Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog http://blog.okfn.org Wed, 14 May 2008 22:21:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.1 en CKAN 0.5 Released http://blog.okfn.org/2008/02/01/ckan-05-released/ http://blog.okfn.org/2008/02/01/ckan-05-released/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2008 11:39:45 +0000 Jonathan Gray News Open Knowledge OKF Projects Metadata Technical http://blog.okfn.org/2008/02/01/ckan-05-released/ The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) version 0.5 has just been released.

Changes include:

  • feature to list and search tags
  • feature to make data available in machine-usable form via sql dump
  • feature to purge a revision and associated changes
  • support for reserved html characters in urls
  • upgrade to Pylons 0.9.6
  • new spam management utilities including (partial) blacklist support

The CKAN code is available from:

The data is available from:

We’ve currently got 135 packages. If you come across a large dataset or substantial collection, please consider registering it on CKAN!

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2008/02/01/ckan-05-released/feed/ First COMMUNIA Workshop - “Technology and the Public Domain” http://blog.okfn.org/2008/01/25/first-communia-workshop-technology-and-the-public-domain/ http://blog.okfn.org/2008/01/25/first-communia-workshop-technology-and-the-public-domain/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:38:09 +0000 Jonathan Gray Events Open Knowledge Talks Metadata Policy External OKF http://blog.okfn.org/2008/01/25/first-communia-workshop-technology-and-the-public-domain/ Last week I went to the first COMMUNIA workshop on Technology and the Public Domain in Turin.

COMMUNIA coordinator Juan Carlos De Martin and Rishab Ghosh of MERIT, University of Maastricht gave opening talks. I was on a panel with Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons, Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons and Keith Jeffery of euroCRIS. My slides are available at:

Other talks directly related to open knowledge included:

Seeing as though there look to be many areas of common interest between the OKF and the COMMUNIA network, I suggested in my talk and thoughout the day that:

  • We should work together to create a set of ‘public domain calculators’ - or algorithms that can help to determine whether or not a given work is out of copyright in a given jurisdiction (such as we’ve been working on with Public Domain Works and the Open Library);
  • We should work together to pool open metadata - whether this be bibliographic metadata, or metadata for databases or large collections of knowledge resources (such as are listed in CKAN).

This is a great opportunity to strengthen the community of individuals and organisations with an interest in open knowledge and the public domain across Europe. I look forward to seeing the launch of the Working Groups!

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2008/01/25/first-communia-workshop-technology-and-the-public-domain/feed/ Response to ‘The Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft from the Library of Congress http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/19/response-to-the-future-of-bibliographic-control-draft-from-the-library-of-congress/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/19/response-to-the-future-of-bibliographic-control-draft-from-the-library-of-congress/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:42:57 +0000 Jonathan Gray Process Open Knowledge Metadata Policy Open Data External Open Access OKF http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/19/response-to-the-future-of-bibliographic-control-draft-from-the-library-of-congress/ A couple of weeks back we blogged about the ‘Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft report from a working group at the Library of Congress. Since then, we’ve submitted to the group a brief, collaboratively edited response to the draft and an appendix with some additional detailed comments.

The response was drafted by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Aaron Swartz of the Open Library and was co-signed by over 150 groups and individuals, including:

Many, many thanks to all of those who helped to publicise this, and to those who co-signed the response! We hope that the working group consider amending the draft in light of our comments in January.

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/12/19/response-to-the-future-of-bibliographic-control-draft-from-the-library-of-congress/feed/ Open Learn 2007 http://blog.okfn.org/2007/11/05/open-learn-2007/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/11/05/open-learn-2007/#comments Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:03:16 +0000 Jonathan Gray Events Metadata Musings External http://blog.okfn.org/2007/11/05/open-learn-2007/ Last week I went to the OpenLearn 2007 conference hosted at the Open University. A lot was packed into the couple of days, and there was representation from different OER (Open Educational Resources) groups from around the world. There were an abundance of new projects, papers, groups and initiatives mentioned, and a recurring sentiment was that it is difficult to keep track of all the things that are happening!

In terms of coverage: on-the-fly notes from conference bloggers are available from OCHRE and other blog posts should appear at the OpenLearn blog aggregator. I think the OU also intend to release video/audio footage of the conference.

