Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog

We are pleased to announce the launch of an Advisory Council for opendefinition.org. The Council will be formally responsible for maintaining and developing the Definitions and associated material found on the Open Definition site - including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Open Service Definition. As many of you will know, these definitions aim to provide clear and succinct sets of conditions for ‘openness’ in knowledge and services.

Jordan Hatcher of opencontentlawyer.com has kindly agreed to be Chair of the Council, which includes:

• Paul Jacobson, iCommons
• Paul Miller, Talis
• Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University
• Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation & Cambridge University
• Rob Styles, Talis
• Peter Suber, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) & Earlham College
• Luis Villa, Columbia Law School, GNOME Foundation & Open Source Initiative
• Jo Walsh, Open Knowledge Foundation & Open Source Geo-Spatial Foundation
• John Wilbanks, Science Commons

More detailed biographies are available on the Advisory Council page.

It is our intention that the overall development of the material on the site will continue in the same community based and collaborative manner. The Council’s role will be to provide oversight, guidance and input into this process, not to replace it.

This is fantastic news for the definitions projects!

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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:

• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ckan/0.5

The data is available from:

• http://ckan.net/license/

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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We’ve recently started looking into how much environmental data made available on the web is open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a Data Distribution Centre (DDC) - which is a good start to see what data is available. The DDC “offers access to baseline and scenario data for representing the evolution of climatic, socio-economic, and other environmental conditions”. Many datasets from research centres around the world are available from the centre.

The “Why does the DDC exist?” page states:

Data are being provided by the DDC over the World Wide Web. All research groups supplying datasets have agreed to these being in the public domain. The data are provided free of charge, but all users are requested to register to ensure both that the data are used for public scientific research rather than for commercial applications and also that they can be informed of possible modifications, additions and other new developments at the DDC.

It is unfortunate that the Centre is restricting commerical re-use of the datasets they provide - especially given that many important environmental datasets are produced by US government research groups and are effectively open.

Some datasets have more specific licensing information or terms of use, such as the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios 4th Asessment Report (SRES-AR4) Global Climate Model data page, which states:

These data are licensed for use in Research Projects only. A ‘Research Project’ is any project organised by a university, a scientific institute, or similar organisation (private or public), for non-commercial research purposes only. A necessary condition of the recognition of non-commercial purposes is that all the results obtained are openly available at delivery costs only, without any delay linked to commercial objectives, and that the research itself is submitted for open publication.

It would be great if more data producers and distributors had clearer metadata about the licensing and terms of use of their datasets! This would allow a more fine-grained approach to re-use, as opposed to the blanket approach of the IPCC DDC, and several other environmental dataset distributors.

(As an aside: we’ve started an Open Environmental Data wiki page and we’d warmly welcome any contributions to this!)

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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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Another release of KForge is out (mainly bugfixes and minor feature enhancements). Changes include:

• Ensuring admin pages at /admin/ and not just /admin/model/.
• Setting zip_safe to False in setup.py to avoid problems with apache/modpython.
• Bringing the guide completely up to date.
• Ensuring access control works with Apache 2.0 and not just 2.2.
• Alphabetical sorting of projects and persons.
• Removing redundant variables from configuration file.
• Updating docstrings for plugins to include full installation instructions.

Full details in the release announce on the KForge project website.

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After another six months of work we’ve released a new version of the KForge software. KForge/KnowledgeForge is one the OKF’s main activities with the KForge software being used to run the KnowledgeForge service. Over two and half years after work first started the project is now fairly mature with a growing number of projects hosted on KnowledgeForge as well as a substantial number of ‘outside’ users. Given the stability of the codebase and the service we’ll be looking to go “1.0″ in the near future.

The 0.13 release of KForge provides several new features and bugfixes including support for installing KForge on a single virtual host. Full details are in this post on the KForge project website.

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After a year of (off and on) development we are delighted today to announce the official launch of the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN for short): http://www.ckan.net/.

CKAN is a registry of open knowledge packages and projects — be that a set of Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents.

CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own. Those familiar with freshmeat (a registry of open source software), CPAN (Perl) or PyPI (python package index) can think of CKAN as providing an analogous service for open knowledge.

CKAN is a key part of our long-term roadmap and completes our work on the first layer of open knowledge tools:

• The Open Knowledge Definition which sets out what we mean by open knowledge.
• KForge/KnowledgeForge which provide a system for managing open knowledge projects and the services (repositories/wikis/mailing lists) they need.
• Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) which provides a registry so that open knowledge creators and users can find other open knowledge projects and resources.

CKAN links in especially closely with our recent discussions of componentization: we envision a future in which open knowledge is provided in a much more componentized form (packages) so as to facilitate greater reuse and recombination similar to what occurs with software today (see the recent XTech presentation for more details). For this to occur we need to make it much easier for people to share, find, download, and ‘plug into’ the open knowledge packages that are produced. An essential first step in achieving this is to have a metadata registry where people can register their work and where relevant metadata (both structured and unstructured) can be gradually added over time.

We also make no bones that fact what we have is present is very simple, certainly when compared to the long-term vision — after all, we should remember it has taken software over thirty years to reach its present level of sophistication. Thus, rather than attempting to pre-judge the solution to open knowledge componentisation question (for example in the choice of metadata attached to each package), this beta version is the simplest possible thing that will provide value, and we look to user feedback (and we include ourselves here as users) to determine the future direction of development of the system.

FAQ

What kinds of things do you expect people to register in CKAN?

