conditions make quite clear you’re not allowed to reproduce the material in any way and even linking could be problematic (emphasis added):

Unless otherwise indicated, this Web Site and its contents are the property of Macmillan Publishers Limited, … The copyright in the material contained on this Web Site belongs to Macmillan or its licensors. … Reproduction of material on this Web Site is prohibited unless express permission is given by Macmillan.

…

No licence is granted in respect of any intellectual property rights vested in Macmillan or other third parties.

You may not redistribute any of the Content of this Web Site without the prior authorisation of Macmillan or create a database in electronic form or manually by downloading and storing any content.

You may link to the home page and any HTML page of the Web Site provided you do not create a frame or any other bordered environment around the content … You may not link to any other page of the Web Site, other than the home page or any HTML page, without the prior written consent of Macmillan. Macmillan reserves the right to require you to remove any link to this Web Site. You may not replicate the Content on this Web Site.

To my mind this is clear abuse of the term “open” and more than a little exploitative — you do work for them for free and they don’t even promise to give you credit, let alone permission to use the material you helped create.

Such potential for abuse of the “open” label is a major reason we created the open definition — where open content and data are clearly defined as material that you, and others, are free to use, reuse and redistribute without restriction.

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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, Give it to Us Now (slides)
• Audio from Open Government Data session at OpenTech 2009

The talk includes the following, Opening Government Data “Rules”:

1. “Really” open: use an open license for data
2. Data first, interface second - shiny front ends come last
3. Don’t worry about formats – as long as its RAW
   • csv, rdf, xls, json … - doesn’t matter
4. Reuse existing infrastructure where possible
   • Cloud storage, ckan.net, …
5. Build demand and supply feedback into the system
   • Credit for good providers, demand info (voting) from developer and users

His talk also describes a vision for how UK government data will be discovered, stored, requested and reused:

Links to other documentation from talks at Open Tech 2009 are available here!

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