Below are some musings from the event…

Towards an ‘open participatory learning ecosystem’

John Seeley Brown’s talk started the conference with the idea that ‘we participate therefore we are’, with respect to learning. His He emphasised the advantages of a collaborative, participatory approach to education. The architecture studio - where all of the models are on view and everyone is able to listen to appraisals of everyone else’s work - was used to convey the paradigm of collaborative, ‘open’ development, and, indirectly, the value of ‘releasing early and releasing often’.

He said that ‘tinkering’ is an important form of learning - and suggested we are experiencing a new wave of tinkering as a result of open software and content. He also described a vision of a world where learners are also educators in an ‘open participatory learning ecosystem’. Central to this vision is the notion of a culture of sharing, remixing, blending, and modifying which is enabled by open licensing practices. In his view, the combination of eScience, eHumanities, OERs and web 2.0 is creating a ‘perfect storm of opportunity’ for such an ecosystem to flourish.

Two examples he gave of were the Faulkes Telescope Project, which gives students remote access to astronomical apparatus to perform experiments and pool/analyze their data, and Decameron web, a user generated portal for resources dedicated exploring Boccacio’s work. I was reminded of what the OKF set out to do with Open Economics and Open Shakespeare - i.e. to create open knowledge ‘exemplar’ projects with open material and open ‘tools’ to allow users to explore and analyse the material. Also I’m sure open datasets such as those listed on CKAN could be the basis for interesting ’social learning/research’ projects, by being integrated with visualisation tools (we’ve blogged about this before).

There was also discussion of new user-focused and user-led ways of collecting data for education and research. Patrick McAndrew told me about the Biodiversity Observatory, a joint project of the OU, Imperial, the Natural History Museum and 12 other projects to allow the public to contribute data about British wildlife. I wonder what kind of license they plan to make user-contributed data available under! Vijay Kumar spoke about iLabs - an architecture developed by MIT to allow students to gain remote access to laboratories.

Conceptions of ‘Openness’ and licensing practices

It was clear listening to the different talks that there were various different conceptions about what the ‘open’ in OER meant. There was certainly a strong sense that it is fundamentally related to liberal/open licensing practices (as opposed to just cost-free access) but it often seemed to have wider connotations than this. Erik Duval said that to him openness meant ‘removing barriers’ - including legal barriers, poor findability, and inconvenience to the user. Removing socio-economic obstacles to access, allowing access to source files, and creating a culture of inclusion and participation were recurring themes. I would be interested to hear more about how more people involved in OER felt about the Open Knowledge Definition!

Regarding licensing practices, speakers rarely made distinctions between different types of Creative Commons licenses. The term ‘open content’ was often taken to include material available under a license with noncommercial restrictions. In conversations I had about licenses with noncommercial restrictions (notably with people from MIT and the OU) - I was given the impression that many organisations were not opposed to the commercial usage of educational resources in principle. Commonly cited reasons for adopting one included wanting to incorporate other material available under noncommercial sharealike licenses (especially that which had been donated by other commercial organisations), the reluctance of content contributors (publishers, authors, educators, researchers…) and other parties, and wanting to prevent people mirroring with ads.

It would be great if more OER projects started using licenses requiring only attribution, or attribution sharealike so as to impose minimal restrictions on re-use! The absence of noncommercial restrictions could allow people to experiment with new models for sustaining the development of educational materials.

Repositories, registries and metadata

Chris Pegler gave an interesting talk about the wide range of repositories that now exist - from informal personal repositiories to national, international and discipline-specific repositories. She also discussed the continuum of ‘user concerns’ and the different kinds of technologies available to aid different kinds of repository usage - from rights management and metadata standards to search facilities and RSS feeds. She used Jan Hylén’s taxonomy from his 2006 paper on OER for the OECD to analyse a range of repositories and uses.

Erik Duval gave a talk about ‘open metadata for open educational resources’ - alluding to his experiences with:

  • ARIADNE - “A European Association open to the World, for Knowledge Sharing and Reuse”
  • GLOBE - a global alliance aiming to make educational material accessible worldwide
  • MELT - which “has been designed to provide users of learning content in schools with access to more useful types of metadata that will allow them to find resources that fit their needs, language, cultures and preferred ways of teaching and learning”
  • MACE - an EU project “aimed at improving architectural education, by integrating and connecting vast amounts of content from diverse repositories, including past European projects existing architectural design communities.”

He stressed the importance of open metadata and spoke of ARIADNE’s work on ‘attention metadata’ - or metadata generated automatically from users’ clickstreams, and Kuleuven’s work on automatic metadata generation.