Anything and everything — when we say knowledge we mean any kind of content, data or information. That said there are two main recommendations regarding what you register:

• First, we are looking for people to register ‘packages’ that is collections with some kind of structure rather than individual items. So a substantial set of photos, a datasets of all kinds, the writings of Shakespeare but not an individual blog, or your flickr photo collection (unless it is really big!).
• Second, we’re looking for stuff that’s open: that is material that people are free to use, reuse and redistribute without restriction (other than, perhaps, a requirement to share-alike).

Why Not Just Use the Creative Commons Search Facility in Google/Yahoo/etc

Two main reasons:

1. We focus on work that is open. Simply put the set of open work and the set of CC-licensed works are not identical because (a) not all Creative Commons licensed work is open (for example those which use the non-commercial provision are not) and (b) there are plenty of open works which do not use CC licenses (e.g. Wikipedia)

2. The registry is designed to support holding much more metadata than simply whether the work is open on not. In particular we want to be able to support automated installation of knowledge packages in the future (which requires things like dependency and version information).

Is CKAN itself open?

Of course, both the code that CKAN runs on and the data itself is open, see the license page: http://www.ckan.net/license/.

How Can I Get Involved

Start enter things into CKAN and editing existing entries — you don’t need to be the developer of a particular project or resource to enter it into the registry.

If you want to get more deeply involved join the okfn-discuss list and and introduce yourself or just drop an email to info [at] okfn [dot] org. If you want to just start hacking with the code see our development project page (then follow the links to subversion):

http://www.knowledgeforge.net/project/ckan/

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Over the last month we’ve been working to produce a Guide to Open Data Licensing. As the name should make clear this is a guide to licensing data aimed particularly at those who want to make their data open. The guide is currently located on the wiki so that anyone can edit and update it:

http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenDataLicensing

While attending XTech back in May it became clear that there were a lot of questions both about the legal status of data and what approaches to use when licensing it — something that had also become apparent following on from Jo’s post back in April on copyright not being applicable to geodata).

We started work on the guide in order to have something which could help answer these kinds of questions. At present it is roughly divided into two sections. The first section deals with the practical question of how to license your data. The second section discusses what kinds of intellectual property-like rights exist in data in various jurisdictions.

This guide is very much in an ‘alpha’ state, with much that can be done to improve and extend it. We’ve been working on it in the wiki precisely so that anyone may edit it and we’d welcome contributions — whether it be adding new sections and use cases or just fixing typos. So please, check it out and feel free to make changes.

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Today we are pleased to announce the launch of Open Textbook, a place to list and keep track of news about textbooks that are open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition — i.e. free to use, reuse, and redistribute. We welcome participation in the project and if anyone has a textbook or notes they’d like to see listed or would like to be a contributor to the site please head on over to http://www.opentextbook.org/.

Background

We’ve been planning work on open textbooks ever since the Open Knowledge Foundation started in 2004 and though we’ve been doing gradual work collecting texts and links to texts since then up until recently we’ve been so busy with other projects that we have not had the chance to really focus on the issue.

Things started to get moving properly back in February, when Steve Coast (of http://www.openstreetmap.org/) was kind enough to donate us the http://www.opentextbook.org/ domain. After some discussion on the okfn-discuss list we decided we would start out focusing on being a place to list and keep track of news about textbooks that are open (of course, in the future we may post textbook content, but for now the site will be mainly used as a registry).

Having put everything in place, meetings and discussion at the recent iCommons summit proved the catalyst to officially launch the site. The Summit saw many people express an interest in open text books and we’re looking to collaborate as widely as possible. Information about the questions and issues raised can be found on the WikiEducator Free Textbooks page. Join the Free Culture freetextbooks mailing list list if you want to get involved!

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This is the fourth release of the Open Economics project and the first that has been deemed ‘worthy’ of a full release announcement. The Open Economics project provides data storage and visualization for economics data as well as associated web services and assorted modelling code. The project home page is: http://www.okfn.org/econ/ while the open economics web interface is currently available at: http://www.openeconomics.net/ (though note that we plan to move to a dedicated domain in the near future).

To see some of the features of the web interface in action check out:

• http://www.openeconomics.net/current_value/?year=1900 — value of a pound/dollar from 1900 today
• http://www.openeconomics.net/store/ — data store browser with javascript graphing

Work first started on an Open Economics project back in late 2004 with some basic modelling code. Since then, especially with work over the last year or so, it has expanded considerably to be both a resource in its own right and another experiment into what a knowledge package would look like. At present it consists of 3 components:

1. A python library for building economics models
2. A set of data (under trunk/data) along with
3. A web interface for access the data store, visualizing the data and providing various simple ‘web services’

Finally, we should mention that the project is looking for contributors. Areas in which assistance would be valuable include:

• Uploading and creating data
• Improving code (python)
• Setting up a project blog/website
• Improving web frontend to services and data store

Release Announcement

A new version of Open Economics is now out get it either:

1. Direct from python package index with easy_install:

   $ easy_install econ

2. From subversion:

   $ svn co http://p.knowledgeforge.net/econ/svn/tags/econ-0.4

Changelog

• Change to use pylons (2007-03-31)
• Convert from kid to genshi templates (2007-03-29)
• Current value working again (scipy does not conflict with plain wsgi)
• Several new datasets
• Clean up and improve web user interface
• view ‘action’ gains a limit argument (2007-04-03)
• Improvements to data bundle package (e.g. uuids). (2007-04-05)

About Open Economics

An open set of economics related tools, data and services.

Project home page: http://www.okfn.org/econ/

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