Finally Giovanni Fulantelli spoke about ‘OpenLOs’ (open learning objects), and the EU SLOOP (’Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective’) project. He described the importance of treating metadata as dynamic and changing information that is essential in supporting the evolution of learning resources.

Its good to see the work being done on metadata for OER (though it looks like some of the data that’s being made available has NC restrictions - and is hence not ‘open’ as in the OKD). It’d be fantastic to have more discussions with members of the OER community about how CKAN should be able to handle metadata!

Update, 2007-11-14: As ibbo commented below, there were many interesting discussions of Learning Object Metadata (LOM) and of LOM standards, such as the 2002 standard, IEEE 1484.12.1. We’re certainly keen to keep track of developments in this area!

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/11/05/open-learn-2007/feed/ Public Domain Works + The Open Library http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/17/public-domain-works-the-open-library/ http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/17/public-domain-works-the-open-library/#comments Wed, 17 Oct 2007 02:05:16 +0000 Jonathan Gray Open Knowledge Free Culture OKF Projects Metadata Open Data Open Service http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/17/public-domain-works-the-open-library/ 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 publicly announced in June 2006, the PDW team have been busy mining through data kindly donated by Phillip Harper and the BBC Archives and building a web interface for it.

After an initial plan to partner with a project called WikiBiblio, Jon Phillips of Creative Commons announced that WikiBiblio was going to merge with the Open Library (whom we’ve blogged about before). He also suggested that Public Domain Works becomes a partner - which is currently being arranged.

The plan looks to be to upload the Public Domain Works data to the Open Library, and to use read/write APIs to continue to develop different front-ends for different jurisdictions - each with its own algorithms to determine which works are in the public domain.

The Open Library will be an invaluable resource for open metadata about works in the public domain if all goes to plan!

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]]> http://blog.okfn.org/2007/10/17/public-domain-works-the-open-library/feed/ The re:transmission of video data http://blog.okfn.org/2006/10/17/the-retransmission-of-video-data/ http://blog.okfn.org/2006/10/17/the-retransmission-of-video-data/#comments Tue, 17 Oct 2006 18:48:00 +0000 jwalsh Open Knowledge Free Culture Metadata http://blog.okfn.org/2006/10/17/the-retransmission-of-video-data/ I dropped in for the last session of Re:Transmission event in London, on video metadata. This was a gathering for the Transmission network of independent video producers and distributors that is trying to move into standards-based, peer-based online distribution.

This involves an effort to establish a simple common standard for video metadata distribution, right now heavily leaning towards use of the Atom syndication format. Digging around, I found some parallel assessments, particularly Lisa Rein’s research on video metadata models for microformats.

I attended the meeting to argue, amongst other things, that the group should consider specifying data license as a required field and not as an optional one in their metadata model. In stating the case for this, I am thinking particularly of Rufus’ essay on the importance of being explicit about openness. He cites examples of collections of contributed works which have “died” because the right to re-use the material is unclear; the rights technically reside in each individual contributor, who has to be consulted before the work can be legally re-used and redistributed.

[to] my second question: ‘am i allowed to redistribute/reuse their material’ the simple answer was: No — I’d would have to go out and identify, and then gain permission, from each contributor; an endeavour that would clearly be prohibitively time consuming.
From the point of view of an individual “client” or “consumer” licensing clarity may not be much of a consideration; but for the operation of an aggregator, collecting and providing scheduled or edited collections of feeds from lots of different media publishers, explicit openess becomes much more crucial. At the meeting I heard expressed some resistance to imposition of licensing stance on the grounds that one kind or another of more or less open license is an “ideological” decision and not a “technological” one. I’m not sure the boundaries can be so clearly drawn. There is some resistance to “enforcing” “compliance” in the standard by requiring a statement about licensing - even if all that says is “Public Domain”. The alternative - encouraging compliance in specifications for standards-based publishing software - is still a kind of technological enforcement. There are cultural reasons for participating in an open knowledge network like the one embodied by Transmission.
…when engaging in any kind of collaborative effort — the norm on the web — the adoption of an explicitly open approach can be considered as providing a form of social contract among the participants which is clearer than the informal tacit arrangments which would otherwise operate.

The network organisers have set up a small metadata working group and I hope they will be able to seek opinions from Free Culture UK, and perhaps get the chance to learn from some of the data modelling and licensing decisions that were made in the context of the Creative Archive project.

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